The U.S. Marines in Vietnam were different. They came with naval and seafaring traditions that belied their deep roots in the Southern soil of Virginia and South Carolina. They took high casualties from attrition-style warfare tactics, while advocating a U.S. pacification strategy born of counterinsurgency fights in Nicaragua and Haiti.
The Marines in Vietnam were idiosyncratic. The combat correspondents remarked upon it, and so did both their North Vietnamese Army (NVA) opponents and U.S. Army colleagues. The Marine Corps operated in their own tactical zone (I Corps), humped different terrain, and battled conventionally-trained soldiers, who in terms of small unit tactics and fighting cohesion, were a peer adversary of the Marine infantrymen.
Celebrated combat journalist Michael Herr in his essential Vietnam book Dispatches (1977), captured the U.S. Army’s view of the Marines:
“If you spent some weeks up (in I Corps),” Herr wrote. “And afterward joined an Army outfit, of say, the 4th or 25th Division, you’d get this:
‘Where you been?’
‘Up in I Corps.’
‘With the Marines?’
‘That’s what’s up there.’
‘Well, all I got to say is Good Luck. Marines. Fuck that.’”
Every Marine a M-14 Rifleman.
The Marines also looked different. They wore a different flak jacket, the M1955, which had no collar and heavier armor plating than the Army version, and Marines were almost never pictured without them, because wearing flak jackets was a standing order in the Corps.
If you see images of American infantry on a combat patrol in Vietnam wearing only a jungle fatigue blouse (shirt), you can be assured they are soldiers; the U.S. Army left decisions about wearing flak jackets to the individual soldier or unit commander.
The Marines also carried a different rifle than soldiers. They stuck with the trusty M-14 with its wooden stock until 1967, while the U.S. Army had switched to the new M-16 in 1965. The delay was not the result of Pentagon bureaucrats stiffing the Corps, but of Marine doubts about the plastic rifle.
As an infantry-first organization, the Marines were reluctant to trade in the M-14’s proven durability in bad field conditions, its long-range capabilities, and the stopping power of its caliber.
Marine Corps concerns were validated—in the worst possible way—during the famed “Hill Fights” outside of Khe Sanh in 1967 when newly-issued M-16s jammed, resulting in the deaths of Marines in close quarters combat [Edward F. Murphy documents the failures in The Hill Fights (2007)].
13 Months in I Corps.
Military Assistance Command Vietnam (MACV) was the organizational umbrella that officially “assisted” the South Vietnamese government in conducting the war. For operational convenience, they divided the country into four tactical zones, IV Corps covered the southern most tip of South Vietnam, while I Corps was the northernmost region.
The U.S. Army, with its greater numbers managed Corps II-IV, while the Marine Corps was given the sole responsibility of the most dangerous sector, I Corps.
I Corps bordered North Vietnam, making it easy for the NVA to infiltrate into the country, engage U.S. forces, and then retreat across the DMZ (Demilitarized Zone) to rest, re-equip, and replenish its forces (U.S. policy prevented U.S. ground forces from entering North Vietnam).
Because of their tough assignment, Marine casualties were disproportionately high relative to their numbers. Of the 58,220 total U.S. deaths in Vietnam, The Marine Corps accounted for approximately 13,000 deaths (about 22.5% of all U.S. combat deaths), despite being less than 15% of U.S. forces in the country.
The Marines also served 13-month tours, in contrast with the 12-month tours of the U.S. Army. This extended tour helped make up for persistent Marine Corps personnel shortages, but added an additional combat and psychological burden to individual Marines.
Tasting of Bad Fate.
The morale of soldiers in a war is a difficult thing to measure. Leaders can certainly “take the temperature” of their men, but they may also have political or professional reasons for exaggerating unit morale.
One helpful bit of data for thinking about unit morale in Vietnam was that only 10% of U.S. Marines were draftees, as opposed to 30-35% of U.S. Army. The Marines had a clear advantage when it came to unit cohesion and esprit de corps, because they weren’t handling the large conscription rates the Army faced.
The combat correspondents who covered the U.S. Marine Corps in Vietnam remarked again and again on how different the Marines were from the other service branches; how they seemed more doomed, more astonishingly courageous, and stubbornly dogged in their determination to assault even when logic and good military sense argued against it.
Two of the best correspondents of that era, men like John Laurence and Herr, spent time with Marines in very bad places like Khe Sanh, Hue, and Con Thien, and made memorable observations.
“If the war in I Corps was a matter for specialization, among correspondents, it was not because it was inherently different as war,” Herr wrote. “But because it was fought almost exclusively by the Marines, whose idiosyncrasies, most reporters found intolerable and even criminal.”
Herr admitted he knew dozens of fine Marine officers, but he also felt there was a sense of disaster surrounding Marine outfits.
“Something always went wrong somewhere, somehow. It was always something vague, unexplainable, tasting of bad fate, and the results were always brought back to their most basic element—the dead Marine.”
Herr believed the Marines overestimated their abilities vis-à-vis the NVA, which “saw Marine squads fed in against known NVA platoons, platoons against companies, and on and on, until whole battalions found themselves pinned down and cut off.”
Serene Field Marines.
John Laurence, the author of The Cat from Hue (2002) who reported for CBS during the war, was with the Marines during the 1968 Battle of Hue and during the worst days of shelling on Con Thien in 1967. Like Herr, he repeatedly singles out remarkable Marine behavior. He wrote:
“Most of the Marine officers in Hue were confident, self-assured, determined. They all seemed so calm, almost serene, not at all nervous. I couldn’t figure it out. Calling it good public relations with the press was too simple, though it may be a factor. No one else could act so self-composed in these circumstances. It wasn’t tranquilizers either; their minds were too quick . . . among themselves, they called it command presence.”
During the street fighting in Hue, Laurence interviewed legendary Marine Ernest C. Cheatham, Jr., who personified command presence. In a documentary about Hue, there are remembrances by both Laurence and Cheatham, plus a clip of the interview Laurence conducted with him in the middle of the battle:
▶ Click the image to watch on YouTube.
It wasn’t just Marine officers. Laurence noted the same qualities among enlisted men at Con Thien. “The Marines at (Con Thien) were so casual about the shelling, so resigned to it, so outwardly loose and easy about the danger. They made it hard to take our own fears seriously.”
During the Battle of Hue, Laurence watched Marines fighting in the street below him: “Their behavior (under fire) was so straightforward, so calm in the face of such visible danger. Who would run through a stream of machine gun bullets? And go back into it to rescue someone? That the Marines were trained to do so made it no less dangerous.”
None of which is to suggest bravery and courage (or dereliction, for that matter) were exclusive to the Marines. U.S. Army fights in Dak To, the A Shau Valley or the Ia Drang Valley, among others, were noted for outstanding bravery by U.S. Army soldiers.
Yet what’s significant, is that the collective, and consistent actions of this U.S. Marine culture, were so persistent, so predictable (in the best sense of the word), as to invite study and investigation.
A Difference in Strategy.
The Marines were the first major U.S. combat forces to enter Vietnam when they came ashore in 1965 (Marine and Army advisors had been in the country for several years). As their role evolved beyond static defense of airbases, they began to operate combat patrols in and around the populated coastal areas of Da Nang.
The Marines began to appreciate the complexities of fighting a popular insurgency made up of civilian militias, the Viet Cong, who were integrated into the complex fabric of local villages and hamlets. The civilians they encountered represented a spectrum of opinions about the Viet Cong, including active support, passive support, opposition, indifference, etc.
Peter Brush and others have remarked that Marine leaders began to draw upon the lessons learned during the 1920s and ‘30s, during the so-called Banana Wars, when Marines were sent to Latin America to put down insurgencies. Brush wrote in Vietnam Magazine:
“Retired Marine general Edward H. Forney, then Public Safety Advisor with the U.S. Operations Mission in Saigon, felt the historical experiences of the Marine Corps in Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and Nicaragua had particular relevance to the insurgency in Vietnam.
Forney said the Marines should link their pacification efforts with Vietnamese militia at the local village and hamlet level in order to provide the sort of operation around which the people of Vietnam would rally.”
They used the term “Pacification,” by which they meant a focus that wasn’t primarily on killing Viet Cong soldiers, but on creating circumstances where the civilian population feels secure and confident the South Vietnamese government cared for their safety.
Marine Lt. Gen. Lewis Walt in his book Strange War, Strange Strategy (1970) put it in simple terms: “The struggle was in the rice paddies—in and among the people, not passing through, but living among them night and day—a journey with them toward a better life long overdue.”
The Westmoreland Strategy.
In short order, the Marine Pacification strategy came into direct conflict with MACV and General Westmoreland, whose references were more World War II (Westmoreland was an artillery officer in Europe), than the small, scrappy Marine units of the Banana Wars.
Westmoreland believed the key to victory was establishing big bases in the remote interior regions of South Vietnam, where they’d seduce the enemy into committing large units, which could then be fixed and destroyed by overwhelming U.S. firepower.
There is an interesting 1966 State Department memorandum that makes it clear that future Secretary of State Henry Kissinger (he was then a Harvard professor and government advisor) saw both the flaws in Westmoreland’s plan and the strengths of the Marine approach.
The memo notes, “Kissinger praised the morale and dedication of our military forces but asserted that our strategy was wrong. ‘The best way to exhaust ourselves’, he said, ‘is to spend our time chasing main force units near the Cambodian border.’ Only the Marines had learned that the war had to be won against the guerrillas and not against the main force units . . . (Kissinger) thought that General Westmoreland still conceived of his job as the location and destruction of main force units.”
The apotheosis of the Marine pacification efforts was the Combined Action Platoons (CAP), where a “Marine rifle squad would join forces with a South Vietnamese militia platoon to provide security for local villages. CAP’s modus operandi made it unique. While assigned to combined units, Marines would actually live in a militia unit’s village,” according to Captain Keith F. Kopets.
The CAP program had mixed results, but one can argue it was never given full operational expression. In modern business terms, it remained a Beta program, forever an innovative idea that provides an enticing “what if” when we consider the overall tragedy of the Vietnam War.
Adult Leadership.
In the end, we now know that Westmoreland’s strategy was a fateful one. The North Vietnamese wanted the U.S. to weaken its forces in the populated, coastal cities and commit them to the interior. Drawing U.S. forces away from these cities helped pave the way for the 1968 Tet Offensive, when NVA and Viet Cong forces simultaneously attacked coastal, urban centers up-and-down South Vietnam.
Westmoreland’s policy resulted in a curious historical irony for the Marines. Their name and reputation will always be positively associated with the siege of Khe Sanh; the battle is listed among the Corps’ other great fights, along with places like Belleau Woods and Iwo Jima, but it was a fight the Marine leadership did not want and furiously resisted.
Before the base was anything but a minor special forces outpost, General Walt wrote Westmoreland, “We think (Khe Sanh) is too isolated. We think it would be too hard to support.” Murphy adds, “To the Marines, Route 9, offered at best, a dubious link to Khe Sanh, while frequent bad weather made aerial resupply of any forces holding Khe Sanh a hit-or-miss venture.”
The Marine leadership was right, of course. They were right about many things, the possibilities of CAP and the dangers of the M-16, but they must also answer for high casualty rates that can’t be pinned solely on the dangers of operating in I Corps.
The enlisted men, more than anyone, knew their officers were human, fallible, and like any distinct culture, the Marines reserved the best jabs for their own.
Michael Herr writes, “There was a joke going around that went like this: ‘What’s the difference between the Marine Corps and the Boy Scouts?’ ‘The Boy Scouts have adult leadership.’ Dig it! The grunts would say, digging it just as long as they didn’t have to hear from outsiders, “non-essential personnel,” like the Army or the Air Force.”
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Robert Fay is an Oregon-based writer who has written for The Atlantic, The Los Angeles Review of Books, First Things, The Chicago Quarterly Review, and other publications.
Partial Bibliography
Caputo, Philip. A Rumor of War. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1977.
Herr, Michael. Dispatches. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1977.
Laurence, John. The Cat from Hue: A Vietnam War Story. New York: PublicAffairs, 2002.
Marines in Vietnam, 1965: The Landing and the Buildup. Washington, D.C.: History and Museums Division, Headquarters, U.S. Marine Corps, 1985.
Murphy, Edward F. The Hill Fights: The First Battle of Khe Sanh. Novato, CA: Presidio Press, 2003.
They pointed a corporate mid manager at the head of military; then this person polluted the whole leadership with corporatism.
I have been reading James Hawes's Cold War Navy Seal, and counter insurgency pieces from John Nagl.
Your article resonates with what I have learnt perfectly. Still lessons are there, just seems no one would like to learn them, they want to boots on the ground learning, then when they are learning, they are very likely catching bullets and shells at same time, and die in the process.
Why not just start learning before entering the battlefield
Great essay and I enjoyed reading it, but you may have waxed a little too poetic in the intro: “… that belied their deep roots in the Southern soil of Virginia and South Carolina.”
Publicly available records indicate that over 200,000 Marines graduated from Parris Island during the Vietnam era. And while the records are not as readily available, it’s likely that a similar number, or even more graduated from MCRD San Diego, due to facility expansion during that time.
In other words, many of the Marines who served in Vietnam trace their roots to the undulating hills and arid scrub of Camp Pendleton.
Not to mention that units deploying to Vietnam came from the 1st and 3rd Marine Divisions and their training would have taken place at Camp Pendleton and in Hawaii, respectively. 2nd Marine Division units on the East Coast acted as a strategic reserve for NATO and Atlantic commitments during the Cold War.
Again, great essay and the people I’ve shared it with have enjoyed it as well. Cheers!