Vietnam War History

MSG Jeremy C. Sims analyzes Operation Junction City through the lens of joint planning and the elements of operational art and design. One of the largest operations of the Vietnam War, it was conducted by U.S. and South Vietnamese forces from February 22 to May 14, 1967, in Tay Ninh Province near the Cambodian border. More than 20,000 troops took part, including four U.S. infantry divisions and two airborne brigades, and the operation opened with the Army’s largest airborne assault since the Korean War. Its aim was to dismantle Viet Cong and North Vietnamese Army forces and disrupt the supply lines and communications that fed them through Cambodia and Laos. Sims examines how planners defined the operation’s ends, ways, and means, identified friendly and enemy centers of gravity, and organized lines of operation and lines of effort, including the logistical bases that sustained the force. He concludes that sound joint planning synchronized U.S. and host-nation capabilities and proved invaluable to the operation’s success.

Sergeants Major Clayton Dos Santos and Dale J. Dukes, with James Perdue, examine the Battle of Ia Drang in November 1965, considered by many the first major battle between the U.S. Army and the North Vietnamese Army. In October 1965, Major General Harry W. O. Kinnard of the 1st Cavalry Division saw North Vietnamese forces moving west toward the Cambodian border and identified the rugged Chu Pong Massif as likely enemy territory. The authors follow the airmobile assault ordered by Colonel Tim Brown, in which Lieutenant Colonel Harold G. Moore Jr.’s 1st Battalion, 7th Cavalry, landed by helicopter at Landing Zone X-Ray in the face of a large, well-trained enemy who knew the terrain. They trace the key decisions and actions of the fighting, the American reliance on fire support and close air support, and the battle’s cost: 79 Americans killed and 121 wounded in less than 72 hours, against far heavier North Vietnamese losses. The battle’s lesson, they conclude, is that technology and training must be matched by a refusal to underestimate the enemy.

Bob Seals introduces the “Green Beret Affair” of 1969, one of the most controversial and least understood episodes of the Vietnam War. Seals explains how U.S. Army Special Forces working with the Central Intelligence Agency came to suspect that Thai Khac Chuyen, a Vietnamese agent in the intelligence effort known as Project GAMMA, was a Communist double agent, and how Chuyen was executed in the summer of 1969. He profiles Colonel Robert B. Rheault, the respected commander of the 5th Special Forces Group, who was arrested with other officers on charges of premeditated murder. Seals follows the investigation and legal proceedings until Secretary of the Army Stanley Resor dropped all charges after the CIA, citing national security, refused to make its personnel available. Whether Chuyen was truly a traitor may never be known, Seals concludes, but the affair illustrates the moral ambiguity of unconventional warfare and the principle that even elite forces remain subject to military justice.

Terry McIntosh offers a firsthand perspective on the Green Beret Affair from his service with Special Forces Detachment A-414 at Thanh Tri in the Mekong Delta in 1968–1969. His camp, a stone’s throw from the Cambodian border, also hosted a secret intelligence network operating “over the fence” into Cambodia as part of Project Gamma, run by three men from the B-57 intelligence office under cover names. One of them, “Captain Martin,” was Robert Marasco, who later became the central figure in the affair. McIntosh describes the camp, the men who ran the network, and how the Vietnamese agent Thai Khac Chuyen, suspected of being a double agent, came to work there after the team’s translators had been killed or wounded. He follows the events that led to Chuyen’s execution and the murder charges brought against Marasco, Colonel Robert Rheault, and six other officers. Reflecting on the affair, McIntosh argues that soldiers must make real-time decisions in war and that the American presence in Vietnam accomplished more good than it is often given credit for.

Walter S. Zapotoczny uses Carl von Clausewitz’s “paradoxical trinity” to compare American experience in the Second World War and the Vietnam War. Clausewitz described war as driven by three tendencies: primordial violence, hatred, and hostility, associated mainly with the people; the subordination of war to policy, associated with the government; and the play of chance and probability, associated with the commander and the army. Drawing on Michael Handel’s idea that the nature of war is the “vector” produced by these shifting forces, Zapotoczny shows how they shaped each conflict. After Pearl Harbor, the people, government, and military were closely united, creating a national spirit of confidence. In Vietnam, rising troop levels, conscription, and television images that brought the war into American homes pulled the vector toward the passions of the people and away from the government and military. The result, he argues, was a national spirit that questioned government and retreated from engagement in foreign affairs.

Major Jeremiah S. Boenisch argues that the 1970 Cambodian Incursion, often portrayed as a strategic failure, was in fact a success. On 1 May 1970, U.S. and South Vietnamese forces launched a ground and air offensive into neutral Cambodia to destroy North Vietnamese sanctuaries used for raids into South Vietnam. The American ground operation lasted sixty days, overlapped by Allied air strikes and a longer South Vietnamese incursion. Boenisch sets the scene: stalled peace talks, Henry Kissinger’s deadlocked secret negotiations, and the ouster of Prince Norodom Sihanouk by Lon Nol. He follows President Richard Nixon’s decision to authorize General Creighton Abrams to strike the sanctuaries, operations into the Parrot’s Beak, and the political restrictions imposed after the Kent State shootings. The incursion killed thousands of enemy soldiers and captured unprecedented quantities of materiel. Boenisch concludes that it severed enemy supply lines, supported the withdrawal of American troops, restored U.S. credibility, and demonstrated the progress of Vietnamization.

David Pennington assesses the Battle of Dien Bien Phu, fought from November 1953 to May 1954, which the writer Jules Roy called one of the greatest disasters in Western history. Pennington argues that the French had no clear objective, ignored conventional theories of warfare, relied too heavily on air power, and underestimated their adversary. He traces the Navarre Plan, in which General Henri Navarre chose the remote valley as a “mooring point” for offensive operations that would engage Vietminh units, cut General Vo Nguyen Giap’s supply routes, and bar the road to Laos. Pennington shows how the Vietminh placed artillery in concealed, fortified positions on the surrounding heights, shattered the strongpoint at Beatrice in the first moments of their attack, and soon made the airstrip unusable. He also questions Navarre’s choice of Colonel de Castries as commander. Although the Vietminh suffered far heavier casualties, the French lost the battle and the war; as Ho Chi Minh had predicted, the conflict was decided politically.

Mike Nastasi tells the story of the Wild Weasels, the American aircrews whose job was to find and destroy North Vietnamese surface-to-air missile sites. Early in the war the U.S. Air Force enjoyed almost complete freedom in the skies over Vietnam, until Soviet-supplied SA-2 Guideline missiles abruptly challenged that dominance. The Air Force responded by dedicating aircraft and men to the SAM threat. Often the only way to locate a missile site was to draw its fire, so Weasel missions were among the most dangerous of the war. Nastasi traces the evolution from F-100F Super Sabres fitted with radar warning equipment to the F-105 Thunderchief, armed with AGM-45 Shrike anti-radiation missiles and eventually developed into the dedicated F-105G. He profiles aviators such as Colonel George Acree, who flew more than 200 missions over North Vietnam, and Major Leo Thorsness, who received the Medal of Honor. The Weasels’ tactics and equipment, he concludes, paved the way for the modern suppression of enemy air defenses.

John M. Rincon analyzes the effects of Vietnamization, the program begun in 1969 to withdraw American combat troops and transfer the war to the armed forces of South Vietnam. He argues that the plan was disjointed and ill-conceived, and tests its results through three pivotal operations: the combined U.S.-ARVN incursion into Cambodia in 1970, the South Vietnamese invasion of Laos in February 1971, and the Communist Easter Offensive of 1972. Each, he shows, exposed weaknesses the program never repaired: inadequate training, the lack of basic military criteria for promoting officers and noncommissioned officers, and morale that never matched the enemy’s. By 1972 congressional limits allowed U.S. forces only to help the South Vietnamese react. Vietnamization achieved its single goal of removing American combat troops, Rincon concludes, but failed the South Vietnamese army where it most needed leadership, training, and morale.

Mike Nastasi examines the role of air power in the Vietnam War, a conflict that served as a testing ground for new technology, weapons, and tactics. American involvement in the air war lasted more than fifteen years, from training and advising the South Vietnamese Air Force to the Christmas bombing of 1972, and drew on the air components of all four services. Nastasi follows the Rolling Thunder campaign against North Vietnam and the effort to interdict the Ho Chi Minh Trail, the use of aircraft such as the F-4 Phantom, A-6 Intruder, F-105 Thunderchief, and B-52 Stratofortress, and the arrival of the attack helicopter as a vital new weapon. He then turns to the Linebacker campaigns under President Richard Nixon and their role in bringing North Vietnam to negotiate. Nastasi weighs the arguments over the air war’s effectiveness against its cost: more than 8,500 aircraft lost and hundreds of pilots and aircrews killed. Ironically, the last American aircraft over Vietnam was a Marine helicopter evacuating the embassy guards from Saigon in 1975.