From: jewell@mace.cc.purdue.edu (Larry Jewell)
Newsgroups: soc.veterans
Subject: Limited War (II)
Date: 8 Oct 92 18:41:53 GMT
Organization: Purdue University

Reposted from VWAR-L with permission:
From: BRUSHPW%SNYPLAVA.BITNET@UBVM.cc.buffalo.edu
Subject:      Limited War (II)

F. J. West's _The Village_ portrays a different sort of limited
war in its description of the village of Binh Nghia. A comparison
of the fates of Ben Suc and Binh Nghia also contrast the differences
in the US Army tactics of search-and-destroy with the US Marine Corps
tactics of civic action.

This is a summary of _The Village_.


     Lieutenant General Lewis W. Walt, Commanding General of the
III Marine Amphibious Force, was in the habit of asking his
district advisors to comment on the effectiveness of Marine
battalions in I Corps. In June, 1966, Walt visited Major Richard
Braun, advisor to the Binh Son district chief in Quang Ngai
Province. Braun told Walt that the Marines would be more
effective if they worked with the Vietnamese rather than
searching for Viet Cong on their own. When Walt asked for
specific recommendations, Braun suggested sending a platoon of
Marines to the village of Binh Nghia.

     The ARVN had been chased out of Binh Nghia two years
previously. A platoon of the PLAF lived there regularly, and
often a company or more would come in to resupply or rest. Binh
Nghia belonged to the NLF, and was the full-time government of
five of the seven hamlets in the region and controlled the boat
traffic moving on the Tra Bong River.1

     On 10 June, 1966, Marine Corporal William Beebe led a group
of twelve volunteers from their base camp to the Vietnamese
village of Binh Nghia. All the Marines were seasoned combat
veterans who had been chosen on their ability to get along with
the villagers.2

     With the arrival of the Marines, the village police chief
felt strong enough to move his security forces into the village
proper from a nearby outpost. Chief Ap Thanh Lam called a meeting
of the villagers, explained that the Americans and his men had to
come to stay, and asked for volunteers to construct a new
fortified headquarters. Forty civilians joined the Marines,
policemen, and Popular Forces in constructing a fort. Work
progressed on the fort by day, and by night combined Marine-PF
patrols went hunting for the enemy. Beebe later commented on his
early experiences in Binh Nghia: "I still get shaky thinking of
those first few nights....It was nothing [previous experiences in
combat] compared to that ville. That was the most scared I've
ever been in my life."3

     The activities of the combined unit settled into a regular
pattern. The police left combat to the Marines and PFs. Lam
considered his police to be highly trained specialists and
concentrated on intelligence matters, leaving night patrols and
ambushes to the others. Initially, the Marines and PFs were
distrustful of each other, but over time came to respect each
others' particular strengths. The Marines used the PFs as "eyes
and ears" because they could not always depend on them to advance
with the Marines. But the PFs were valuable at point due to "the
belief that a Vietnamese soldier could spot a Viet Cong at night
before an American could."4 From the beginning the Marines could
shoot better than the Viet Cong; "Long hours on the ranges of
boot camp....had seen to that. And after hundreds of patrols in
the village the Marines were learning to move as well as the Viet
Cong."5

     The Marines liked duty in the village. They enjoyed the
admiration of the PFs who were unwilling to challenge the Viet
Cong alone. They were pleased that the villagers were impressed
because the Marines hunted the Viet Cong as the Viet Cong for
years had hunted the PFs and village officials. The Marines were
aware that the village children did not avoid them, and that the
childrens' parents were more than polite. The Marines "had
accepted too many invitations to too many meals in too many homes
to believe they were not liked by many and tolerated by most."6
Their conduct had won them admiration and status within the
Vietnamese village society in which they were working. This
combined action platoon would pay a high price for their success,
for most of them would die at Binh Nghia.

     In September, 1966, the NLF attempted to force the Marines
out of the village. Eighty local-force Viet Cong joined with
sixty soldiers from the 5th Company of the 409th NVA Battalion in
an attack on the fort, which was defended by six Marines (the
others were away from the fort on patrol) and twelve PFs.7 Five
Americans and six PFs were killed, but the position 8held. The
day after the fight the commander of the 1st Marine Division
entered the smoldering fort to speak to the Marines. General
Lowell English remarked that perhaps the combined platoon was too
light for the job, too exposed, and overmatched from the start.
He was considering pulling them out; they could stay at the fort,
or go.

     One Marine stated the position of the group:

          The general was a nice guy. He was trying to give us an
     out. But we couldn't leave. What would we have said to the
     PFs after the way we pushed them to fight the Cong? We had
     to stay, There wasn't one of us who wanted to leave.9

     Once during a fight the Marines called in an artillery
strike on thirty Viet Cong. The single round fell three hundred
yards short, destroying a thatched hut and killing two civilians.
Even though the combined unit Marines were not responsible for
the error, they saw too much of the villagers and lived too
closely with them not to be affected by personal grief. Rifles
and grenades were to be the weapons of the Americans at Binh
Nghia.10 The village stayed intact throughout some of the
heaviest fighting in Vietnam - there was never an airstrike
called for Binh Nghia during the war.11 Although the region was
marked as "VC" on military operational maps, they were also
marked in red as "out of bounds" for harassment and interdiction
artillery fire because American ground forces patrolled the
area.12

     By March, 1967, it appeared that the enemy had modified
their strategy toward Binh Son district in general and toward
Binh Nghia in particular.  The PALF previously had sought out
contact with the combined unit, but now avoided the patrols.
Vietnamese military intelligence reported that the NLF political
cadres had attended a conference in January, where it had been
decided to no longer fight the spreading pacification efforts
with local troops. Rather, the guerrillas were to gather
intelligence and act as guides and reinforcements for the main
forces.13 At the January conference the Binh Nghia combined unit
had been denounced more bitterly than any other US or GVN
program. The unit was hurting the NLF militarily; its patrols and
ambushes prevented NLF use of the Tra Bong River and blocked one
route to the air base at Chu Lai. Its presence impeded rice
collection, taxation, proselytizing, and recruitment. NLF
attempts to re-establish control over the area after the attack
on the fort in September were a failure.14

     By October, 1967, it was felt by District and Marine
Headquarters that the job of the combined unit at Binh Nghia was
finished. The village was pacified and the Marines were needed
elsewhere. By December, 1967, the US Army and ROK Marines moved
into the area while the Marines moved further north, toward the
DMZ. A captain from District Headquarters felt that security in
the area had not improved, as the Army troops were too far in the
hills and the Koreans were behind a massive defensive barrier.15

     By 1971 the war had passed by Binh Nghia. The Americans were
gone. The Viet Cong guerrillas and local force soldiers were
gone. The fort constructed by the combined unit and the
Vietnamese was gone, the wind and rain having caused the sand
bags and punji stakes to cave in and wash away. But the village
was intact, and had endured.


NOTES:

1F. J. West, Jr., The Village, Harper & Row, N.Y., 1972, p. 10.
2Battalion surveys showed that over 40 percent of the Marines
disliked the Vietnamese, and that this feeling was particularly
acute among small unit leaders. The Marine command recognized
that such an attitude was "not just academic. It is costing us
lives." West, p. 11.
3Ibid., p. 19.
4Ibid. p. 52.
5Ibid., p. 72.
6Ibid., p. 102.
7Ibid., p. 112.
8Ibid., p. 131.
9Interview with PFC Sidney Fleming who subsequently died fighting
with the combined unit. Ibid., p. 131. Later, when the combined
unit was ordered to leave by higher headquarters on the eve of
another enemy attack, they again refused. Ibid., pp. 193-194.
10Ibid., p. 35-36.
11Ibid., p. 187.
12Ibid., p. 220.
13Ibid., p. 189.
14Ibid., p. 191.
15Ibid., p. 269.

Peter Brush
BRUSHPW@SNYPLAVA
State University of New York at Plattsburgh

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