The U.S. Army Campaigns of the Vietnam War

DEEPENING

INVOLVEMENT

1945 –1965
CMH Pub 76–1

Cover: A U.S. Army Special Forces soldier gives instruction on the carbine to trainees of a Civil Defense 

Group in the Province of Thua Thien, 22 July 1963.
by

Richard W. Stewart

Center of Military History

United States Army

Washington, D.C., 2012

DEEPENING

INVOLVEMENT

1945 –1965

5

Introduction

To many Americans, the war in Vietnam was, and remains, 

a divisive conflict. Now almost fifty years after the beginning 

of major U.S. combat operations in Vietnam, the war has faded 

from much of America’s consciousness. Over half of the U.S. 

population was born after the war and has no direct memory of 

the conflict, yet this does not lessen its importance. The massive 

American commitment—political, military, and diplomatic—to 

the independence of South Vietnam beginning in the 1950s and 

continuing with U.S. direct combat operations in the 1960s and 

early 1970s makes it important to remember those who served. 

U.S. involvement in this corner of Southeast Asia began after 

World War II when Vietnam was fighting for independence from 

France. Although generally favoring Vietnamese independence, 

the United States supported France because the rebels—or Viet 

Minh—were led by Communists and in the days of the Cold 

War U.S. officials considered any and all Communists to be little 

more than the puppets of Moscow and Beijing. France’s defeat in 

1954, the bifurcation of Vietnam into a Communist North and 

non-Communist South, and America’s assumption of the job of 

training the armed forces of the newly created non-Communist 

Republic of Vietnam pulled the United States deeper into the 

conflict. Framed primarily as a fight to defend democracy against 

the forces of international communism, the United States gradually committed more troops and materiel to fight Communist-led 

Southern guerrillas (or Viet Cong) and the regular military forces 

sent to South Vietnam by the politburo in Hanoi. 

By the time President Lyndon B. Johnson committed major 

combat units in 1965, the United States had already invested 

thousands of men and millions of dollars in the fight to build a 

secure and stable South Vietnam. That commitment expanded 

rapidly until by 1969 the United States had over 365,000 soldiers 

in every military region of South Vietnam with thousands of 
6 

other servicemen and women throughout the Pacific area in 

direct support of operations. The war saw many technological 

innovations including the massive use of helicopters, wide-scale 

use of computers, sophisticated psychological operations, new 

concepts of counterinsurgency, and major advances in military 

medicine. Yet, as in most wars, much of the burden of battle was 

still borne by the foot soldiers on the ground who slogged over the 

hills and through the rice paddies in search of an often elusive foe. 

The enormous military and political effort by the United States was, 

however, continuously matched by the determination of North 

Vietnamese leaders to unify their country under communism at 

whatever cost. That determination, in the end, proved decisive. 

Negotiations accompanied by the gradual withdrawal of American 

forces led to the Paris Peace Accords in January 1973, effectively 

ending the U.S. military role. The continued existence of an 

independent South Vietnam, however, was of short duration. Two 

years after the American exit the North Vietnamese Army overran 

South Vietnam and sealed its victory in April 1975.

The vast majority of American men and women who served 

in Vietnam did so in the uniform of the United States Army. They 

served their country when called, many at great personal cost, 

against a backdrop of growing uncertainty and unrest at home. 

These commemorative pamphlets are dedicated to them. 

 RICHARD W. STEWART

 Chief Historian
7

Deepening Involvement, 1945–1965

The triumphant end of World War II for the forces of the 

United Nations (principally the United States, Britain, the Soviet 

Union, France, and China) seemed to usher in a new era of 

international cooperation. However, the alliance that conquered 

Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan soon fractured over a host of 

issues that the necessity for unity in the face of a common threat 

had only papered over. The expansion of world communism at the 

point of Red Army bayonets into Eastern Europe and the rapid 

fall of the Nationalist Chinese government of Chiang Kai-shek 

to the forces of Mao Zedong’s Communist guerrillas seemed to 

portend the reawakening of a monolithic Communist threat 

intent on world revolution. These events coincided with the rapid 

collapse of the empires of Britain, France, and the Netherlands that 

between them dominated much of the remainder of the globe. The 

United States found itself inheriting both the struggle against a 

resurgent Communist movement and the destabilizing problems 

of decolonization that provided fertile ground for Communist and 

Communist-inspired movements to seize more and more control 

over those new states and their natural resources. Nowhere would 

this dilemma be more acute than in French Indochina where the 

forces of nationalism and communism combined to oppose the 

re-establishment of French control after the defeat and withdrawal 

of the Japanese occupation forces.

The Japanese had occupied French Indochina in 1940–1941 

as part of their expansionist moves into Southeast Asia. They 

were hungry for the oil and rubber of the region and needed 

bases as they moved south against the Dutch East Indies (later 

Indonesia) and the United States in the Philippines. For a time, 
8

the French flag still flew over Indochina despite the Japanese 

occupation, but in March 1945 the Japanese took total control 

over the region and killed or captured much of the French 

garrison. Because France was by now one of the Allied powers, 

the first direct actions of the United States in the region were 

to support the remnants of the French forces with airpower and 

advisers as they tried to fight the Japanese (Map 1). 

With the Japanese surrender in September 1945, the United 

States pushed for, and achieved, the movement of a Chinese 

corps into northern Vietnam to disarm the Japanese while the 

British Army performed a corresponding mission in the half of 

the country below the 16th Parallel. Members of the U.S. Office 

of Strategic Services (OSS), some of whom had parachuted into 

northern Vietnam to work with the French forces retreating from 

Japanese attacks in early 1945, worked with the Chinese to attempt 

to recover Allied prisoners and disarm the Japanese. Other OSS 

personnel had joined members of the native Vietnamese resistance 

movement against the Japanese known as the Viet Nam Doc Lap 

Dong Minh Hoi, or Viet Minh, led by a dynamic Communist who 

called himself Ho Chi Minh. The United States found itself caught 

between the Viet Minh, with links to the Communist international 

movement, and its French allies who were intent on re-establishing 

their hold over the colony. Both sides took advantage of the 

Ho Chi Minh (standing, third from left) at a farewell party for the OSS in 1945
Tonle Sap

GULF

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T ONKIN

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Lao Cai

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Vinh Yen

HANOI

Haiphong

Dien Bien Phu

Luang Prabang

Vinh

Dong Hoi

VIENTIANE

Udon Thani

(Udorn)

Savannakhet Hue

Da Nang

Paksé

Nakhon Ratchasima

(Korat)

BANGKOK

Kratie

Pleiku

Qui Nhon

Quang Ngai

Quang Tri

Kontum

Da Lat Loc Ninh

Nha Trang

Tay Ninh

Bien Hoa

PHNOM PENH

Sihanoukville

Can Tho

SAIGON

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CHINA

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FRENCH INDOCHINA

1954

0 150

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 Map 1
10 

unsettled nature of the immediate end of the war to build allies 

and construct political agreements to weaken the other entity. 

The result was open warfare between the returning French forces 

and the Viet Minh by November 1946. The United States, not 

wishing to oppose an ally who was crucial to the U.S. position in a 

vulnerable Europe, was also reluctant to support an independence 

movement that was obviously controlled by Communists. As the 

Truman Doctrine began to take shape in response to Communist 

attempts at subversion in Eastern Europe and Greece, the view that 

the Viet Minh were simply additional players in the worldwide 

Communist movement, controlled directly from Moscow, was 

only strengthened.

In the end, U.S. policy toward Indochina during France’s 

attempt to retake and pacify their colony from 1946 to 1954 

remained ambiguous. The United States provided financial support 

and military aid to France in small amounts, but much of its 

support was focused on building up the French forces in Europe. 

However, in March 1950 the French asked directly for military 

equipment to assist in their fight against international communism 

while simultaneously rebuilding their empire in Indochina. With 

the Cold War now in full swing, the United States determined that 

such aid was critical in the fight against Communist aggression. 

In September 1950, the United States established the Military 

Assistance Advisory Group (MAAG), Indochina, in Saigon to 

supervise the flow of that aid. 

Strategic Setting

From the establishment of the MAAG in 1950 until the end 

of French rule in Indochina in 1954, the United States was increasingly engaged in providing military equipment, development aid, 

agricultural assistance, and economic support to Vietnam to assist 

the French effort to defeat the Viet Minh. The Viet Minh, on the 

other hand, increasingly turned to the Chinese, now ruled by the 

Communist dictator Mao Zedong, for military aid and advisers. 

With the United States fighting the Chinese in Korea from 1950 

to 1953, the war in Indochina was seen as a crucial test of western 

resolve, and the aid flowed correspondingly. As U.S. fears of direct 

Chinese intervention in the conflict grew, and thus concerns 

also grew about the fall of yet another “domino” to the forces of 

international communism, American engagement in the fate of 

Indochina deepened.
11

The MAAG was initially staffed with only a handful of U.S. 

officers and men—less than eighty personnel in all. It engaged 

France’s military and helped determine their requirements in 

equipment, supplies, and expertise; forwarded their requests 

back to Washington; and then supervised the arrival and distribution of the supplies to the French Army. Once the equipment 

and supplies were in Vietnam, U.S. personnel were supposed to 

monitor their use and inspect them for long-term maintenance 

requirements. However, the lack of effective French equipment 

accountability methods, poor maintenance procedures, and illdisguised resentment of U.S. personnel by the French colonial 

authorities at having to ask for help interfered with attempts at 

improving the situation. 

French dislike and distrust of U.S. military support diminished somewhat in the fall of 1950 and early 1951 when the Viet 

Minh unleashed a major ground offensive that captured several 

French outposts in the Tonkin region of Vietnam near the Chinese 

border and near the Hanoi-Haiphong region. In January, two 

Viet Minh divisions attacked the town of Vinh Yen northwest 

of Hanoi, and only the use of American-supplied napalm bombs 

(a form of jellied gasoline) and artillery staved off a shattering 

defeat. As the flow of American materiel increased in early 1951, 

it was obvious that only French superiority in aviation, artillery, 

and mobility that resulted from that flow was keeping the Viet 

Minh at bay. 

Despite American assurances that the aid would continue, 

there was deep concern that French unwillingness or inability 

to create an effective national Vietnamese Army would undermine all attempts at defeating the Viet Minh. MAAG personnel 

suggested on numerous occasions that U.S. equipment should 

flow directly to Vietnamese units (many of which were still officered by the French) to bolster the idea of an independent, nonCommunist, nationalist alternative to the Viet Minh. However, 

French authorities rejected such ideas out of hand. Rather than 

contemplate such a development, which would obviously have 

been fatal to their hopes of restoring their colonial empire, 

the French threatened to pull out of Vietnam completely and 

abandon the struggle against Communist aggression. The United 

States could not easily consider such a development in 1951 with 

the Communist Chinese on the offensive in Korea and war-torn 

Europe under threat from potential Soviet aggression.
12 

Even more important than equipment, in the eyes of the U.S. 

State Department, was the need to build up a Vietnamese National 

Army separate from the French-officered units. American pressure 

and French battlefield reverses in 1952 combined to force the French 

to agree to a plan to create forty light battalions of Vietnamese 

infantry. U.S. Army Chief of Staff General J. Lawton Collins approved 

of the proposal and further urged the French to develop a more robust 

training system modeled on the schools developed for training South 

Korean troops. However, despite U.S. support and the promise of 

additional aid to make the forty battalion program viable, French resistance to the idea of creating institutions that might make Vietnamese 

independence a reality effectively crippled the plan. 

By early 1953, and the arrival of Dwight D. Eisenhower’s 

administration, U.S. aid to the French in Indochina totaled more 

than 150,000 tons of equipment including 900 combat vehicles, 

15,000 other vehicles, 2,500 artillery pieces, 75,000 small arms, 

24,000 automatic weapons, and nearly 9,000 radios. The Air Force 

provided France 160 F6F and F8F fighters, 41 B–26 light bombers, 

and 28 C–47 transports along with massive amounts of spare 

parts, maintenance assistance, and bombs. Yet it seemed as if the 

French were no closer to victory over the resilient Viet Minh than 

they had been in 1946 when the war started.

American concerns about France’s ability to defeat the Viet 

Minh led to the dispatch of a special mission headed by Lt. Gen. 

John W. (“Iron Mike”) O’Daniel, a distinguished combat veteran 

of World War I, World War II, and Korea. O’Daniel’s mission was 

to glean additional information about how the French planned to 

conduct military operations—the French seldom provided much 

information to the United States on the specific uses of all of its 

operational aid—while encouraging them to be more aggressive 

against the Viet Minh. Arriving in June 1953, General O’Daniel 

and his team seemed to make progress; they were presented with 

an aggressive new plan by the French commander in Vietnam, 

Lt. Gen. Henri Navarre. The Navarre Plan included a number 

of offensive operations and accelerated moves to build up the 

Vietnamese National Army, long a sore point between the United 

States and France. The O’Daniel mission, and a follow-up mission 

in November, generated renewed hope in the French Army’s 

ability to reverse the tide of events on the battlefield. This hope was 

not shared by the MAAG or by Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) 

advisers who knew how difficult it was for the French Army to 
13

implement grand plans with its limited resources and decreasing 

support from its government and people.

Dien Bien Phu: The Gamble

On 20 November 1953, French paratroopers jumped into a 

valley deep in Vietnam, almost to the Laotian border, near the 

small village of Dien Bien Phu. The plan was to establish a heavily 

fortified installation deep in enemy territory to support counterguerrilla operations and draw enemy main force units out in the 

open where French firepower and air support could destroy them. 

The French succeeded in drawing out enemy main force units. 

Over the next few months, the Viet Minh moved four infantry 

divisions and an artillery division onto the hills surrounding Dien 

Bien Phu and sustained them using an army of porters, bicycle 

transports, and handcarts. Quickly cutting off all land supply lines 

and then neutralizing the French artillery, the Viet Minh turned 

the fortress of Dien Bien Phu into a trap. It could only be resupplied with men, ammunition, and food by a long and tenuous 

air line of communications. Despite mobilizing all of their air 

transport fleet and obtaining the support of a number of United 

States Civil Air Transport C–119 Flying Boxcar transport aircraft 

(a CIA–run airline that painted French markings on the planes), 

supplies quickly ran short in the cutoff outpost as the Viet Minh 

French machine gunners have just enough time to throw themselves on the ground and put 

their weapon in play as Viet Minh soldiers attack. 
14 

drew the noose ever tighter. Attempts to parachute in reinforcements only trickled in small packets of soldiers. 

At first it seemed as if despite its isolated position, French 

firepower might yet prevail. On a visit to the outpost in February 

1954, General O’Daniel noted a number of flaws in the French 

deployment of forces, but he also saw extensive bunkers with interlocking fields of fire and left encouraged by the overall impression 

of French strength. By then, however, the buildup of Viet Minh 

forces outside the besieged position numbered over thirty-five 

thousand soldiers with at least a hundred artillery pieces on the 

high ground overlooking the fortress. Beginning on 13 March, the 

Viet Minh launched a series of attacks against the French strong 

points that protected the main position and quickly overran them. 

This reverse marked the beginning of the end for the French 

fortress. 

While assisting France with providing supplies for their 

cutoff troops at Dien Bien Phu, the United States faced a series of 

deeper questions: Should it directly intervene militarily to prevent 

a French defeat? If it did not, what effect would this have on the 

global struggle against communism? Conversely, if the United 

States did intervene, how would it do so, in what strength, with 

what goals, and with what chance of success? Would it have the 

desired effect or just throw good money after bad? These were 

General O’Daniel (right) inspected the Dien Bien Phu outpost in February 1954 and was 

encouraged by the impression of French strength.
15

policy issues that had no easy answers. The Eisenhower administration did not want to appear “soft on communism” (candidate 

Eisenhower had, after all, campaigned on a promise to “roll-back” 

Communist gains around the world).The administration had no 

desire to expand the U.S. Army by the hundreds of thousands of 

troops that would be needed to engage in a military intervention 

in Indochina or expend huge amounts of money in a gamble. 

Or, if the intent was simply to unleash U.S. airpower against the 

Viet Minh, where were the hard targets and how effective would 

airpower really be against a mainly guerrilla force? The Viet Minh 

had no cities or factories or supply lines that could be attacked 

effectively by air. Speculation to this day wonders what would have 

happened if the United States had directed B–29 Superfortress 

attacks against the Viet Minh troop concentrations surrounding 

Dien Bien Phu. Even assuming the air attacks were completely 

effective (some policymakers were even considering the possible 

use of nuclear weapons to increase the odds of success), the 

remarkable motivation of the Viet Minh and their persistence in 

providing replacements and resupply might have made such a 

major effort useless in the long run. The fortress could still have 

fallen, making the United States seem weak and ineffectual and 

giving the forces of communism around the world a huge psychological boost. The United States could not discount the possibility 

of direct Chinese intervention with ground forces as a result of 

such actions, especially given the example of Korea. 

It seemed as if all possible avenues were fraught with danger. 

The French position in Indochina would either be lost, and with it 

the fight in that region against worldwide Communist aggression, 

or the United States would find itself bogged down in a lengthy, 

expensive commitment in Asia. A commitment in Asia had the risk 

of direct confrontation with the Chinese and their Soviet patrons 

that might result in a wider conflict. What was Indochina worth? 

What was the support of a North Atlantic Treaty Organization ally 

worth?

The fall of Dien Bien Phu on 7 May 1954 and the conclusion of the Geneva Agreements on 21 July put an effective end 

to speculation on whether or not to intervene to save the French 

who were clearly defeated and had no further political or military 

stomach for the fight. Their forces were to withdraw to the south, 

leaving the area north of the 17th Parallel to the triumphant Viet 

Minh. The treaty was to be supervised by an International Control 
16 

Commission consisting of representatives of India, Poland, and 

Canada, and free elections were to be held in North and South 

Vietnam in July 1956. The United States did not concur in the 

final declaration but pledged to “refrain from the threat of the use 

of force to disturb” the agreements while warning that it would 

not stand idly by at any renewal of attacks in violation of the 

agreements. The outcome was nothing less than a major defeat 

for France, the United States, and the free world. The Geneva 

Agreements ceded half the country to Ho Chi Minh’s Communistcontrolled Democratic Republic of Vietnam, with its capital in 

Hanoi. This left South Vietnam under the weak remnant of a 

government headed by the last Vietnamese emperor Bao Dai and 

his new prime minister, Ngo Dinh Diem, with its capital in Saigon. 

Operations

The final collapse of the French in Indochina, even with the 

establishment of a non-Communist zone in the southern half of 

Vietnam, also signaled the collapse of U.S. policy in the region, 

which had focused on bolstering France’s position. All arguments 

about direct U.S. military intervention, either by bombings in 

support of the French at Dien Bien Phu or even the direct involvement of up to seven divisions of American combat troops in the 

Red River delta region (up to five more in the event of Chinese 

French soldiers escort Viet Minh into Hanoi, October 1954
17

intervention), foundered 

on the simple fact that the 

Eisenhower administration 

did not have the money or 

the forces to pursue a policy 

that had so little chance of 

success. Yet the impulse to 

oppose the further expansion of Communist influence in Asia was powerful. 

What, then, was the United 

States to do now?

The decision to expand 

American advisory efforts 

to assist the new South 

Vietnamese government was 

made even before the signing 

of the Geneva Agreements. 

In May, the French, reeling from their defeat at Dien Bien Phu, had 

consented to the placement of U.S. advisers with Vietnamese units 

to train those units as well as to ensure the proper maintenance 

and use of U.S.-supplied equipment. This had been a longstanding 

request and only desperation had moved the French to accept it. The 

total collapse of France’s effort in 1954 prevented any implementation of this initial advisory effort and postponed any further initiatives until after the creation of South Vietnam.

The fledgling South Vietnamese government under Prime 

Minister Diem soon turned to the United States for help, asking 

for assistance in moving eight hundred thousand refugees 

from North Vietnam to the south as permitted by the Geneva 

Agreements. President Eisenhower endorsed Diem’s request and 

dispatched a fact-finding mission on military aid led by former 

Chief of Staff of the Army General Collins. This group recommended an expansion of the U.S. training mission to build a new 

South Vietnamese Army. On 12 February 1955, the new MAAG 

chief, General O’Daniel, assumed full responsibility for the organization and training of the South Vietnamese Army. In the eyes 

of many Vietnamese, however, the French colonial masters had 

merely been replaced by Americans (Map 2).

General O’Daniel’s new Military Support Mission (later 

called the Training Relations and Instruction Mission [TRIM]) 

South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem 
Tonle

 Sap

GULF OF

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CHINA SE A

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Mekong R Mekong R

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Q UANG TRI

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Q UANG NAM

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 BINH

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ADMINISTRATIVE BOUNDARIES

December 1963

SOUTH VIETNA M

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 Map 2
19

incorporated approximately 200 French officers who had been 

previously attached to South Vietnamese units along with 68 

U.S. officers with 149 being added over the next few months. The 

French continued to provide officer and specialist training for the 

South Vietnamese Army while the Americans established basic 

training centers and schools. However, there was no small amount 

of friction between the U.S. and French advisers and instructors 

and between the French and their South Vietnamese counterparts 

who resented continuous French criticism of their new army. It 

was not a congenial arrangement.

The awkwardness of the continuing French advisory component was aggravated by the presence of three French combat divisions. Diem considered them an unnecessary relic of the colonial 

past that served only as a propaganda tool for the Vietnamese 

Communists to exploit. He therefore withdrew from the French 

Union, restricted special French commercial benefits, and abolished 

the monarchy before the end of 1955. The French took the hint, 

and by May 1956 had withdrawn virtually all troops and advisers 

from South Vietnam, leaving the advisory effort completely to the 

Americans. General O’Daniel 

departed in October 1955 and 

was replaced by Lt. Gen. Samuel 

T. (“Hanging Sam”) Williams, 

who created a new Military 

Assistance Advisory Group 

(MAAG), Vietnam. 

One of the first challenges 

faced by General Williams was 

accounting for the vast amount 

of U.S. equipment that had been 

supplied over the past ten years 

to the French in Indochina. 

Much of the equipment, in 

dubious states of repair, had 

been dumped on the unprepared South Vietnamese as the 

French departed. With only 

a rudimentary army and no 

established logistical, maintenance, repair, or depot storage 

Lt. Gen. Samuel T. Williams 
20 

system, much of that equipment was unusable. The U.S. advisers, 

only 342 strong by the end of 1955, slowly began to establish a 

system to deal with this flood of material while also advising on 

the formation and training of a completely new South Vietnamese 

Army. In excess of $700 million in American equipment, desperately needed for that army, was rapidly vanishing without a trace.

The solution was to dispatch a team of 350 additional 

U.S. officers and men to South Vietnam to form a Temporary 

Equipment Recovery Mission (TERM). In addition, the MAAG 

gained another forty-eight permanent spaces to assist in 

handling the expanded workload. The TERM team members 

began arriving in June 1956 and were fully integrated into 

the MAAG’s advisory and training effort. In fact, most of the 

members of TERM were quickly diverted to the operational 

and staff training missions of the MAAG. Only seven team 

members were directly working on equipment recovery issues 

by the end of 1957. All pretense as to the team’s real purpose 

was dropped in 1959, and the TERM team was fully absorbed 

by the advisory group, a major expansion of the MAAG size 

and mission.

MAAG, Vietnam, operated under two chains of command. 

As part of U.S. forces in the Pacific region, the advisory group 

reported to the Commander in Chief, Pacific, on all operational 

matters. The group also reported to the U.S. ambassador to 

Vietnam on all policy matters involving the implementation 

of the in-country military assistance program. As such, the 

MAAG was part of the ambassador’s Country Team, a loosely 

structured committee headed by the ambassador that included 

representatives dealing with all aspects of U.S. support to a 

country. The Country Team was meant to impose some manner 

of cooperation and coordination on the various American 

initiatives, but the loose structure and lack of clear lines of 

authority often prevented a truly integrated approach. As was 

often the case, the military and the State Department did not 

always agree on policy, leaving the MAAG chief caught in the 

middle.

Along with the MAAG, the Country Team in Vietnam 

included representatives of the CIA, which gathered intelligence 

and provided advice and assistance on building South Vietnamese 

national police and intelligence capacity; the United States 

Information Service, which handled information and propaganda 
21

issues; and the United States Operational Mission (USOM—later 

the International Cooperation Agency and later still the United 

States Agency for International Development [USAID]), which 

handled socioeconomic development, governmental capacitybuilding in the provinces, and assistance to police and paramilitary organizations. With oft-competing agendas and the ability 

to appeal any local decisions back to their cabinet-level superiors 

in Washington, different parts of the Country Team frequently 

worked at cross purposes. 

By 1960 the MAAG had grown in size to about 685 U.S. 

military personnel. Although most of the men were from the Army, 

there were also around one hundred Air Force, eighty Navy, and 

a few Marine Corps personnel at the headquarters and in field 

advisory posts. American advisers were also assigned to an Army 

basic training center at Quang Trung near Saigon, a military college 

for senior officers in Saigon, the National Military Academy (a 

basic officer training center) at Da Lat in the Central Highlands, a 

ranger and noncommissioned officer school at Duc My near Nha 

Trang, the Cay Mai intelligence and psychological warfare school in 

Saigon, and several branch schools 

near Saigon. Building on earlier 

attempts at gaining control over the 

U.S. equipment in South Vietnam 

and rationalizing the logistical 

structure, by 1961 the MAAG had 

also assigned a number of logistics 

advisers to the four major depots 

in South Vietnam in Saigon, Nha 

Trang, Qui Nhon, and Da Nang. 

In August 1960, General 

Williams was replaced as chief 

of MAAG, Vietnam, by Lt. 

Gen. Lionel C. McGarr, a 1928 

West Point graduate who had 

commanded the 3d Infantry 

Regiment (Old Guard) in Europe 

during World War II and had been 

the assistant division commander 

of the 2d Infantry Division in 

Korea. To General McGarr, the 

challenge facing his organization 

Lt. Gen. Lionel C. McGarr (shown as a 

major general)
22 

was clear: “The problem confronting Vietnam today is one of a 

political-military-psychological-economic nature which cannot [his 

emphasis] be resolved by military means alone.” The solution, he 

believed, lay “in the coordinated use of additional military, political, 

social, economic, and psychological power . . . with the objective 

of truly winning over and motivating the population to a common 

purpose.” However, McGarr also acknowledged that the critical situation challenging the Diem regime in 1960 was such that military 

measures had to be the first priority or there would be no time to 

pursue any long-term goals of economic or social reforms. At every 

turn successive U.S. commanders and diplomats had to recognize 

both the military dimensions of the threat to South Vietnam and 

the constant need to balance those security activities with aid and 

pacification operations. Unfortunately, the enemy, in this case the 

North Vietnamese, always had a vote as to which dimension to 

emphasize at any given moment, and thus was often able to force 

South Vietnam and its U.S supporters to react to his initiatives.

The North Vietnam–inspired and –led insurgency within 

South Vietnam against the nascent Diem regime had continued to 

gain ground from its initiation in 1955. Diem, with little popular 

support and facing internal challenges from political and religious 

factions and from his own generals, had initially been slow to recognize the threat. He chose individuals to be senior province leaders 

and high military officials from those whom he felt he could trust, 

regardless of their ability or their susceptibility to corruption. Rather 

than try to win over the people with a serious effort at land reform, 

Diem sought to turn back the clock by returning thousands of 

acres of the most fertile land in the Mekong Delta to a handful of 

rich families who had fled the region during the long war with the 

French. Another of Diem’s attempts to help improve the security of 

his country against Communist subversion seemed to create more 

local animosity than security. He tried to create fortified villages in 

the Central Highlands region of the country but in doing so directly 

threatened the interests of the mountain tribes of Vietnam. These 

tribes, collectively called Montagnards (mountain-dwellers), by the 

French and moi (savages) by the Vietnamese, were of a MalayoPolynesian and Mon-Khmer racial stock and practiced slash-andburn agriculture in the jungles of central Vietnam. They had never 

gotten along with the ethnic Vietnamese, and the French had capitalized on this dislike by playing one off against the other. Rather 

than recruiting them as allies in his fight against the Vietnamese 
23

Communists (Viet Cong), Diem’s policies threatened to drive them 

wholesale into the arms of his enemies.

Through a ruthless campaign Diem was initially successful 

in rooting out many insurgents. However, he faced a renewed 

campaign of violence in 1959 and 1960 as Viet Cong agents began 

an assassination campaign against government officials in the 

hamlets and villages. The campaign of terror also was directed 

against teachers, village elders, clergymen, and landlords who 

might be expected to support the government. The Viet Cong 

would then establish their own webs of control, recruit the young 

men of the villages into their own guerrilla and main force units, 

collect food and taxes from those villages, and begin to set up a 

shadow government that directly opposed the Saigon government. 

By 1960, the successes the Viet Cong guerrillas had achieved 

were the result of a well-laid plan orchestrated by the North 

Vietnamese Communist party. To support the growing insurgency, 

the North had established a special logistical unit in early 1959 tasked 

with building a network of trails and roads through the jungles of 

Laos and Cambodia to the porous border of South Vietnam. This 

network, known as the Ho Chi Minh Trail, was the lifeline of the 

Bicycles are used to transport supplies down the Ho Chi Minh Trail. 
24 

insurgency and permitted the movement of troops and growing 

quantities of supplies and equipment from the North to the South 

despite all attempts at interdiction. In 1959, the North Vietnamese 

Communists infiltrated 1,600 small arms, 50 tons of supplies, and 

500 party cadre and soldiers with another 3,000 personnel the 

following year. These men were highly trained officers, noncommissioned officers, technicians, and political leaders who specialized in 

organizing, indoctrinating, training, and leading South Vietnamese 

recruits and organizing them into an effective fighting force.

This resurgent force began a series of military operations 

that almost immediately threatened the survival of the Diem 

regime. In one of the most serious incidents, a Viet Cong squad 

attacked the quarters of the American detachment advising the 

South Vietnamese 7th Infantry Division in Bien Hoa on 8 July 

1959. Sneaking through barbed wire and past inattentive South 

Vietnamese guards, the six-man squad attacked the mess hall where 

the U.S. advisers and some guests were watching a movie. The Viet 

Cong raked the room with automatic weapon fire. Two Americans 

were killed and one wounded out of the thirteen Americans in the 

advisory team. Maj. Dale R. Buis and M. Sgt. Chester M. Ovnand 

were the first advisers to die by enemy action in South Vietnam. In 

another attack early in the New Year—this time on the command 

post of a South Vietnamese regiment near Tay Ninh City, a provincial capital northwest of Saigon near Cambodia—300 Viet Cong 

killed or wounded 66 South Vietnamese soldiers. The Communists 

also destroyed five buildings and seized large quantities of arms 

and ammunition before escaping virtually unscathed.

Violent incidents increased throughout the country including 

terrorist bombings and assassinations. There were 180 such separate 

incidents in January 1961 and 545 in September. Increasingly, Viet 

Cong units began to take on regular army formations and not just 

conduct raids on small outposts guarded by poorly trained militia, 

police, or the paramilitary Civil Guard units. Despite the continuing 

difficulty of infiltrating large numbers of operatives into Saigon, 

the Viet Cong were steadily growing stronger in the countryside 

throughout 1960 and 1961. By 1961 the Viet Cong claimed to control 

up to one-third of the South’s 13.2 million to 15 million people. Even 

U.S. intelligence figures were only slightly more optimistic with 

strong evidence that 20 percent of the population was controlled 

outright and another 40 percent was under varying degrees of influence by the Viet Cong. In the rice-rich Mekong Delta, for example, 
25

the Communists probably controlled seven of the thirteen provinces. There were few rural areas of South Vietnam where the Viet 

Cong could not operate, especially at night. 

Government Security and Military Forces 

The mission of the MAAG, Vietnam, was to help the South 

Vietnamese create a military and security structure that could fight 

back against guerrilla units, give the Diem regime a “breathing 

space” to gain its footing, and then assist in the long, slow climb to 

stability and prosperity. The challenge was formidable, given the 

strong enemy forces and their increasing support from the north, 

but also because of the poor quality of the South Vietnamese 

security and military structure. 

In the countryside, where the threat was arguably the most 

imminent, the government seemed to have few forces at its disposal, 

and most of those were poorly armed, led, and trained. Each hamlet 

had a handful of part-time militiamen to serve as a security force 

but little more. These guards would probably notice if the hamlet 

was being visited by Viet Cong recruiting parties, cadre, or taxmen 

but could do little about it. The next higher administration element, 

the village, may only have had one full-time policeman and a squad 

(10–15 strong) of Self-Defense Corps soldiers, a part-time paramilitary organization under the Interior Ministry. At most there were 

about 45,000 part-time security men in the entire country. Spread 

as thin and nearly as ill-trained and equipped as the militia, the SelfDefense Corps was a regular target of the Viet Cong. The Viet Cong 

could concentrate their forces quickly and attack a Corps outpost—

seizing their weapons, inflicting casualties, and then melting away—

almost at will.

At the province level, the most significant security forces available were the Civil Guard. This full-time, paramilitary organization was administered, like the Self-Defense Corps, by the Interior 

Ministry but was controlled by Vietnam’s thirty-eight province 

chiefs. Organized into companies and platoons, the 55,200-man 

guard was better armed and motivated than other police and paramilitary forces available in the provinces but suffered from lack 

of transport. The Civil Guard was often engaged in static defense 

missions and was not generally able to react to Viet Cong attacks 

quickly enough to be decisive.

The lack of effective local security forces was just one problem 

facing Diem. The South Vietnamese military was also thrown into 
26

the fight against the insurgency and it was far from ready for battle. 

Built largely on the remnants of French-trained colonial forces, 

the Vietnam Armed Forces (VAF) consisted of an army, navy, 

marines, and air force numbering approximately one hundred 

fifty thousand. By early 1961 the largest of these elements was the 

Army of the Republic of Vietnam with 138,000 soldiers. It was 

organized into seven infantry divisions of three infantry regiments 

and two artillery battalions each and a mix of combat support and 

combat service support units. In addition to the divisions, the 

Army had a ranger command consisting of sixty-five separate 

ranger companies, an airborne brigade of five battalions, five 

separate infantry battalions, eight field artillery battalions (three 

with 105-mm. howitzers and five with 155-mm. howitzers) and 

four armored regiments. The small navy of 3,200 sailors with 30 

seagoing vessels and about 200 smaller craft was mostly engaged 

in coastal patrolling. South Vietnam also had a marine corps of 

2,200 troops organized into three battalions and a 4,400-man air 

force. The air force operated a squadron of fighter-bombers, some 

liaison and observation aircraft, two transporter squadrons, and a 

squadron of light and medium helicopters. 

Like the nation’s police and paramilitary formations, the 

Republic of Vietnam’s armed forces looked formidable on paper. 

Four institutional problems proved particularly vexing: a convoluted chain of command, uneven quality of officers, intelligence 

gathering and sharing, and tactical inflexibility. The first was a 

convoluted chain of command. On paper, authority extended 

downward from the office of the president through the Ministry of 

Defense to a Joint General Staff, headed by the army chief of staff, 

and then to the senior officer in charge of the field command, all 

of whom were headquartered in Saigon. Below the field command 

were five generals and their staffs who administered five geographically based military regions: Military Region II in the northern 

provinces nearest to the Demilitarized Zone, Military Region IV in 

central Vietnam, Military Region I in the provinces immediately 

north and east of Saigon, Military Region V in the Mekong Delta, 

and the Capital Military Region, which encompassed Saigon and 

the immediate area (Map 3). Three of those officers were also corps 

commanders equipped with a distinct corps staff—the headquarters of I Corps was based in Military Region II, II Corps was based 

in Military Region IV, and III Corps was based in Military Region 

I—that developed plans to be used in the event of a cross-border 
MR II

MR III

MR IV

MR V

MR I

CAPITAL MR

Kontum

Pleiku

Song Mao

Bien Hoa

Vung Tau

Phuoc Vinh

SAIGON

My Tho

Ap Bac

Duc Hoa

Can Tho

Ha Tien

Qui Nhon

Tay Ninh

Duc My

Nha Trang

Da Lat

Ban Me Thuot

Hue

Da Nang

Quang Ngai

Tonle

 Sap

GULF OF

SIAM

SOUT H

CHINA SE A

SOUT H

CHINA SE A

Mekong R Mekong R

DEMARC A T ION LINE

PHNOM PENH

LAOS

THAILAN D

CAMBODIA

NORTH

 VIETNA M

ADVISORY COMMANDS

Before 1960

Military Region

Military Region Boundary

MR

SOUTH VIETNA M

0

0 150

150 Kilometers

Miles

Note: Dierent units were rotated into MR V to perform assigned

missions. Miscellaneous units were assigned in all MRs.

 Map 3
28 

invasion. The commanders of divisions, separate regiments, and 

smaller independent units reported directly to the military region 

or corps commander. 

In reality this chain of command operated in a highly irregular 

fashion. The South Vietnamese president, who also held the post 

of minister of defense, frequently devised and executed military 

operations without consulting the Joint General Staff. The highest 

army headquarters, the field command, had no combat units under 

its control because Diem refused to let any of his generals have 

operational authority over the entire army. The next lower echelon, 

the regional military and the corps commanders, had only tenuous 

control over subordinate units, as the division commanders could 

easily evade orders from above with an appeal to the president or by 

his prior instruction. In fact, Diem freely reached over intermediate 

commands to detach battalions and companies from regular army 

units for indefinite periods, to the detriment of unit cohesion. 

A further complication arose from the fact that Diem assigned 

primary responsibility for South Vietnam’s internal security to 

the nation’s thirty-eight province chiefs and not to the military. 

Province chiefs, often former military officers chosen for their 

political loyalty, were outside of the military chain of command 

and frequently communicated to Diem on security matters without 

consulting local army commanders. Not only did each province 

chief have his own private army entirely outside of armed forces 

control in the form of the Civil Guard and Self-Defense Corps, 

but the chiefs also controlled army units detached to assist them 

in maintaining security and could even block military operations 

in their jurisdictions. 

The second major weakness affecting the military’s performance was the uneven quality of South Vietnam’s officers. While 

the best commanders had proved themselves in battle, first against 

the Viet Minh and later against the Viet Cong, others had used 

political connections rather than military skill to attain their rank. 

Diem controlled the selection and promotion of all officers above 

the grade of captain, and loyalty rather than talent was often a 

key criterion for advancement. He seemed unconcerned by the 

rampant corruption in the military and actually welcomed the 

rivalry between his generals because it reduced the chance they 

would form a junta to overthrow him. 

If politicization undermined the cohesiveness, efficiency, and 

discipline of the officer corps, so too did other factors. The relative 
29

newness of the South Vietnamese Army, when coupled with the 

fact that the French had permitted relatively few Vietnamese to 

obtain senior rank during the colonial era, meant that many highranking officers had little experience in commanding large formations. Because higher education was a prerequisite for officership—15 percent of field grade officers held doctorates—officers 

tended to be drawn from Vietnam’s relatively small urban middle 

class. Many of these individuals were unfamiliar with the jungle, 

mountain, and swamp terrain in which much of the war would be 

fought and were unsympathetic to the plight of the rural peasant. 

They were similarly indifferent to the welfare of their own soldiers, 

a fact that did not help unit morale. Finally, the South Vietnamese 

style of command, in which junior officers were expected to wait 

for direction and to follow orders literally, discouraged initiative 

in a war that required rapid decisions and aggressive, independent 

actions at the junior officer level. 

A third institutional problem was intelligence. Eight separate 

agencies had their own networks for gathering and analyzing 

information that often overlapped and competed with one another. 

The different groups operated with little or no coordination, and 

several, including the Political and Social Research Bureau and 

the Military Security Service, specialized in political surveillance 

designed to ensure loyalty among officials and to counter dissidents rather than in gathering intelligence on the Viet Cong. The 

best intelligence probably came from agencies that had operatives 

among the people—the police, civil government, Self-Defense 

Corps, Civil Guard, and the Surete (secret police). Most of these 

agencies reported either to the province chief or to their respective administrative headquarters in Saigon and were loath to share 

information with the military. When information was shared, the 

lengthy communication and coordination process often meant 

that the information was out of date by the time it got into the 

hands of a commander who could act on it. The Army’s own intelligence apparatus, beginning with the Military Intelligence Service 

(J–2) of the Joint General Staff and extending down to intelligence officers on headquarters and unit staffs, was poorly trained, 

woefully understaffed, and unable to transmit information rapidly 

and securely.

Tactical inflexibility was the armed forces’ fourth major 

problem. Despite having motorized units, government troops 

were often less mobile than the Viet Cong because the South 
30 

Vietnamese troops relied heavily on the limited network of 

roads. Traveling light on foot and often in small groups, the Viet 

Cong could converge on targets from several directions and then 

disperse quickly. When the Army responded to those attacks by 

sending truck-mounted reinforcements, the soldiers often arrived 

several hours too late because the Viet Cong had mined the road 

or set an ambush to delay their advance. Unlike the enemy, the 

Army rarely operated at night. That fact alone meant that government forces yielded the initiative to the Viet Cong on a regular and 

predictable basis.

Despite its numerical superiority, the South Vietnamese 

Army often lacked sufficient strength to mount effective mobile 

operations against the Viet Cong because nearly 40 percent of its 

units were tied down in static positions guarding bridges, population centers, or military installations. Similarly, although the army 

enjoyed a tremendous superiority in firepower over the guerrillas, 

the inefficient command structure and a lack of communication 

equipment often meant that hours or even days would pass between 

a request for air strikes or artillery support and the delivery of that 

support. This situation, when coupled with the guerrillas’ ability 

to pick and choose when and where to strike, greatly negated the 

Army’s superiority in materiel. 

Finally, the South Vietnamese Army was poorly trained. Few 

South Vietnamese officers exhibited much interest in training, 

and the heavy operational and pacification requirements imposed 

by the escalating insurgency meant that by 1961 many units had 

received little or no training. This lack of training was especially 

critical in infantry units. Although a majority of military personnel 

were long-service volunteers, these individuals tended to coalesce 

at the higher echelons and in service and support units where their 

technical knowledge could best be put to use. In contrast, up to 

60 percent of Vietnamese soldiers in combat units were poorly 

paid, poorly educated, unmotivated, and inexperienced eighteenmonth conscripts. Vietnamese soldiers would repeatedly prove 

that they were capable of great feats of courage and endurance 

when properly trained and led; however, all too often these vital 

ingredients were missing.

The Advisory Effort

The task of training the Army of the Republic of Vietnam to 

fight the Viet Cong and their North Vietnamese masters fell squarely 
31

on the shoulders of the Military Assistance Advisory Group led 

by General McGarr. The MAAG advisers faced a number of challenges in accomplishing this awesome task, not least of which was 

the ongoing effort to truly understand what was happening in the 

countryside. MAAG was not authorized or staffed to collect its 

own intelligence, so almost all of its information came from the 

South Vietnamese. Few advisers had any language capability and 

could not gather direct, unfiltered information from their counterparts in the army or from sources in the countryside. 

The effectiveness of the advisory effort was also handicapped 

because most advisers served only a one-year tour. Building trust 

and rapport was challenging enough, but with American personnel 

rotating through their positions each year, it was even more difficult 

to build a strong relationship with their counterparts. In addition, 

many South Vietnamese had been fighting, with greater or lesser 

effectiveness, for many years and they did not relish getting advice 

on organization, tactics, or operations from foreign officers, many 

of whom were junior to them with no combat experience. 

Central to the advisory effort was the establishment of a 

comprehensive training program for the South Vietnamese Army. 

The program included sending senior officers and enlisted men 

to U.S. schools and military courses in the Philippines and Japan 

while creating an effective training establishment inside Vietnam. 

When professional schooling was matched with properly organized units and supervised by a network of U.S. advisers attached 

to those units, the United States felt confident that the result would 

be an effective army capable of defending South Vietnam against 

any conventional or unconventional foe.

There were four major military school systems in Vietnam by 

the early 1960s. There was a basic training center at Quang Trung, 

near Saigon, that turned out some nine thousand recruits in its 

standard sixteen-week course. Senior officers attended a military 

college in Saigon that had both a staff officers’ course for junior 

officers and a commanders’ course for field grade officers. At Da 

Lat, about 150 miles northeast of Saigon in the II Corps area, 

the South Vietnamese Military Academy provided basic officer 

training. The major branch schools—armor, infantry, transportation, signal, administration, engineer, ordnance, artillery, and 

quartermaster—were located at the Thu Duc School Center, a 

few miles northeast of Saigon. In addition to these complexes, the 

advisory group established a physical training center and ranger 
32 

training school at Nha Trang where some of the early training 

teams from the U.S. Army Special Forces conducted their first 

missions in Vietnam. Special Forces provided a critical component 

of training to the South Vietnamese armed forces. 

Supporting police and local security forces was initially the 

responsibility of the United States Operations Mission. The directors of USOM considered the local security forces, such as the 

Civil Guard and militia Self-Defense Corps, police forces rather 

than military forces and thus were their responsibility. Since those 

organizations belonged to the Ministry of the Interior, they were 

not eligible for U.S. military advisers, equipment, ammunition, 

weapons, or training support. However, it cannot be said that the 

USOM did much to train these police forces in the 1950s, even 

after the United States agreed to provide some equipment support 

in 1959. It was not until 1961 that the Civil Guard and Self-Defense 

Corps were transferred to the Vietnamese Ministry of Defense and 

were eligible for full support from the military advisory and assistance effort (and the money and equipment that flowed with it). 

Only then was any serious and systematic attempt made to build 

Cadets at the Da Lat Military Academy 
33

up these essential organizations that were often the first line of 

defense against the Viet Cong.

Perhaps even more central to the challenge of improving the 

ability of the armed forces of South Vietnam to counter a wily and 

aggressive foe was the difficulty of getting the Diem regime to agree 

to administrative, economic, and political reforms to undercut the 

Viet Cong’s revolutionary plans and gain more support from its 

own people. Diem was not interested in any reforms that had, in 

his mind, the potential to loosen his grip on the military or government, and he resisted all attempts by the United States to force his 

hand. Even the promise of additional aid did not serve as adequate 

leverage for the United States to use over this sovereign government that it was publically committed to support. When United 

States Ambassador Elbridge Durbrow presented a comprehensive 

Basic Counterinsurgency Plan to Diem on 13 February 1961, 

he tried to make Diem agree that in return for the $42 million 

worth of additional aid he would have to undertake key political 

and economic reforms. Diem drew out the discussions for three 

months as he attempted to prevent or delay many of the required 

reforms. While interested in aid, Diem saw that maintaining his 

own freedom of action and political autonomy was more important. While he delayed, the insurgency in the countryside only 

grew worse. It seemed that the United States had no reasonable 

alternatives to Diem who was, despite all of his flaws, an aggressive 

anti-Communist. This was no minor consideration as the situation 

elsewhere in Southeast Asia threatened to spiral out of control.

The Problem of Laos

As threatening as the situation in South Vietnam appeared 

to Washington officials in the early months of 1961, events in the 

nearby country of Laos seemed far worse. A small, mountainous 

kingdom set in the heart of Indochina, Laos occupied a strategic 

position between Communist China and North Vietnam on the 

one side and non-Communist Thailand, Cambodia, and South 

Vietnam on the other. Because neither side in the global Cold 

War could abide having Laos fall into the hands of the other, the 

signatories of the 1954 Geneva Agreements had agreed that Laos 

should be neutral territory. This proved impossible, and soon a 

bloody three-way civil war between pro-Western, neutralist, and 

pro-Communist factions engulfed the country. By January 1961, 

the situation seemed to be coming to a climax as the Communist 
34

Pathet Lao faction, backed by North Vietnam, launched a major 

offensive. A Communist victory in Laos would undermine the 

morale of pro-Western forces throughout Southeast Asia. More 

significantly, a Communist Laos would permit North Vietnam to 

convert the still primitive Ho Chi Minh Trail into a major thoroughfare for the infiltration of men and supplies into the beleaguered South. In the minds of many strategists, the fates of Laos 

and South Vietnam were inextricably linked. 

If the challenge was clear, the solution was not. One alternative was military intervention, either unilaterally or as part 

of a multinational effort under the aegis of the Southeast Asia 

Treaty Organization. The Lao people displayed scant unity, and 

their national army was neither well trained nor motivated. Laos’ 

mountainous, landlocked terrain would make movement and 

supply difficult. The country’s common border with China posed 

the threat of a Chinese intervention against the introduction of 

any American forces as had occurred in Korea in 1950. To make 

matters worse, in March the Joint Chiefs of Staff placed the troop 

strength required to stop the Pathet Lao and to parry a potential 

Chinese intervention at sixty thousand men. 

Daunted by the prospect of becoming embroiled in a Laotian 

war, the newly inaugurated U.S. President, John F. Kennedy, sought 

to strengthen pro-Western forces by means short of outright intervention. In March he authorized Operation Millpond, which 

expanded several clandestine efforts that were already under way 

in Laos (Army Special Forces had been engaged in training the 

Royal Laotian Army and indigenous Hmong tribesmen since late 

1959 working with the CIA). On 19 April, Kennedy then signaled 

his determination to prevent the collapse of Laos by transforming 

the covert American military aid organization in Laos—the 

Program Evaluation Office—into an overt Military Assistance 

Advisory Group, Laos. The situation in Laos, however, continued 

to deteriorate. 

In late April, the Ambassador to Laos, Winthrop G. Brown, 

forced Kennedy to revisit intervention when he requested air 

strikes against the Pathet Lao. Brown further warned that the 

United States would probably have to follow up the strikes with 

combat troops. Presidential adviser Walt W. Rostow, backed 

by Ambassador-at-large W. Averell Harriman, recommended 

a limited troop deployment to Thailand. Secretary of Defense 

Robert S. McNamara went further, stating that “we must take any 
President Kennedy discusses Laos during a press conference at the State Department in 

1961. 

Secretary of Defense McNamara (seated, fourth from the left) meets with members of the 

Joint Chiefs of Staff at the Pentagon in 1961.
36 

military action required to meet the threat.” McNamara recommended that the president directly intervene in Laos. Chairman 

of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Lyman L. Lemnitzer agreed, 

but the rest of the Joint Chiefs were divided about the wisdom of 

a major ground intervention—an action that they now believed 

would require 140,000 men as well as the possible use of nuclear 

weapons. Congressional leaders likewise opposed intervening in 

Laos. 

Torn by diverging advice, President Kennedy stuck to his 

preferred position of avoiding intervention. This decision received 

a significant boost in early May when the Pathet Lao agreed to 

a cease-fire and the initiation of a fourteen-nation conference in 

Geneva to settle Laos’ future. Yet the situation remained perilous—

the outcome of the negotiations was uncertain, the Laotian government remained weak, and the Pathet Lao flagrantly violated the 

truce. Stung by the failure of his proxy invasion of Cuba in April, 

Kennedy and his advisers felt that the United States had to demonstrate that it could fight the Cold War effectively, and if Laos was 

not the proper venue for that fight, then the United States needed 

to find one that was. The worsening situation in Laos during the 

winter and spring of 1961, and its implications for the situation 

in Southeast Asia, paradoxically helped propel the president to 

deepen the nation’s commitment to saving the Diem regime. 

Strategic Hamlets

While the U.S. advisory effort focused its attention on 

building up the conventional South Vietnamese Army and major 

elements of the local security forces, Diem was developing his 

own plans to establish control over the villages and hamlets of his 

country. In 1959 he initiated a relocation program that attempted 

to solve the problem of security by picking up whole communities and moving them to safer locations. These rural settlements 

were called agrovilles and were meant to be protected centers 

where the government could offer a wide range of social services 

such as schools and medical facilities while offering a full menu 

of economic development opportunities for the villagers. Poor 

planning and inadequate financial support, coupled with the deep 

reluctance of the Vietnamese people to leave their ancestral lands, 

quickly doomed the program.

In 1961, Diem inaugurated the strategic hamlet program, 

which attempted to implement lessons that the British had 
37

learned in their successful counterinsurgency campaign in 

Malaya. Sir Robert Thompson, head of the British advisory 

mission to Vietnam, had been one of the planners of that 

campaign and provided advice on the importance of rural 

security in isolating an enemy guerrilla force. Unfortunately, 

rather than building the hamlets slowly outward from a central, 

expanding base, Diem tried to build thousands almost simultaneously throughout the country with insufficient plans to link 

them together for security purposes. He hoped to complete 

seven thousand strategic hamlets by early 1963 and another 

five thousand by the following year. However, the program 

again uprooted farmers and their families and the government’s development and security aid often proved inadequate. 

Therefore, the program was only partly successful. 

While Diem was experimenting with various hamlet and 

village security initiatives, the United States implemented a 

number of programs that President Kennedy had approved in 

the spring of 1961. This included augmenting the MAAG with 

additional training and operational personnel. First to arrive 

were ninety-three men of the 82d Army Security Agency (ASA) 

A strategic hamlet in Long An Province in 1963
38 

Operating Unit, who landed at Tan Son Nhut airfield outside of 

Saigon on 14 May. Working under the code name of the 3d Radio 

Research Unit (ASA units maintained this “cover” throughout 

their involvement in the Vietnam conflict), the ASA soldiers 

were charged with intercepting Communist electronic communications and then using direction-finding equipment to locate 

enemy radio transmitters. These operations began the following 

month at Nha Trang, Vung Tau in Phuoc Tuy Province, and Ha 

Tien in Kien Giang Province (later relocated to Bien Hoa air 

base in Bien Hoa Province), with Vietnamese soldiers providing 

security. Initial results were not promising. The Army’s AN/

TRD–4 direction-finding equipment had been designed to locate 

radios operating behind enemy lines as would be the case during 

a conventional war, not transmitters located in friendly positions 

as was the situation in the unconventional conflict in Vietnam. 

This fact, combined with the particular radio frequencies used 

by the Viet Cong, made locating enemy transmitters difficult, 

and the unit was unable to provide fixes with any certainty. To 

compensate, the unit—which would grow to 150 men by year’s 

end—began using truck-mounted PRD–1 direction finders, 

but this equipment needed to be fairly close to an enemy transmitter to locate it, a dangerous proposition. Just how dangerous 

became clear in December, when guerrillas ambushed a 3d 

Radio Research Unit truck, killing one American and nine South 

Vietnamese soldiers. 

United States Support Grows 

In late 1961, the United States took steps to reorganize the 

MAAG to provide more direct advisory support to Vietnamese 

headquarters and tactical units. In April an inspection team 

from Pacific Command had noted disapprovingly that only a 

fraction of MAAG officers actually served in the field. General 

McGarr agreed that reorganization was needed but had decided 

to wait until the United States and South Vietnam had actually 

begun to implement some of the core elements of the counterinsurgency plan. In August McGarr reduced the administrative 

staff and expanded the number of advisers in the field. By the 

fall, when the MAAG’s assigned strength had increased to 792 

people (77 Navy, 86 Air Force, and 629 Army), 594 personnel 

performed advisory duties, while 198 served in staff and support 

functions. This was a favorable ratio, though many of the 
39

advisers at MAAG headquarters probably spent more of their 

time doing staff work than actually advising the Vietnamese. 

Even after the reorganization only about 30 percent of MAAG 

personnel actually served with troop formations; most advisers 

continued to work at schools, training centers, and with higher 

command, staff, and logistical elements, many of which were 

located in and around Saigon.

Under the new structure, the MAAG assigned between fifty 

and seventy advisers to each Vietnamese corps: ten advisers at the 

corps’ headquarters, twenty at the corps’ regimental training area, 

ten to twenty with the corps’ logistic command, and nine advisers 

with each of the corps’ infantry divisions. The typical division 

advisory detachment consisted of a senior adviser (colonel or 

lieutenant colonel) and five majors or captains acting as advisers 

in the areas of artillery, signals, ordnance, engineering, and staff. 

Rounding out the division advisory team were three regimental 

advisers (lieutenant colonels or majors), each of whom advised 

one of the division’s three infantry regiments.

By the fall of 1961, despite the reorganization of the MAAG 

and the increase in American advisory support, the situation in 

Radio direction finder in Vietnam
40 

Vietnam continued to deteriorate. Communist attacks were up 

and government casualties, despite some isolated tactical victories, were on the rise, with 477 dead in September and 539 killed 

in October. The provincial capital of Kontum Province had been 

overrun the night of 1–2 September by one thousand Communist 

fighters—two battalions of khaki-clad, well-armed soldiers that 

just a few days before had infiltrated into the South from Laos. 

Viet Cong agents in the garrison opened the gates and the enemy 

easily penetrated the security positions without firing a shot. They 

mauled a Civil Guard relief force and ambushed the 1st Battalion, 

40th Infantry, quick reaction force as it tried to reach Kontum the 

following day. It was not until late on 4 September that two battalions arrived from the general reserve in Saigon, over two hundred 

miles away. Only then was the government able to retake the city. 

By that time the Communists had disappeared, only to strike more 

outposts in Darlac, Quang Nam, Quang Ngai, Phuoc Vinh, and 

along the Laotian border. 

A rattled Diem, aware now of the extent of the danger, asked 

for a bilateral defense treaty with the United States and requested 

combat troops to assist him, a position he had refused to take for 

many years. However, Washington was not ready to take these steps. 

Instead, the MAAG recommended that the United States provide 

additional radios to facilitate coordination between Vietnamese 

units, a critical capability for units in far-flung counterinsurgency 

operations or those conducting rapid reaction operations. In 

addition, the United States sent a special U.S. Air Force unit, the 

4400th Combat Crew Training Squadron (nicknamed Jungle Jim), 

under the code name Farm Gate. Although the squadron’s initial 

mission was to train the South Vietnamese Air Force, American 

pilots quickly began flying combat missions, always being careful 

to take along a South Vietnamese passenger to maintain the 

fiction that the planes were merely on training missions. Finally, 

President Kennedy sent an interagency team led by his personal 

military adviser, General Maxwell D. Taylor, to take a fresh look at 

the situation in Vietnam.

General Taylor, accompanied by Walt Rostow of the National 

Security Council and more than a dozen other personnel, held 

extensive discussions with U.S. and South Vietnamese officials. 

The mission concluded that the situation was serious but not 

hopeless and highlighted the issues within the Diem government 

that stood in the way of progress: inefficiency, corruption, over 
41

centralization, and nepotism. The mission also recommended 

more U.S. civilian and military advisers throughout the government of South Vietnam along with additional communications 

and support personnel. President Kennedy accepted the recommendation but rejected a further suggestion that he send eight 

thousand combat troops into the embattled Mekong Delta. 

Diem opposed many of the proposed reforms, arguing that they 

were either unnecessary, unrealistic, or would have the effect of 

turning South Vietnam into a protectorate of the United States. 

Vietnamese pride and American caution thus slowed the pace of 

U.S. involvement, but regardless of concerns on both sides, on 4 

January 1962, a new partnership between the two countries was 

announced. 

While all services contributed to the new partnership by 

offering additional equipment and advisers (in what was called 

Operation Beef-Up), the U.S. Army provided the most by sending, 

for the first time, units that would help conduct combat operations. 

General Taylor (center), with President Kennedy and Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, 

during his swearing in as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff on 1 October 1962
42 

General McGarr believed that greater mobility was essential if 

South Vietnam’s overstretched security forces were to take the 

war to the enemy as well as to respond to his far-flung attacks. 

Because the South Vietnamese had not used their helicopter 

assets effectively and because it would take time to train and equip 

additional Vietnamese helicopter forces, the United States decided 

to send Army aviation units to Vietnam. The initial commitment 

was sixty-eight fixed-wing aircraft, most of them for observation, 

and three companies of transport helicopters, one for each corps 

tactical zone. The first contingent arrived on 11 December when 

the aircraft carrier USS Core tied up at Saigon’s docks bearing 

32 H–21C Shawnee helicopters (popularly called flying bananas 

because of their distinctive shape) and 400 men assigned to the 

U.S. Army’s 8th and 57th Transportation Companies (Light 

Helicopter). Additional aircraft, including the third helicopter 

company, the 93d Transportation Company (Light Helicopter), 

arrived in January 1962. After a short shakedown period, the 

helicopter units immediately went to work training South 

Vietnamese soldiers and transporting them on operations. 

McGarr next turned his attention to intelligence. Two incidents that occurred in November and December demonstrated 

the merits of having an efficient intelligence system. In the first, 

word that the Viet Cong were going to be celebrating the recent 

capture of a government official enabled the South Vietnamese 

to vector two AD–6 (later redesignated AE–1) Skyraider attack 

aircraft to the celebration site twenty miles east of Tay Ninh City, 

Tay Ninh Province, on 30 November. The ground troops who 

H–21 “Flying Banana” helicopters unload South Vietnamese soldiers in 1962.
43

arrived shortly after the strike found fifty-two corpses, took sixty 

prisoners, and collected numerous arms and documents. Several 

days later, information gathered from a Viet Cong prisoner 

allowed government paramilitary troops to crash a Communist 

Party meeting in the southwestern delta province of An Giang. 

The soldiers killed twenty-eight insurgents and two local party 

commissioners. Unfortunately, such incidents were rare, as 

the manner in which the Vietnamese government collected, 

processed, and distributed intelligence caused many operations 

to fail.

To remedy the situation, McGarr suggested that the Pentagon 

redraft MAAG’s terms of reference to allow it to actively gather 

and analyze intelligence, functions not normally performed 

by military advisory groups. He also asked that the Defense 

Department augment the 25 intelligence personnel on his staff 

by 150 more. The additional manpower would be used to post 

intelligence operators and advisers in every province, regiment, 

division, and corps; to bolster a newly formed intelligence evaluation center designed to share information between American 

agencies; and to create a proposed combined U.S.-Vietnamese 

intelligence organization. General Taylor endorsed all of these 

as well as other intelligence reform measures, and in December 

Diem agreed to integrate U.S. intelligence advisers throughout 

his military chain of command. Meanwhile, in December the 

Department of the Army ordered the Army Security Agency to 

send an additional 288 soldiers to Vietnam to improve MAAG’s 

ongoing efforts to intercept enemy communications.

The increase in intelligence personnel was just one part of 

Operation Beef-Up’s program to improve the Vietnamese armed 

forces. In addition to the 318 new advisers already scheduled 

to arrive by year’s end, General Taylor recommended that the 

Pentagon deploy over 400 more by 31 March 1962. Along with the 

extra personnel would come new terms of reference permitting 

American forces to participate fully in the planning and execution 

of Vietnamese operations. Noting that the United States currently 

posted only one adviser to each South Vietnamese infantry 

regiment but that the war was largely prosecuted at the battalion 

and company levels, Taylor also proposed that the United States 

assign advisers to smaller tactical units. President Kennedy was 

lukewarm to a suggestion that would surely lead to American 

casualties but ultimately approved the idea in lieu of sending 
44 

combat forces to Vietnam. The president’s decisions marked an 

important milestone in U.S. involvement in combat and combat 

support operations.

The Buon Enau Experiment and Civilian Irregular Defense 

Groups (CIDG)

The increased level of Viet Cong attacks and the expanded 

U.S. support led to an initiative that would provide better local 

security and an improvement of the government’s position in 

the Central Highlands. The need to prevent the Viet Cong from 

gaining a foothold with the Montagnard population in that critical 

region created an opportunity for a new organization to show 

what it could do: the U.S. Army Special Forces. Special Forces was 

created in 1952 to serve as an irregular warfare force capable of 

creating and sustaining an insurgency behind Soviet and Warsaw 

Pact lines in the event of World War III in Europe. By the late 1950s, 

the highly trained men of Special Forces were increasingly recognized as also being the nucleus for a counterinsurgency capability. 

Organized into small, self-reliant teams (an A team consisting of 

twelve men skilled in communications, demolitions, weapons, 

intelligence, and medical treatment was supported by larger B and 

C teams for command and control), Special Forces units were seen 

as ideal for going into rural areas, working with the people, and 

training them in security operations while providing them basic 

civic action assistance. Despite some experience in Korea in 1953 

and extensive exercises in Europe, the Pacific, and South America, 

Vietnam would be the first large-scale test of these units.

In late 1961 and early 1962, under an initiative begun by the 

CIA, Special Forces personnel of Team A–35 of the 1st Special 

Forces Group (Airborne) supported by Vietnamese Special Forces 

personnel (Luc Long Dac Biet or LLDB) entered the small village 

of Buon Enao, a highland community of the Rhade tribe. They 

quickly gained a measure of trust from the villagers. Special 

Forces helped establish local self-defense forces, worked with 

them to identify Viet Cong infiltrators, and began to equip the 

villagers with firearms. The soldiers lived with the villagers, ate 

with them, worked with them to build defenses, set up medical aid 

and training programs, and reinstituted a number of civic action 

projects. The initiative quickly spread from Buon Enao until 40 

villages and 14,000 Rhade were included by the middle of 1962. 

Expanding further, new complexes were established using the 
45

same model until 200 villages were included and 60,000 people 

were effectively being protected from Viet Cong attacks and thus 

were counted as being in support of the government. By September 

1962, the program was so large and absorbed so many military 

resources that the Kennedy administration transferred it from 

CIA to Army control in what was called Operation Switchback. 

The Army activated a new headquarters in Saigon (later moved 

to Nha Trang), U.S. Army Special Forces (Provisional), and gave 

it control over the twenty-four Special Forces detachments in the 

country, many of which were engaged in what was now called the 

Civilian Irregular Defense Group (CIDG) project (Map 4). 

Although there continued to be many challenges with the 

CIDG program, not least of which was the continuing mutual 

suspicion between the lowland Vietnamese and the highland 

Montagnards, the program was a major success. With the use of 

fairly limited resources, entire regions of the Central Highlands 

that had been rife with Viet Cong influence were resisting that 

pressure. If they were not actively providing thousands of troops 

for the Vietnamese Army, and not fully supportive of the South 

Vietnamese government, they were at least defending their own 

Special Forces medics check a Montagnard baby as part of the Civilian Irregular Defense 

Group program in 1963. 
(Hoa Cam

Training Center)

X X X

X X X

X X X

CTZ I

CTZ II

CTZ III

CTZ IV

Tonle

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GULF OF

SIAM

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CHINA SE A

SOUT H

CHINA SE A

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Nha Trang

Can Tho

Ban Me Thuot

Buon Enao

Pleiku

Kontum

Da Nang

Hue

Nam Dong

DEMARC A T ION LINE

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SAIGON

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U.S. SPECIAL FORCES DEPLOYMENT

1 June 1963

SOUTH VIETNA M

0

0 150

150 Kilometers

Miles

A detachments

B detachments

Special Forces Headquarters

Corps Tactical Zone

Corps Tactical Zone Boundary

CTZ

 Map 4
47

villages with their own men and not calling on extensive detachments of government troops for help. In addition, as time went on 

and the Special Forces established closer bonds to the tribesmen, 

often being initiated into the tribes as members, the elite troopers 

were able to create small strike force units (nicknamed MIKE 

forces) to serve as mobile–ready reaction teams. They also proved 

highly capable as border watchers and in reconnaissance and 

patrol units. While not without problems, the CIDG program 

demonstrated what could be done in the rural areas if the government was able to work with the people to help provide the security 

and economic aid they needed. 

By the end of 1961, the American presence in South Vietnam 

had grown dramatically. There were almost one thousand U.S. Army 

personnel assigned to the MAAG along with another one hundred 

fifty personnel working in mobile training teams, as technicians, 

or in the military attaché’s office. In addition, over 500 soldiers 

were in Vietnam as part of the helicopter units and another 380 

in radio and signals intelligence operations. Add to this another 

1,000 personnel from the other services and there were over 3,000 

U.S. military personnel in South Vietnam with plans to expand 

that number to almost 7,000 by the middle of the next year. Aid 

was growing as well, with $65 million worth of military equipment 

already delivered and more on the way allowing the number of 

men in the regular South Vietnamese armed forces to rise to nearly 

180,000 soldiers and the number of men in the police, militia, and 

paramilitary forces to climb to about 159,000. The hope was that 

such an expansion in men, advisers, equipment, and training aid 

would lead to a successful push to pacify the country. 

Unfortunately, as they would do for the remainder of the war, 

the North Vietnamese matched American troop increases with 

comparable number of infiltrated soldiers, cadre, and equipment. 

The Ho Chi Minh Trail complex allowed the movement of an additional 7,664 men into the South along with 317 tons of weapons 

and equipment by the end of 1961. Anticipating increased U.S. 

support, the North Vietnamese leadership also planned to expand 

the movement of forces south, approving plans to send another 

30,000 to 40,000 soldiers to South Vietnam by the end of 1963. 

Escalation matched escalation as each country grappled with the 

need to change the balance in South Vietnam to its favor.

In December 1961, President Kennedy stated that he regarded 

Vietnam as “a laboratory, both for training our people, and for 
48 

learning the things that we need to know to successfully compete 

in” revolutionary warfare.Just a few days after the president made 

this remark, the Army conducted the first major experiment in its 

new laboratory. Acting on a tip from U.S. signals intelligence as to 

the location of a Viet Cong radio transmitter, on 23 December 1961 

twenty H–21 helicopters drawn from the 8th and 57th Transportation 

Companies ferried 360 South Vietnamese paratroopers of the 

5th Airborne Battalion to five locations near Duc Hoa, Long An 

Province, west of Saigon. Flying at treetop level and without a 

preliminary bombardment that might tip off the enemy, the raiders 

surprised the guerrillas, killing one, capturing forty, and seizing both 

documents and radio repair equipment. The radio itself, however, 

eluded the searchers. One helicopter from the 57th Transportation 

Company crashed, killing two paratroopers, wounding a third, and 

injuring three U.S. Army aviators. Communist rifle and mortar 

fire impeded efforts to salvage the downed helicopter, so the crew 

destroyed it to keep it out of enemy hands. The first test in combined 

operations under the new “limited partnership” thus proved inconclusive. Whether the outcome was a harbinger of things to come 

remained to be seen, but over the ensuing months the Army would 

push to complete Operation Beef-Up and lay the foundations for 

more robust experimentation in the crucible that was Vietnam.

MACV: A New Leader and a New Command

The rapidity with which General McGarr put the newly 

arrived helicopters to the test belied the many obstacles that 

needed to be overcome before the effects of the American initiative could truly be evaluated. One of the first things that needed 

to be accomplished was to create an organizational framework to 

oversee the United States’ expanding involvement in Vietnam. On 

8 February 1962, General Paul D. Harkins took command of the 

new vehicle for U.S. military activities in Vietnam—the Military 

Assistance Command, Vietnam (MACV). General Harkins came 

to Vietnam from Hawaii, where he had been serving as the deputy 

commander in chief of United States Army, Pacific. During World 

War II, he had served under General George S. Patton Jr. in North 

Africa and Sicily before becoming Patton’s deputy chief of staff 

during the Third Army’s drive across France. Nicknamed “The 

Ramrod” for his determination to ensure that Patton’s orders were 

executed, Harkins was a talented planner who, unlike his patron, 
49

could be quite diplomatic, an 

important quality given the 

nature of his new assignment.

If Harkins had any illusions 

about the challenges that lay ahead, 

they dissipated on his first day on 

the job when the commander of 

the South Vietnamese I Corps 

urged him to support the overthrow of Diem. As Harkins 

traveled the country he found that 

“everybody clamped up tight and 

tense, and it was a ticklish situation.” Recognizing the obstacles 

before him, Harkins decided he 

needed to assume “an optimistic 

attitude,” for as he explained to 

Ambassador Frederick E. Nolting 

Jr., he believed it was necessary to 

“whistle while we work” so as to 

sustain “our own and everyone 

else’s morale here.” Harkins’ optimistic demeanor would become a 

sore point with those who thought he was either naive or deliberately deceitful, neither of which was the case.

Harkins’ task, like that of the MAAG under McGarr, was 

“to assist and support the government of Vietnam in its efforts 

to provide for its internal security, defeat Communist insurgency, and resist overt aggression.” However, he was not in 

a position, anymore than previous advisers, to dictate to the 

South Vietnamese. He had to use the American aid programs 

as leverage to achieve military and political goals. Still, Harkins 

would enjoy advantages that McGarr had not. In addition to 

exercising operational command over the growing swell of U.S. 

soldiers and units that were flooding into Vietnam as part of 

Operation Beef-Up, Harkins had authority to coordinate all U.S. 

military intelligence activities in South Vietnam, an important 

asset in a war of shadows. As the commander of a subordinate 

unified command under Pacific Command, he also had direct 

access not just to its commander, Admiral Harry D. Felt, but to 

the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the secretary of defense. Last but 

not least, in recognition of the increasingly important role of 

General Paul D. Harkins 
50 

the military adviser to success in Vietnam, the Kennedy administration made Harkins coequal with the U.S. ambassador in 

Vietnam. 

Despite the formation of MACV and the arrival of additional advisers and administrators of military aid programs, the 

efforts to improve the armed forces and to take the fight to the 

enemy still progressed slowly. Regular and paramilitary strength 

grew by 100,000 from 1962 to 1963, communications networks 

were installed and manned, and new weapons and equipment 

added to the firepower and mobility of the South Vietnamese 

military. Yet that force continued to be, in the words of one U.S. 

senior adviser in IV Corps, “poorly organized, poorly trained, 

poorly equipped and poorly led.” 

Poor leadership was demonstrated by the performance 

of the South Vietnamese Army during an engagement near 

Ap Bac in the Mekong Delta province of Dinh Tuong on 

2 January 1963. During that battle, about twelve hundred 

soldiers drawn from the South Vietnamese 7th Division and 

provincial forces trapped over three hundred main-force Viet 

Cong. The Viet Cong fought the South Vietnamese to a standstill. The outmatched Viet Cong then slipped away in the night 

after killing 63 government troops and 3 American advisers 

while wounding 100 other government soldiers and shooting 

down 5 U.S. helicopters. Although the allies estimated that 

the Communists had lost an equal number of men, the disappointing results seemed to indicate that even years of training 

and assistance were not making a difference where it counted: 

on the battlefield.

Compounding the frustration of the American advisory 

effort was Diem’s tone-deaf response to calls for reform. He 

did not listen to popular grievances and seemed no closer to 

winning the loyalty of his own people than when he had come to 

power in 1954. His perceived favoritism to family members and 

Catholics created a host of enemies, including some Buddhist 

monks who deeply resented Catholic influence. Beginning in 

early 1963, Buddhist radicals led a number of anti-Diem rallies, 

some of which ended in gunfire and the death of the protesters. 

In a series of spectacular and well-publicized suicides, Buddhist 

monks poured gasoline on themselves and set themselves on 

fire. Seeing the protests as a direct threat to his regime, Diem 

and his powerful brother-in-law, Ngo Dinh Nhu, conducted 
51

a series of raids against Buddhist pagodas. The United States 

began to lose faith in the ability of Diem to rule his own people, 

let alone conduct vigorous operations against the Viet Cong 

insurgents.

The Downfall of Diem 

The Buddhist protests seemed to many South Vietnamese and 

American military personnel to be the last straw in dealing with 

Diem. Many of the more active South Vietnamese officers saw the 

favoritism and corruption of the Diem government and knew that it 

was standing in the way of victory. Others saw the removal of Diem 

as a way to enhance their own personal agendas. Maj. Gens. Duong 

Van Minh (known to the Americans as “Big Minh” because he was 

quite tall for a Vietnamese) and Tran Van Don led the conspirators 

who included many members from the Joint General Staff and other 

Saigon headquarters. They turned to the Americans for support 

after the August raids on the pagodas. The United States, with a new 

ambassador on station (Henry Cabot Lodge had recently replaced 

Ambassador Nolting), began to listen to the generals’ proposals. 

A young Buddhist monk performs a ritual suicide, by self-immolation, in the central market 

square of Saigon on 5 October 1963. Corbis ©
52 

Over the next few months, senior U.S. policymakers debated 

the pros and cons of supporting the coup plotters. A number 

hoped to use the threat of a coup to force Diem to distance 

himself from Nhu and repudiate his policy of confrontation with 

the Buddhists. Others wanted to give the plotters a green light to 

overthrow Diem without overt American assistance. This would 

keep U.S. hands “clean” and might lead to a new and more popular 

government. Ambassador Lodge, who favored Diem’s ouster, 

and General Harkins held opposite views, and relations between 

the two quickly soured. In the end, covert assurances by certain 

State Department and CIA officials that the United States would 

not oppose a coup led to the generals moving against Diem on 

1 November 1963. By the next day, the rebels had captured the 

palace and murdered Diem and Nhu. The generals established a 

provisional government on 4 November consisting of a Military 

Revolutionary Council with General Minh as chief of state and a 

mixed civilian-military cabinet.

The fall of Diem ushered in an era of debilitating instability. 

In January 1964, Maj. Gen. Nguyen Khanh overthrew Minh. A 

dizzying number of plots, counterplots, and changes of governMaj. Gen. Duong Van Minh Henry Cabot Lodge
53

ment and personnel followed over the next year. This led to near 

paralysis in government programs in the countryside and to 

continuing ineffectiveness of the military. Diem, for all his faults, 

was an unquestioned patriot who had succeeded in maintaining 

control and creating a functioning—if inefficient—regime. His 

removal created a crippling vacuum that no one seemed able to fill. 

With American support, General Khanh tried to re-energize 

the effort to build up the armed forces and restore government 

authority throughout the embattled countryside, but the results 

were minimal. Meanwhile, the United States—reeling from the 

assassination of President Kennedy on 22 November 1963 and 

the swearing in of Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson as president—attempted to improve the way it provided support to South 

Vietnam and to develop new and more comprehensive plans for 

conducting the counterinsurgency and pacification effort. The 

result was additional tendrils of U.S. commitment and responsibility working their way deeper into the South Vietnamese military 

and civil establishment. 

A New Commander for MACV

The coup against Diem had another unintended consequence for U.S. support to South Vietnam. General Harkins’ 

opposition to the coup had poisoned his relationship with 

The bodies of Diem (right) and Nhu lie in an armored personnel carrier shortly after they 

were killed on 2 November 1963. Corbis ©
54 

Ambassador Lodge. Desiring a unified team, on 25 April 

1964, President Johnson announced that Harkins’ deputy, Lt. 

Gen. William C. Westmoreland, would soon replace General 

Harkins as commander of 

MACV. The Pentagon recalled 

Harkins almost immediately, 

with Westmoreland serving 

as acting commander until 

1 August when he formally 

assumed command and pinned 

on his fourth star. 

General Westmoreland was 

an experienced and decorated 

combat commander from World 

War II. He had transferred to 

airborne troops after the war 

and commanded the 101st 

Airborne Division, served as 

superintendant of the United 

States Military Academy at 

West Point, and commanded 

the XVIII Airborne Corps. He 

seemed ideal for the position, 

combining combat experience, 

President Johnson and Secretary McNamara confer at the White House in 1964.

General Westmorland tours the village of 

Vam Lang in May 1964. 
55

administrative skill, and advanced business management training. 

At nearly the same time, Ambassador Lodge resigned to take part 

in the U.S. presidential election and was replaced by recently retired 

Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Taylor. An entirely 

new team was in place by the middle of 1964; however, they faced 

the same daunting task of improving the provision of American 

assistance and the effectiveness of the South Vietnamese government 

and military against an expanding enemy. 

Right Hand and Left Hand: OPLAN 34A 

As MACV increasingly absorbed the training mission and, 

eventually MAAG, it also involved itself in a series of shadowy 

operations against North Vietnam and into Laos and Cambodia. 

Expanding on an ongoing CIA effort, MACV prepared a list of 

reconnaissance, sabotage, intelligence, and psychological operations against the North under the general heading of Operation 

Plan (OPLAN) 34A. The plan was prepared in December 1963 

and its first activities were approved by President Johnson to begin 

on 1 February 1964. To accomplish these tasks, General Harkins 

established a Special Operations Group, later renamed Studies and 

Observations Group (SOG). The headquarters of MACV-SOG was 

initially small, only ninety-nine military personnel and thirty-one 

civilians and was commanded by an Army colonel. The MACV 

commander had operational control but the final selections of its 

missions were made by the White House and State Department due 

to their sensitivity.

Many of the initial operations of this highly secret organization, especially those that involved actions in North Vietnam, were 

conducted using South Vietnamese personnel to ensure some 

measure of American deniability. Despite the shortage of trained 

personnel, by mid-1964 MACV-SOG was conducting propaganda and psychological warfare activities inside North Vietnam. 

Some of these operations included small amphibious raids and 

bombardments of shore targets along the North Vietnamese coast 

by fast, armed motorboats. These operations in the Tonkin Gulf 

would eventually have some dramatic, unintended consequences. 

While MACV-SOG conducted operations in North Vietnam, 

other MACV personnel began working closely with South 

Vietnamese military forces to plan a series of reconnaissance 

missions and raids into southern Laos against the Ho Chi Minh 

Trail. Although the Geneva Agreements of 1962 prohibited the 
56 

operations of foreign troops in Laos, the North Vietnamese were 

flagrantly ignoring the treaty, prompting the government of Laos 

to allow the South Vietnamese to conduct limited operations on 

its territory. The MACV-J–5 (Plans) section developed Operation 

Leaping Lena, which conducted aerial surveillance and ground 

patrols of South Vietnamese Special Forces inside Laos. United 

States Special Forces teams worked with their South Vietnamese 

counterparts at Nha Trang to train and prepare the teams but did 

not accompany them across the border. The first teams entered 

Laos in June 1964, but the soldiers lacked motivation and dynamic 

leadership, and the raids were disastrous. Moves to turn over 

the mission entirely to U.S. Special Forces CIDG elements were 

contemplated, but it would take time to train the Montagnards 

for the assignment. For the time being, occasional air interdiction 

missions had to suffice. Nevertheless, the precedent of ground 

operations into Laos had been set.

Valor at Nam Dong 

In early July 1964 an attack on an obscure South Vietnamese 

outpost near the Laotian border set in motion a chain of events 

that would lead to much greater public attention on the simmering 

conflict in Southeast Asia. On 

6 July, a reinforced Viet Cong 

battalion almost a thousand 

strong hit the small CIDG camp 

of Nam Dong defended by 

approximately three hundred 

South Vietnamese and their U.S. 

and Australian advisers. The 

attack began just before dawn 

and raged for five hours with 

heavy casualties on each side. 

Special Forces team A–726 from 

the 7th Special Forces Group 

(Airborne) was commanded by 

Capt. Roger H. C. Donlon who 

quickly organized the defensive effort. According to a later 

citation, Donlon personally 

neutralized an enemy demolition team and was severely 

Captain Donlon 
57

wounded in the stomach but continued to direct the fight, rescuing 

his wounded team sergeant. Wounded again, he fought on using 

small arms, mortar rounds, and recoilless rifle fire, sustaining a 

third wound. The enemy finally retreated. For his actions that day, 

Captain Donlon received the nation’s highest award, the Medal of 

Honor, the first such award for operations in Vietnam and the first 

to a soldier while serving in the Special Forces. 

The resultant publicity of the Nam Dong action and the 

subsequent Medal of Honor recommendation highlighted to the 

American people that the United States was fighting a war in the 

shadows in an obscure country that most Americans could not locate 

on a map. That conflict was soon to hit the headlines of every paper 

in the United States because of what appeared to be unprovoked 

attacks by North Vietnamese patrol boats on U.S. naval elements in 

international waters. Those incidents, real and illusory, were to send 

the conflict in Vietnam in an entirely new direction.

The Tonkin Gulf Incident 

In early 1964, President Johnson and Secretary of Defense 

McNamara ordered the U.S. Navy to step up its longstanding 

Desoto Patrol operation. The Desoto Patrol employed destroyers 

in intelligence-gathering missions in international waters along 

the coasts of the Soviet Union, China, North Korea, and North 

Vietnam. In early August 1964, the destroyer USS Maddox, under 

the operational control of Navy Capt. John J. Herrick, steamed 

along the coast of North Vietnam in the Gulf of Tonkin gathering 

various types of intelligence. Unknown to Herrick, shortly beforehand South Vietnamese patrol boats participating in an OPLAN 

34A operation had bombarded shore targets just to the south of 

Maddox’s patrol area (Map 5). 

North Vietnam’s leaders, who knew from their own intelligence sources about the American connection to OPLAN 34A, 

were determined not to bend to U.S. pressure. Hanoi directed its 

navy, which had not been able to catch the fast South Vietnamese 

patrol boats, to attack the slower U.S. destroyer. On the afternoon 

of 2 August, the North Vietnamese dispatched three Soviet-built 

P–4 motor torpedo boats against the Maddox. Torpedoes launched 

from the P–4s missed their mark. Only one round from enemy 

deck guns hit the destroyer, lodging in the ship’s superstructure. The North Vietnamese naval vessels were not so fortunate. 

Shellfire from the Maddox hit the attackers. Then F–8 Crusader 
I CTZ

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Vinh Yen

HANOI

Haiphong

Dien Bien Phu

Luang Prabang

Vinh

Dong Hoi

VIENTIANE

Udon Thani

(Udorn)

Savannakhet Hue

Da Nang

Paksé

Nakhon Ratchasima (Korat)

BANGKOK

Kratie

Pleiku

Qui Nhon

Quang Ngai

Quang Tri

Kontum

Da Lat Loc Ninh

Nha Trang

Tay Ninh

Bien Hoa

PHNOM PENH

Sihanoukville

Can Tho

SAIGON

BURM A

NORTH

VIETNA M

CHINA

CHINA

THAILAND

LAOS

CAMBODIA

SOUTH

VIETNA M

INDOCHINA

1961

0 150

Miles

Corps Tactical Zone

Corps Tactical Zone Boundary

CTZ

 Map 5
59

jets dispatched from the aircraft carrier USS Ticonderoga strafed 

all three P–4s and left one boat dead in the water and on fire. 

With the action over, Maddox steamed toward the mouth of the 

Gulf of Tonkin and supporting naval forces. The president and 

his national security advisers were surprised that Ho Chi Minh 

had not only failed to buckle under U.S. military pressure but 

had reacted to it in such a bold way. President Johnson, Admiral 

Ulysses S. G. Sharp, the commander of American military forces 

in the Pacific, and Admiral Thomas H. Moorer, commander of the 

U.S. Pacific Fleet, decided that the United States could not retreat 

from this clear Communist challenge. They reinforced Maddox

with the destroyer USS Turner Joy and directed Captain Herrick 

to continue his intelligence-gathering mission off North Vietnam. 

On the night of 4 August, the warships reported being 

attacked by several fast craft out at sea. Officers in the naval chain 

of command and U.S. leaders in Washington were persuaded 

by interpretation of special intelligence and reports from the 

ships that North Vietnamese naval forces had attacked the two 

destroyers. Analysis of that data long after the purported attacks, 

and additional information gathered on the 4 August episode, 

throws doubt on these claims. It now seems apparent that North 

Vietnamese naval forces did not attack Maddox and Turner Joy

The Tonkin Gulf Incident by Edmond J. Fitzgerald, January 1965. This painting depicts the 

engagement between USS Maddox and three North Vietnamese motor torpedo boats in 

the Gulf of Tonkin on 2 August 1964.
60 

that night in the summer of 1964 although the attacks on 2 August 

were quite real. However, Washington policymakers believed the 

North Vietnamese had attacked U.S. destroyers again and were 

determined to do something about it. 

In response to the actual attack of 2 August and the suspected 

attack of 4 August, the president ordered Seventh Fleet carrier 

forces to launch retaliatory strikes against North Vietnam. 

On 5 August, aircraft from the carriers Ticonderoga and USS 

Constellation destroyed an oil storage facility at Vinh and damaged 

or sank about thirty enemy naval vessels in port or along the coast. 

Of greater significance, on 7 August the U.S. Congress overwhelmingly passed the so-called Tonkin Gulf Resolution, which enabled 

President Johnson to employ military force as he saw fit against the 

Vietnamese Communists. 

Aftermath of Tonkin Gulf 

Except for the very tangential role in providing support for 

the Studies and Observations Group operations as part of OPLAN 

34A, MACV had little to do with the events of 2–4 August 1964 

in the Gulf of Tonkin. However, those naval engagements had a 

major impact on MACV planning and operations. Almost immediately the command began preparing the ground for the expected 

President Johnson signs the Tonkin Gulf Resolution on 10 August 1964. 
61

air strikes against the North. In addition to helping plan potential 

targets, MACV personnel had to prepare for the possibility that 

the Viet Cong inside South Vietnam would strike back at U.S. and 

South Vietnamese installations in retaliation for attacks on North 

Vietnam. 

American aerial and naval forces immediately began to 

move into Southeast Asia in greater numbers. Two squadrons of 

Air Force B–57 Canberra jet bombers moved to the Bien Hoa air 

base north of Saigon and two additional squadrons of interceptors 

and fighter-bombers deployed to the Tan Son Nhut and Da Nang 

airbases. Other Air Force, Navy, Marine, and Army personnel 

were put on alert for potential deployment to the region. General 

Westmoreland asked for a Marine Expeditionary Brigade and 

either the 173d Airborne Brigade on Okinawa or a brigade of the 

25th Infantry Division in Hawaii to be prepared for immediate 

deployment to Vietnam along with two HAWK (Homing All the 

Way Killer) air defense missile battalions. However, Ambassador 

Taylor withheld his support for the request, and the Joint Chiefs of 

Staff put all such movements on hold while reinforcing emergency 

reaction plans already in place.

The Viet Cong did not take long to react to the escalation of 

tensions in the region. They launched a number of terrorist and 

sabotage attacks against U.S. facilities during the rest of the year. 

Bars, restaurants, stadiums, and other places visited by Americans 

were hit by grenade attacks. On the night of 1 November, Viet 

Cong saboteurs infiltrated the sprawling air base at Bien Hoa 

and launched a series of mortar attacks against the American 

bombers and personnel stationed there. In the course of about 

thirty minutes the Communists killed four Americans, wounded 

seventy-two others, and destroyed most of a squadron of bombers. 

On 7 February 1965, Viet Cong raiders hit the U.S. barracks and 

helicopter base near Pleiku, prompting immediate retaliatory 

airstrikes against the North Vietnamese, code-named Flaming 

Dart. A vicious cycle of attack and counterattack seemed to be 

under way and threatened to spiral out of control.

To ratchet up the pressure even more, U.S. strategists were 

in the final stages of developing a sustained air campaign against 

North Vietnam, code-named Rolling Thunder. Planned for 

early March 1965, the first strikes were canceled because of bad 

weather, but it was apparent to the MACV staff that such escalation 

was imminent. Therefore, MACV moved to bring in additional Air 
U.S. Air Force B–57 destroyed by the Viet Cong mortar attack on Bien Hoa Air Base 

Marines wade ashore at Da Nang on 30 April 1965.
63

Police to help guard U.S. airplanes at Bien Hoa, Tan Son Nhut, and 

Da Nang. Then, to further secure the air bases against the expected 

enemy retaliation, General Westmoreland asked for and received 

permission to land the 9th Marine Expeditionary Brigade (minus) 

at Da Nang to protect the airfield. The brigade landed on the 

beach on 8 March 1965 and took positions on the airfield perimeter and on the hills immediately to the west of the base. They 

began short-range patrols but made no immediate enemy contact. 

Nevertheless, a major watershed had been reached. United States 

ground troops were now in a position where direct engagement 

with the Viet Cong was probable. America was now committed 

in a more decisive way than ever to the survival of South Vietnam 

and the prosecution of the war to protect it and U.S. interests. The 

Rubicon had been crossed and there was no going back.

Analysis

It is impossible to understand the deepening U.S. involvement in Indochina and South Vietnam from 1945 to 1965 without 

recognizing that the region was viewed as another test of American 

resolve in the context of the Cold War against international 

Communism. While one cannot discount the forces of nationalism and anticolonialism as contributing factors in the struggle 

between North Vietnam and South Vietnam, there is nonetheless 

little question that North Vietnam viewed itself as the vanguard 

of the international Communist revolution and the United States 

was initially right to consider them as part of the worldwide 

Communist movement. Because of Soviet expansionism and the 

fall of China to the Communist forces of Mao Zedong, the United 

States viewed the entire world through the lenses of Greece, the 

Philippines, and Korea, where the forces of international communism—directed, as the United States believed, from Moscow—were 

attempting to subvert and overthrow the governments of the free 

world. The United States felt that it could not afford to lose another 

country to communism but at the same time it was reluctant to 

confront Moscow or Beijing directly with all the risks that would 

have entailed. Even though a Sino-Soviet split began to unfold in 

the late 1960s, the rifts in international communism were not yet 

apparent. The context of U.S. involvement in building up South 

Vietnam to withstand Communist subversion and destruction was 

deeply rooted in the belief that the forces of the Communist world, 

of which North Vietnam was only a part, were unified, aggressive, 
64 

expansive, and centrally directed. The U.S. government under President 

Johnson felt that it could not stand idly by in the face of such a threat to 

our national interest.

Within this Cold War context, the United States attempted initially 

to provide only minimal support, first to the French and then to the new 

government of South Vietnam. Unlike in Europe, which was seen as 

the vital theater to contain Soviet power, the Far East and especially the 

handful of new countries on the mainland of Asia that resulted from the 

collapse of European colonial empires, were not viewed as critical to U.S. 

policy. The United States supported France so the French would remain 

strong in Europe against the Soviets and not because it cared about the 

re-establishment of their empire. U.S. leaders resisted deeper commitment for years because the cost of intervention in support of the French, 

or later of Diem, seemed to be greater than any result would have been 

worth. Only when it appeared that Communist infiltrators from the North 

were determined to force the reunification of Vietnam under Communist 

control did America ramp up the flow of aid. Only after the United States 

perceived that its naval forces had been deliberately attacked in international waters did it seek to intervene decisively with air and naval power 

and then just defensively and reactively. Again, this was done less to save 

South Vietnam, either under Diem or the later generals, than it was done 

for the principle of not losing another country to Communist aggression. 

U.S. interests were paramount, and America could only achieve its goals if 

it invested enough time, resources, equipment, and finally ground troops 

to support an admittedly weak South Vietnamese government. 

The United States in the 1950s and early 1960s worked hard to pressure 

Diem to get his house in order, eliminate corruption, and rally his people 

behind his regime. While the results were not all that the United States 

wished, Diem was a tough anti-Communist with a substantial power base 

of support. He was, for all his flaws, the face of South Vietnam for nine 

years and provided a stability that was henceforth to be lacking. When the 

United States tacitly allowed the generals to overthrow Diem, the administration was left with a version of the “Pottery Barn Rules” attributed to 

Secretary of State Colin Powell in 2003 in a later foreign policy initiative: 

“You break it; you bought it.” The United States helped “break” the government of Vietnam and thus “bought” the responsibility for it. For the next 

ten years, the U.S. tried with only some success to fix it. 

The roots of American involvement in an ever-expanding war were 

set deep in the 1950s and 1960s as the United States slowly but inexorably 

provided more aid, more advisers, and more equipment until finally troops 
65

were needed to protect U.S. air and naval bases as air attacks were launched 

against North Vietnam. Once U.S. troops were on the ground and advising 

South Vietnamese units, it was only a short step to participating in combat 

operations, piloting helicopters, gathering intelligence, and conducting 

defensive and offensive patrols. It would be hard to state with any clarity a 

specific moment when it was apparent that the United States had passed the 

point of no return. It could have been when the United States committed to 

the survival of an independent South Vietnam in 1954 and 1955. Perhaps it 

was only when America began to expand the number of U.S. advisers in the 

late 1950s in an attempt to create a professional South Vietnamese Army. 

It could have been when the United States began active operations to ferry 

South Vietnamese troops into battle on American helicopters in 1961. Or 

when the United States sent warplanes onto air bases in that Southeast 

Asian country, which then necessitated providing ever-increasing security 

forces, including marines, to protect those assets. Or it could have been 

when President Johnson began the series of retaliatory air raids into North 

Vietnam. None of these decisions seemed to commit the United States to 

limitless support, yet each one drew the nation deeper and deeper into 

the conflict. By the spring of 1965, the United States found itself deeply 

entrenched in South Vietnam and morally and practically committed to its 

survival as a free nation. The prestige and power of the United States was 

on the line in another battlefield of the Cold War and it appeared almost as 

if neither the Johnson administration nor America was entirely sure about 

how they got there.
66 

The Author

Richard W. Stewart, a retired Army Reserve colonel, is the 

chief historian at the U.S. Army Center of Military History. He 

has authored numerous commemorative pamphlets for the Center 

including The Korean War: The Chinese Intervention, 3 November

1950–24 January 1951; Operation Urgent Fury: The Invasion 

of Grenada, October 1983; The United States Army in Somalia, 

1992–1994; and The United States Army in Afghanistan: Operation 

Enduring Freedom, October 2001–March 2002. He is also the 

general editor of the two-volume revised edition of American 

Military History, 1775–2008.
67

Further Readings

Birtle, Andrew J. Advice and Support: The Middle Years, 

1960–1965. United States Army in Vietnam. Washington, D.C.: 

U.S. Army Center of Military History, forthcoming.

Cosmas, Graham A. MACV: The Joint Command in the 

Years of Escalation, 1962–1967. United States Army in Vietnam. 

Washington, D.C.: U.S. Army Center of Military History, 2006.

Hunt, Richard A. Pacification: The American Struggle for 

Vietnam’s Hearts and Minds. Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1995.

Spector, Ronald H. Advice and Support: The Early Years, 

1941–1960. United States Army in Vietnam. Washington, D.C.: 

U.S. Army Center of Military History, 1983.
nam War

The

Viet

50th Anniversary

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