A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam (112 page)

As a good lawyer is impelled to approach each case as unique, the beginning of the American war in 1965 had inspired Krulak to look at the war in Vietnam anew. The attrition strategy of Westmoreland and DePuy that he had accepted so unquestioningly in Harkins’s time no longer made sense to him, particularly in view of the terrain and population features of the five northernmost provinces on the Central Coast (I Corps) where the Marines were being deployed. Krulak also happened to be in Vietnam on another of his frequent trips there as Commanding General Fleet Marine Force Pacific, when the first hard fight occurred in August 1965. Watching the battle with the 1st Viet Cong Regiment in which fifty-one of his Marines died amid the hedgerows and bamboo thickets near the airfield that bore the Chinese phonetics of his name and then studying the reports of Moore’s fight and the destruction of the other Air Cav battalion in the valley of the Drang in November made him reflect more carefully still. By December 1965 his mind was made up. He had been expounding ideas as they occurred to him since the previous spring in memoranda and letters to McNamara and others
and had not been obtaining the response he wanted. He decided to bring all of his thoughts together into one paper that would arouse the attention he needed. It was plain that Hanoi was not going to buckle under the gradually escalating air raids against the North and that the ground conflict in the South was passing the point of no return. Krulak wanted to get the war under control and on a winning course while there was still time.

He wrote his paper in his office on the mountain overlooking Pearl Harbor where he now held the place of Holland Smith. He took a week to write it, drafting the sentences in pencil on a large pad of lined paper as he did all of his important letters and memoranda. The finished product ran to seventeen typed pages; Krulak went into each of his arguments in detail, even drawing diagrams to illustrate his main points. The paper was full of the standard American misconceptions about the Vietnamese and ignorance of their history. That Krulak could find his way to the dynamics of the war despite this mental bric-a-brac was another demonstration of the originality of his mind.

Attrition would fail, Krulak wrote, because attrition was the enemy’s game. In a reference to the fighting in the valley of the Drang that had taken 233 American lives in four days, he warned that the Vietnamese Communists were “seeking to attrit U.S. forces through the process of violent, close-quarters combat which tends to diminish the effectiveness of our supporting arms,” i.e., artillery and air power. The Hanoi leaders believed that if they killed and wounded enough American soldiers over a period of time they would “erode our national will and cause us to cease our support of the GVN.” Vo Nguyen Giap “was sure that if the cost in casualties and francs was high enough, the French would defeat themselves in Paris. He was right. It is likely that he feels the same about the U.S.A.”

Krulak did the arithmetic of attrition to prove that Hanoi had far more people to spend at this macabre game than the United States did. The Vietnamese Communists had at their disposal in the North and through the Viet Cong in the South a probable military manpower pool of about 2.5 million men. If one accepted the current official “kill ratio” of one American or Saigon soldier for 2.6 Viet Cong or North Vietnamese—an exchange of corpses that Krulak thought might be “optimistic”—and the proportional share of dying in 1965 between the American and the Saigon troops, 10,000 Americans and 165,000 Saigon soldiers would have to die in order “to reduce the enemy [manpower] pool by only a modest 20 percent.”

Brute Krulak laid out his plan to win. In a further irony Vann would
have appreciated, Krulak’s plan was similar to his. Krulak also wanted to adopt a strategy of pacification that would seek the support of the Vietnamese peasantry through a generous program of land reform and other social and economic benefits and change. To accomplish it he too advocated a level of U.S. influence that would amount to a takeover of the Saigon regime. He explained that a strategy of pacification and social and economic reform was the only way to succeed. Attrition was “peripheral” to the real struggle. The big-unit fighting with the Main Force Viet Cong and the NVA “could move to another planet today, and we would still not have won the war” because “the Vietnamese people are the prize.” Without the sustenance they provided through the local guerrillas and the clandestine Viet Cong government, the Communist regulars could not exist. The United States therefore had to employ its troops to shield the populated areas while it pacified by earning “the trust and loyalty of the people.”

The Main Force Viet Cong and the NVA were not to be left entirely at peace in their rain-forest and mountain fastnesses. Krulak wanted to track them by every possible means of intelligence and to “attack them continuously by air.” He was willing to join battle in these sparsely inhabited regions when the intelligence promised “benefits … overwhelmingly in our favor, and when to do so will not consume forces needed for protection of cleared areas.” But the United States must not march to the enemy’s plan by reacting to Communist “initiatives or seek them out just to do battle.” The choice of strategies was a choice of outcomes. Pacification and social and economic reform were “a design for victory.” Attrition was “the route to defeat.”

This was no renegade lieutenant colonel buttonholing generals in the Pentagon, no USOM province representative peddling a brainstorm. This was the third-ranking general in the Marine Corps and a man whose influence had, in any case, always outreached his rank. Furthermore, Krulak had two senior allies in the military hierarchy. The first was his superior in Hawaii, Adm. Ulysses S. Grant Sharp, who had been a destroyer commander during World War II and had replaced Harry Felt as Commander-in-Chief Pacific in 1964. “Oley” Sharp had decided many months before, when Krulak had begun developing his ideas, that his was the logical way to proceed in Vietnam. Krulak’s second ally was his like-preaching bishop, the commandant of the Marine Corps, Gen. Wallace Greene, Jr., another slightly built man, with a gravelly voice and a deliberate way of speaking. Krulak sent Greene a copy of his memorandum as soon as he passed one to Sharp. “Wally” Greene and Brute Krulak had been professional acquaintances since Krulak’s days
as a lieutenant with the 4th Marine Regiment in Shanghai, where Greene had been a captain and company commander. Greene was no more hesitant than any other American military leader of the 1960s to go to war in Vietnam. He wanted to mobilize the reserves and put 500,000 men in South Vietnam as fast as possible, but he did not want to see American soldiers and Marines used as Westmoreland intended. There was a school of pacification strategists within the upper ranks of the Marine Corps because of its institutional history. The decades of pre-World War II pacifying in Central America and the Caribbean, codified in the Corps’
Small Wars Manual
, were a strategic precedent which ruled that wars like Vietnam were wars of pacification. The Marines had adopted an approach that emphasized pacification over big-unit battles almost from the outset of their buildup in I Corps. While Krulak had been the guiding intellect, taking account of the special conditions of the Vietnamese war and grafting social and economic reform onto the strategy the Marines had followed in those earlier decades of pacifying, Greene and other senior Marine officers believed just as firmly in the concept.

Westmoreland was the obstacle. Greene had vainly attempted to talk him into a simpler version of the pacification approach during a visit to South Vietnam on the eve of the buildup in April 1965. Sharp had sought to persuade him, and Krulak had argued with him repeatedly. Krulak’s scheme was to go over Westmoreland’s head, exploit the relationship he had formed with McNamara during the Kennedy years, and use his paper to convert the secretary to the strategy. Sharp and Greene approved. Krulak flew to Washington and saw McNamara in mid-January 1966. The secretary was struck by Krulak’s mathematics of futility—175,000 lives for 20 percent of Hanoi’s manpower reserves. “I think you ought to talk to the president about this,” he said. In the meantime he suggested that Krulak see Averell Harriman to discuss thoughts Krulak had also expressed in his memorandum about the air war against the North, thoughts McNamara did not like. Krulak warned that it was foolish to try to interdict Soviet and Chinese war matériel once the weapons and supplies were flowing to the South down the roads and rail lines of the North. To be effective, he said, the air campaign had to stop the matériel from entering the North by bombing and mining Haiphong and the other ports and attacking the North Vietnamese railroads from China.

“Do you want war with the Soviet Union or the Chinese?” Harriman lectured during the soup course at lunch at his Georgetown home. He waved a heavy sterling-silver spoon in Krulak’s face as he spoke. Krulak
has a prominent nose and felt uncomfortable having a big spoon waved at it. McNamara did not follow up his implied promise to arrange a meeting with the president. Krulak did not realize at the time that although he could catch McNamara’s attention momentarily, he could not hold it. Despite the fright McNamara had received from the fighting in the valley of the Drang, he was still too captivated by Westmoreland and the other Army generals to heed logic and simple arithmetic.

Wally Greene tried to bring his fellow members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff around to the Marine point of view in hope of persuading them to order Westmoreland to adopt the strategy. He had a separate study done by his staff at Marine Corps headquarters. It confirmed Krulak’s estimate of the manpower available to the Vietnamese Communists. Greene briefed his colleagues on its findings and argued for the Marine approach to the war. None of his peers were won over. No one disputed the manpower estimate and the calculations that followed. “You couldn’t challenge the figures,” Greene was to recall from retirement. Greene’s peers reacted as Westmoreland did. They avoided coming to grips with the numbers and the logical implication the numbers had for strategy. The Army generals, Earle Wheeler, now chairman of the Joint Chiefs, and Harold Johnson, the chief of staff, rallied to their Army commander in the field. Gen. John McConnell, who had taken Curtis LeMay’s place as chief of staff of the Air Force, and Adm. David McDonald, the current chief of naval operations, saw no reason to side with Greene against their Army colleagues. The Air Force and the Navy were obtaining their share of the action in Indochina through the air war.

Unlike Vann, Krulak was prominent enough in the system to appeal to the highest tribunal. He did have to wait months for his audience with the president, until Greene could arrange it in the summer of 1966. Krulak sent a copy of his paper over to the White House ahead of time for Johnson to read and carried another in his hand into the Oval Office to refer to while he briefed. Johnson’s opening question indicated that he had not read the paper. “What is it going to take to win?” he asked. Krulak proceeded to tell him. Johnson did not rush Krulak. He gave him forty minutes. He asked few additional questions, and Krulak had the impression that everything he was saying was going “seven leagues” over the president’s head. When Krulak finally switched from pacification to mining Haiphong, Johnson suddenly “looked like he’d sat on a tack.” He stood up, put his arm around Krulak’s shoulder, and told him he was a great general as he escorted him to the door.

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Brute Krulak was not accustomed to being stymied. He was determined to have the Marines demonstrate the merits of the strategy. Westmoreland might then have no choice but to accept it for the whole of South Vietnam. The I Corps region assigned to the Marines was also a geographical model for Krulak’s plan. There were about 2.6 million people in the five northernmost provinces of the Central Coast from Quang Ngai up to Quang Tri at the Demilitarized Zone. More than 98 percent of them lived within twenty-five miles of the sea (most considerably closer) and on less than a quarter of the land, on the coastal littoral of small rice deltas pressed between the Annamites and the South China Sea. The remaining three-quarters of the territory provided formidable rain-forest and mountain redoubts for the Main Force Viet Cong and the NVA troops who had infiltrated into the South, but barely enough rice to feed the sparse numbers of tribal people who normally inhabited it. The Marines had established three base zones: around Chu Lai on the border of Quang Ngai and Quang Tin provinces, in and around the port and air base at Da Nang, and north across the Hai Van Pass around the airfield at Phu Bai just below Hue. The idea was to reach out in both directions from the three base zones, slowly bringing more and more of the population under control until the whole of the littoral was joined into one pacified zone. It would not matter then how many thousands of Viet Cong regulars were out in the mountains. Their battalions would wither without the sustaining flow of food, recruits, and intelligence from the peasantry, and Hanoi would have to truck down food for every NVA soldier who marched into I Corps.

Krulak had no operational authority over the Marines in Vietnam. As chief for the theater, he controlled directly only the Marine reserve troops and support units in the Pacific. His formal responsibility toward Vietnam was to see that the Marines there in the III Marine Amphibious Force (III MAF) were adequately supplied, equipped, and trained. He nevertheless had an enthusiastic collaborator for a while in the man Greene had selected to lead the Marines in Vietnam, Lewis Walt, the most junior major general in the Corps at the time of his appointment in mid-1965.

Walt did not collaborate out of diffidence to Krulak. He was every bit his own man. Greene had chosen him over half a dozen more senior candidates because he considered Walt the premier fighter and finest troop leader in the Marines. Lew Walt had won the Navy Cross twice. He had started in the first Marine counteroffensive of World War II at Guadalcanal, gone to Cape Gloucester on New Britain Island, where a ridge he had wrested from the Japanese had been named after him,
then to Peleliu to help clear the route for MacArthur’s reconquest of the Philippines. The son of a Kansas rancher, he had played football and worked his way through Colorado State University before joining the Marines. At fifty-two years of age in 1965 he still looked the lineman, tall, with brawler hands and arms, sturdy shoulders, and a big head. In the formal chain of command, Walt and the Marines of III MAF were under the operational control or “opcon” of Westmoreland; Walt was theoretically one of Westmoreland’s corps commanders. In practice, no Marine is beyond the Corps, and Walt shared the belief in pacification of Krulak and Greene. Krulak was in Vietnam constantly to observe and pass along ideas. He was to make forty-five trips there during his four years as Commanding General Fleet Marine Force Pacific. He and Walt also talked frequently over the secure telephone connection between Da Nang and Pearl Harbor. Both kept Greene informed, and he gave them moral encouragement.