The Village, CAPs in Vietnam

I just finished reading the Village by Bing West. It illuminates several of the ideas Merkel picked up on.

The book is about one of the first Combined Action Platoons. A squad of twelve volunteer Marines went to live in a Hamlet of several thousand in the Vietnamese countryside along with about 25 Vietnamese Popular Forces, basically a militia. They conducted patrols every night in order to interdict Viet Cong operations and route out their infrastructure. The goal was to provide security for the local population and build trust. In the end they were very successful. After about two years of an American precense the hamlet was able to (almost) stand against the VC on its own.

One of the things that stuck out to me was the huge assumption of risk the CAPs entailed. In the end, of the 15 Marines that stayed there for a significant amount of time 8 died. Five of them were killed in a company level VC attack on their outpost. The casualties could have been mitigated if the unit that was supposed to provide assistance didn't end up being huge knuckleheads. Many of them did die but they also killed a lot of VC. More importantly, they provided security for the population and set the stage for enduring peace in the Hamlet.

One other thing that was clear from the book was how hostile the rest of the military was to them. The leaders of the Marine battalion near them constantly tryed to subvert them. He would send them company scrubs as volunteers and try and put stupid restrictions on them which made no sense at their level. The CAP Marines not only dressed out of uniform but they tended not to follow orders that did not make sense. For example, the VC planned a second company (possibly battalion) level attack on them. The conventional unit commander ordered them to abandon their post but they refused. The VC ended up not launching the attack at the last second becasue they realized the Marines knew they were attacking and had stayed. When an Army unit rotated in nearby the leader of the unit was very accomodating but the army as an insitution was not and was very ciritical of the CAPs.

If the CAPs had been applied on a larger scale and the focus of the war was more along those lines, it's very possible things could have ended up differently. While we were able to attrite the VC to a level where they were no longer effective we did not build up a solid alternative, which the CAP program could have done.