“Show me pictures of your family and of your house in the USA,” the chief’s wife, an elderly lady, asked. “Do you have any?”
All I had was a picture of my wife and me taken in front of her parents’ home. I pulled it out, the old lady stared at it for a while, and then she looked up at me with a deeply penetrating expression.
“Why are you here in Vietnam?” she asked me.
I gave her the standard answer about stopping communism and protecting democracy and our Vietnamese allies.
She shook her head. “It’s sad that you have to leave your family and get involved in this tragic mess,” she said.
I continued to offer the party line.
“But what are you going to do to protect us from ‘them’?” she asked, her hand pointing toward the south.
At first I thought she had made a mistake — the enemy was to the north, after all. But then I realized she was saying exactly what she meant to say. She was talking about the corrupt South Vietnamese government. As far as she was concerned, the enemy was both to the north and to the south.
These people, I was just coming to understand, were trapped between two options, both bad. And that was when I began to realize that the “center of gravity” [15] was the people… and that winning hearts and minds was not just a slogan; it was the only route to winning the war.
Meanwhile, they had to do whatever they could to survive.
Eventually, the winning of hearts and minds was thought to be important enough to engage the Vietnamese Marines in it — engaged specifically in running pacification programs in the II CTZ. The mission involved going into villages to ID, interrogate, and win over the population with civic action projects; and the Marines did not initially warm to it. They thought of themselves as fighters and not civic action wimps.
Usually the operation entailed setting up a “county fair.” They’d put up a series of tents, booths, and stations where the questioning and identification processes were mixed in with medical treatment, food distribution, and entertainment. Some political propaganda was also added in order to win “hearts and minds.”
It turned out that the people actually enjoyed these events, and the Marines soon learned the benefits of these efforts, became more receptive to them, and actually enjoyed running the fairs. Most of the Marines were kids from the country and villages. They liked connecting with folks who were very like themselves. And as time went on, the Marines developed a positive relationship with most of the population in II CTZ.
This did not please the VC, who began to threaten villagers who participated in the fairs.
But despite the intimidation, more and more villagers began to come forward and provide intelligence on enemy activity.
In one incident, a mother in a remote village brought her baby — its face hugely swollen — to a medical station we’d set up. When it turned out that the Marines’ medical personnel weren’t equipped to handle the baby’s infected abscess, she was brought to me.
I called the U.S. Army unit nearby, and they agreed to arrange a medevac and treatment at a hospital in the city of Qui Nhon. The anxious and frightened mother and baby, together with an aunt, were then assembled in the landing zone to wait for the chopper. By the time the helo was actually touching down, they were on the edge of panic. The mother immediately squatted down and peed right there, with the shocked helo crew looking on. But then she somehow mustered up the courage to scramble onto the helicopter. And off they went. Though I wished them well, they quickly slipped out of my mind.
Several months later, I was again in this village, but now with a company from another battalion.
The company commander told me a lady from the village wanted to see me. And I said, “Sure,” though I had forgotten all about the incident.
But when the lady approached us, proudly showing off her now chubby, healthy baby, I immediately recognized her, and I was of course pleased and happy for her as she thanked us for saving her baby. She then chatted with me about the care she’d received and her trip back to this remote village. Later, as she got ready to leave and was about to say good-bye, she turned to me: “There are VC hiding in tunnels nearby,” she whispered, “and I’ll show you where.”
We immediately mustered the troops and went to the location she pointed out to us, just outside the village. There we found the camouflaged entrance to a large underground complex.
As we began to clear the complex, we realized there were people inside. Our troops talked them out by threatening to blow up the holes.
Soon — to my amazement — a group of VC emerged, clad in pinkish uniforms. They turned out to be a regimental medical unit whose aid station was located in the tunnel complex. And then by some kind of wild coincidence that was not really surprising, once you thought about it, our battalion doctor recognized the VC doctor. They’d both attended medical school in France together and had once been friends. A friendly lunch and chat followed (strange but interesting to me), with the old friends bringing each other up to date about their lives and careers since they’d last seen each other. At the end of the meal, friendly good-byes and handshakes were exchanged; and the VC were handcuffed and moved out as POWs.
As they moved off, I recalled that similar events had occurred in our own Civil War.
The VC and NVA were masters at constructing well-hidden underground tunnel systems. We discovered elaborate networks connecting large, furnished subterranean rooms, fully equipped with handmade cloth gas masks with charcoal filters, and carefully booby-trapped dead-end wings.
When the deep rice paddies dried up in summer, the entrances to some of these complexes, submerged during the rainy season, would often be exposed.
We once stopped for a noon break and meal by one of the deep paddies where a tunnel entrance was visible near one of its corners, big enough to walk into standing up. Since it was the dry season and the entrance was exposed, we assumed the tunnel was empty. But while we rested, some of the Marines began poking around the entrance, and then suddenly became alerted when they detected noises from inside. We quickly surrounded the opening and ordered whoever was inside to come out. After some coaxing and threatening, we got an agreement to surrender; and out of the entrance came two young men dressed in sharply pressed khaki uniforms, with close-cropped haircuts. One was a NVA lieutenant and the other an NCO [noncommissioned officer]. When the lieutenant spotted me, he called the NCO to attention and snapped me a very sharp salute. And to the delight of the Marines, I returned it. The two were then taken off as POWs.
Other captures were much tougher. In the following, the VC tried to hide among fishermen on a lake, using them as human shields:
The area along the coast of Binh Dinh Province was filled with lakes, tidal inlets, and swamps, with fishing villages all around them. (Many of the villages in the area had been abandoned because of the resettlement program.) Since the availability of food and the population concentration made the area a favored objective of the VC, we never had any problems making contact with the enemy. We ran any number of sweeps in the region and never failed to end up in a firefight.
One day we had a big one on the Dam Tra O, the region’s major lake.
During a major sweep two of our battalions were conducting with the 1st Cav, we got into a running gun battle as we pushed eastward toward the lake with the lead element of our battalion. The other battalion was moving toward the lake from the south.
As we closed on the lake, rapidly forcing the VC toward the water, we could clearly see that
