Grunts (35 page)

On August 1, they combined with their various PF platoons and began operations. The transition was difficult and awkward. Villagers and PFs alike were suspicious of the Marines. The Marine squad leaders had to work out tenuous command relationships with their PF sergeants. The two sides could not communicate well since most of the Americans knew little Vietnamese (a serious problem that would always plague the program and, indeed, the entire U.S. effort in Vietnam). Most of the Vietnamese doubted that Ek’s Marines would stay in the villages long enough to truly protect them from the VC. Such skepticism was well founded. When the big units conducted operations, they rarely remained in one place for long since they generally spent most of their time trying to find the enemy. For the first week of the combined action program, even Ek’s squads only patrolled their villages during the day. Soon thereafter, though, they patrolled round the clock, maintaining a constant presence.

These initial joint patrols with the PFs were an exercise in frustration. “When we first started going out on night patrols and ambushes, they [PFs] complained we made too much noise,” Sergeant David Sommers, one of the squad leaders, recalled. “By slightly revamping our equipment, we were able to meet their standards of silence.” The Marines initially saw the PFs as ill-disciplined pseudosoldiers. The Americans, for example, were shocked to see that the PFs seldom cleaned their weapons, something that every Marine was trained to do with an almost religious zeal.

Over time, though, the two sides learned much from each other, just as the program’s architects had envisioned. The PFs learned better discipline and military skills. The Americans learned to proceed with patience and diplomacy. Also, the Marines came to appreciate and better understand the local culture. At first they were shocked by the poverty and primitive lifestyle of the villagers. Such was the case for Private Hop Brown, a rifleman in one squad, who came from a disadvantaged background in Harlem. “I didn’t think I’d ever see people living in more squalid and degrading conditions than what I’d left behind,” he said. Initially he was repelled by the impoverishment of the locals and what he perceived as laziness among the PFs. But, as time went on and the two sides formed relationships, his sympathy grew dramatically. “My attitude changed toward these people. As I got used to their way of life and started to see their customs and rituals from their point of view, I began to understand that things I took for granted as an American did not apply to this culture.”

Most of the other Marines felt the same way. As the weeks unfolded, they came to appreciate just how badly the VC had sometimes terrorized the villagers, and they were determined to protect them. The various squads also developed an intuitive understanding of VC influence within their respective villages. “We found . . . that through the attitudes of areas we could pinpoint Vietcong activity within that area,” Ek explained. “If you walk into an area and the people just go about their business and conduct normal daily routines with a fair amount of friendliness . . . things are pretty quiet.” If the people were overly friendly, or distant or hostile, then the VC were nearby.

In spite of the challenges, it was clear by the end of 1965 that this first combined action company was a success. Security in the villages around Phu Bai had improved significantly. The air base rarely came under attack. In the villages, firefights with the VC were rare. When they did take place, the Marines and PFs won. Intelligence tips on VC activity poured in from the locals, indicating a new level of trust on their part for the Marines. Many of the Americans had formed strong bonds with the PFs and some of the civilians, too. In December, when the battalion rotated home from Vietnam, forty of the sixty-six members of the combined action company opted to stay. Many sensed that they were at the leading edge of pacification. Working with the Vietnamese gave them a sense of kinship with them and awakened an obligation to protect them. In a way, they now had a kind of ownership in the war effort. It had a face and a purpose. It meant something beyond just humping around endless hills, jungles, and rice paddies, wilting under crippling heat, searching endlessly for an elusive, dangerous, faceless enemy.

The combined action Marines had become rice roots infantry. Curiously, they no longer thought of themselves as grunts, since they associated that term exclusively with the standard infantry mission of closing with and killing the enemy. They were wrong. They were the ultimate grunts. They were the tangible expression of everyday human will—defeating the enemy not just through combat power but through ingenuity, diplomacy, flexibility, decency, tact, practical know-how, and very basic cultural understanding. They carried out the mission as only human beings, not machines, could do it. They did it imperfectly, but effectively enough to make a positive contribution.

General Walt understood all too well what was happening. In January 1966, with the concurrence of his I Corps opposite in the South Vietnamese army, Lieutenant General Nguyen Chanh Thi, he expanded the combined action program. By the end of that year, there were fifty-seven combined action platoons (commonly known as CAPs) serving under various infantry battalions in the Marine areas of operation. In 1967, the combined action program became an independent command, separate from the infantry battalions. Eventually, by 1970, the program grew to 114 platoons, organized into twenty companies sprinkled throughout I Corps, under the control of four battalion-sized groups. At that point, the four combined action groups consisted of over two thousand Marines and Navy corpsmen plus, of course, thousands of PFs. Typically, Marine CAP squads were commanded by a sergeant, a corporal, or even, in some instances, a lance corporal. A squad normally contained anywhere from half a dozen to fourteen Marines, augmented by a corpsman.
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How to Get into a Combined Action Platoon

According to official program guidelines, CAP Marines were all supposed to be volunteers with at least two months in country, six months left on their tour of duty, combat experience, no disciplinary record, and a mature, open-minded attitude. Only the best Marines could be considered, especially the NCO squad leaders, whose personal responsibilities and daily autonomy were considerable. “The men I wanted to come into the Combined Action Program had to . . . know what it meant to take another human being’s life, and how to shoot, move and communicate,” Lieutenant Colonel William Corson, who ran the program in 1967, said. Such experiences would give them tactical proficiency, a proper understanding of war’s tragedy, and an appreciation for human life. Corson was a counterinsurgency expert and a vocal proponent of the CAP concept. He had prior service in Vietnam dating back to the French war. He had also served in World War II and Korea.

As a Chinese-speaking intelligence officer with considerable field experience in Asia, Corson was adamantly opposed to Westy’s search-and-destroy attrition strategy. He believed that the CAPs represented the best approach to victory. In order to succeed, he knew his program must have men who could, and would, kill the enemy but who also saw the Vietnamese as people, not “gooks,” “slopes,” or “zipperheads,” to list just a few of the racist slang terms common at the time. “If they entered the job with an ethnocentric attitude, they would not succeed. They had to think on their own, be proud, loyal, and brave. And they had to have open minds to a new experience.” In a squad, even one person who was prone to insensitivity, selfishness, racism, or offensive comments could undo the hard work of his entire team in winning the trust of the Vietnamese. So, Corson wanted the elite.

In practice, though, these lofty standards were difficult to maintain. Most of the time, the CAPs’ manpower came from other in-country Marine units, especially rifle companies. Often, battalions were required to give up about twenty or thirty men per month to the CAPs. The commanders of these units obviously had no wish to lose their best Marines and receive nothing in return. They found ways to shunt men they perceived as misfits, rather than their most reliable people, into the program. Near the end of the war, men who were fresh out of training in the States were even assigned directly to the program.

The result was that men took a variety of paths, not all of them ideal, to their CAP. Private John Akins had the reputation of being a loner in his rifle company. When he got into a fight that he claimed another Marine provoked, his commanding officer immediately transferred him to a combined action company. “Ever heard of ’em?” the captain asked Akins. “They’re those small teams that get overrun most of the time.” Private First Class David Sherman’s platoon got orders to give up several of its men to the CAPs. “There was a lot of hemming and hawing and maybe half of the needed men volunteered.” Like several others, Sherman did not want to go because he liked the security of a larger unit. Nonetheless, his sergeant “volunteered” him. With no preamble, all of a sudden he and the other chosen ones became CAP Marines. “No school, no indoctrination, no nothing. Gather a bunch of Marines, stick us outside a hamlet, and we were a CAP.”

Staff Sergeant Calvin Brown was assigned, seemingly out of the blue, to head up CAP-Alpha 3 when he got to Vietnam. “This was a relatively new program to me. I had no idea what it was going to consist of.” Most of his previous training and experience did not apply to the job at hand. “I had to change my whole way of thinking. I was not really prepared for what I saw when I first went to the village” near Phu Bai. When Private First Class Thomas Flynn’s battalion was scheduled to rotate out of Vietnam in 1966, his company commander arbitrarily assigned Flynn and several other men with little time in country to a combined action company. The young rifleman had never even heard of such a unit. “That night, as I lay on my cot, I kept wondering what [it] was all about.” Some men in rifle companies, like Private First Class Jackson Estes, volunteered for the program because they were looking for a way to get out of combat, and they incorrectly perceived the CAPs as a soft deal. “I heard C.A.P. units are a lot easier,” he wrote his wife as he awaited word of his potential transfer. “It would be safer too.” Others simply wanted to escape close supervision and operate in a more autonomous environment.

More commonly, though, men did volunteer for the program because of a genuine desire to make a meaningful contribution to the war effort. Estes may have wanted a safer billet, but he also liked the idea of working closely with the Vietnamese. He wanted “a chance to live with [them] and get a clearer idea of what this war is all about.” Lance Corporal Barry Goodson volunteered because, after several weeks of service in a line company, he liked the idea of getting to know the Vietnamese as people and helping them. “[I] signed up immediately, without question, and without going through proper military channels.” Edward Palm was so eager to escape his boring rear echelon job and do something important that he embellished his service record during an interview with a gunnery sergeant who was recruiting for the CAPs. Impressed, the gunny accepted him on the spot. “I couldn’t believe my good fortune, having just talked the Marine Corps into throwing me into the briar patch of my choice,” Palm later wrote. Nineteen-year-old Sergeant Mac McGahan started his tour with a rifle company, fighting the NVA along the 17th parallel that divided the two Vietnams. He volunteered for a CAP because he liked the idea of improving the lives of ordinary Vietnamese. “We can see the progress being made,” he told an interviewer. “Eight out of the fourteen men here [on the CAP] have extended for another six months. In a line company you’re in a lot of combat and you’re always tired. I went a month and a half averaging three hours sleep a night. You don’t really care about the people. You just want to put in your time and get out. Here with the CAP you’re not just killing the VC, you’re helping people and you can see the progress you’re making.”

One of Corson’s successors, Colonel Edwin Danowitz, personally checked the background and service records of potential CAP members, whether they were in-country volunteers or were assigned to the program directly from the States. “We scanned them to make certain the individuals had good proficiency and conduct marks.” Anyone with disciplinary problems or the wrong kind of medical problems (for example, venereal disease) was out. Often he conducted personal interviews with the applicants. Danowitz claimed that he rejected about 30 to 35 percent of the interviewees. “We did have occasions where first sergeants would submit lists of people who were not volunteers and had no idea what the program was about; they were getting rid of their dead wood. However, once these people were interviewed, this was quickly determined and we sent them back to their units immediately.”

With the expansion of the program, General Walt established a CAP school that most of the selectees went through before joining their new units. The training was similar to the indoctrination Lieutenant Ek had given his original combined action Marines, mostly language and culture classes mixed with small-unit tactics and patrolling. Under the circumstances, this worked fairly well. Commander Richard McGonigal, a naval officer who actually visited every single CAP, marveled at how well the training, and service in the villages, changed the mind-set of the Marines. “When you take a group of civilians and transform them into Marines and get them to kill . . . and then somehow re-transform them into people that can kill discriminatingly and can go through some kind of identification with the people . . . to the point where they’re willing to risk their lives to protect them . . . that’s an amazing psychological trick.” He believed that only the Marines, and not even the Army, could have pulled this off. “I’m quite certain the Navy couldn’t, and the Air Force had no need to. They fought their war from thirty thousand feet. They never had to be accountable for blowing a hootch away.” The CAP Marines were on the ground at the most basic level, though, and thus accountable for everything they did. Needless to say, substandard Marines did not usually last long in this demanding environment.
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