Uphill Battle

Reflections on Viet Nam Counterinsurgency

Frank Scotton

• Publisher: Texas Tech University Press
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9780896728684
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Guerra del Vietnam

When the Viet Nam War ended, with the United States of America defeated, many wondered how a military powerhouse lost to a "raggedy-ass, little fourth-rate country," as President Lyndon Johnson called North Viet Nam. Frank Scotton knew why. A young Foreign Service Officer assigned to Viet Nam in 1962, Scotton drove roads others avoided, walked trails alone, and spent nights in remote hamlets. Learning the Vietnamese language, carrying a carbine, and living out of a rucksack, he proved that small teams, correctly trained and led, could compete with communist units. In 1964, Scotton organized mobile platoons to emphasize political aspects of the conflict. Those special teams, adopted by the CIA, became models for the national pacification program. He prepared units in some provinces at the request of General Westmoreland, and in 1965 and 1966 worked with Special Forces. While organizational assistant and trouble­shooter for Robert Komer in 1967, and subsequently with William Colby in the military headquarters (MACV), Scotton reluctantly concluded that improved counter­insurgency techniques could not beat back the challenges posed by North Viet Nam resolve, lack of political energy in South Viet Nam, and the dissolving American commitment. For the first time Scotton shares his important observations and reasoned conclusions about the United States's involvement in the Viet Nam War.

1: Initiation

We all get two kinds of toilet training. The first is applied by parents and accomplished (maybe with difficulty) at such an early
age we have no memory of it when having our turn with the next generation. The second, what Ev Bumgardner called “adult toilet training,” is while we are on our first real job with a supervisor and we are instructed in how to perform without embarrassing ourselves.

I was a recently appointed officer in the foreign service of the United States Information Agency (USIA) when my wife and I arrived in Saigon in 1962.1 Junior officer training in Washington had been pedestrian at best. I had made my own arrangements for orientation at Fort Bragg and had argued (successfully) for some study of Vietnamese.2 Everet Bumgardner met us on arrival and brought tired travelers to lunch with him and his family. He would coordinate the junior officer trainee phase of my assignment, which would include spending time with each of the USIS sections before finally getting attached to one of them for the remainder of my tour of duty.3 He advised me to expect considerable time with him, the USIS field operations officer, because he was increasing activity in selected provinces.

During and after lunch he briefly described the Information Section (including media relations, publications, and motion pictures); the Cultural Section (including English teaching, the Vietnamese American Association and Library, visiting scholars, and occasional visual or performing artists); the Research Office, just beginning to collect and analyze SVNLF (South Viet Nam Liberation Front)4 material; and his own nascent Field Operations Office. He told us the Field Operations Office consisted, right then, of himself and a Vietnamese assistant, Ung Van Luong, but he had agreement with the Directorate General of Information to place a USIS Vietnamese employee with the Vietnamese Information Service (VIS) in each province.5 The purpose of VIS was to support Republic of Viet Nam communication with citizens, especially in rural areas. But, Everet said, for support to be effective, we need to know what is happening in each province. So he required biweekly reporting from the provincial representatives. The impetus for the program was amplification of his USIS experience in Laos. He also did field liaison with the USIS branch public affairs officers (located in Hue, Dalat, and Can Tho), who conducted USIS programs in each of their regions at the direction of the country public affairs officer, John Mecklin.

After registering in the Continental Hotel annex, we reported to USIS and were processed there and then once more by the embassy administrative section. Late in the day Everet introduced me to John Mecklin. John had worked with Time-Life until he entered government service a year earlier. He had significant experience as a journalist in Viet Nam, was with photographer Robert Capa when Capa was killed in 1954 in North Viet Nam, and was respected by many who had an Indo-China baptism during that period. John welcomed me into the USIS family and said there could not be a better guide than Ev Bumgardner. “But Ev is persuasive, and he will try to pull you into field operations long term. Don’t make a commitment until you spend time with the other sections.”

The man who would provide my “adult toilet training” just smiled. I think he sensed that he already had me. Everet Franklin Bumgardner was born in western Virginia and grew up hunting squirrels and playing pranks with other family members. As a youth he was an amateur boxer in tank towns along the East Coast.6 He enlisted in the US Navy during World War II as soon as he was of age. When the war was over, he attended George Washington University to study photography. He took employment with USIA as a photojournalist for Free World magazine. Most of his assignments, beginning with the Korean War, were in Asia. Moving in and out of Indo-China, he met, courted, and married a young woman from a Mekong Delta family who was educated in Dalat and worked for the Viet Nam national airline. He was the field operations officer in Laos before assignment to Viet Nam. Like John Mecklin, he was acquainted with many people who had previous assignments (with mixed results) in the region. Everet was twelve years older than I, shorter, muscled, wiry, and balding. (In one photograph his wife showed me from the Laos years, he was heavier, bearded, and looked a bit like the performer Burl Ives. Everet was not amused when I suggested some similarity.) As we left John Mecklin’s office, my appointed “guide” told me I ought to just call him Ev, since everyone else did.

The Field Operations Office for USIS was located on the lower floor of the Rex Building, adjacent to the movie theatre of the same name. USIS rented three floors in what was previously a French commercial building. Ev Bumgardner’s work area was next to the garage space by the vehicle side entrance off Le Loi Street. I was allowed a few days to poke around Saigon, settle with my wife in a small house rented by the embassy from Nguyen Van Y (National Police director) on an alley off Ngo Dinh Khoi Street,7 and familiarize myself with the Bumgardner files of folders, maps, and reports beginning to come in from the first Vietnamese employees assigned to the provinces. Ev promised travel to a couple of provinces as a necessary tutorial for me.8

Our first pedagogical trip was to Kien Hoa. We drove down Route 4 over the Ben Luc Bridge and through Long An, then to My Tho, and took the ferry across one of the Mekong branches on our way to Ben Tre.9 We were bringing a USIS Vietnamese employee to work in the Kien Hoa office of the Vietnamese Information Service. Ev’s practice was to have an American officer personally introduce each new representative to province officials. He said this was absolutely necessary because, even though there was agreement between the Directorate General of Information and USIS, Saigon was remote (in every way) from the provinces. He taught that every new project needed a recognizable face, because before anyone buys into your program, they have to buy into you. Ev would say: “First you sell yourself, and then you can sell the program.”

As we drove, Ev required me to be observant and to prepare for discussion during return travel; meanwhile, he distracted me with running commentary on what he had witnessed during the previous several years. His method was to assert a conclusion, provide reasoning, and expect a reaction. If none was drawn forth (and I was too much a rookie for intelligent questions, much less opinions), then he would provide further instruction. I realized months later that from the beginning he was torn between loving argumentation and a need for me to comprehend and digest his cram course.

The French, he said, paternalistically preserved Laos from Thai encroachment, revived Cambodia distinct from Thailand and Viet Nam, divided Viet Nam from within (the better to maintain control), and wherever possible exploited all three countries while brutally suppressing any movement for independence. He elaborated by describing the colonial period division of Viet Nam into three regions with different forms of government and then separation of the Central Highlands (supposedly for protecting tribespeople) to provide exclusive exploitation by French enterprises and settlers. Opportunity for Laotians, Cambodians, and Vietnamese in education, local government, and police auxiliaries often depended on conversion to Catholicism, signaling acceptance of a demi-francaise role. I asked whether achieving independence in 1955 had not made irrelevant the colonial history that he summarized.

“Not at all,” Ev responded. “Well, in the North, colonial baggage might just be for the history books all right, because they won, and won big. They not only took the North, but they won big chunks of the Center and South too, and then had to settle ‘temporary until elections’ for less than earned from 1945 to 1955.” More important, Ev told me, the 1954 Geneva Agreement recognized the independence of Viet Nam but did not establish a separate national territory for the South. The Republic of Viet Nam, he said, has to create conditions for independence from the North, win support from the population, and then fight to maintain its own identity. Ev went on to describe anticolonial President Diem as a man of good character but aloof personality and so disconnected that on assumption of the prime ministry (and later the presidency), he relied on the same civil service clerks, constabulary, and police personnel that previously served French masters.

Furthermore, he said, President Diem is not comfortable with his own people. Ev described a visit to Phu Yen province when Ngo Dinh Diem was introducing himself as the new national leader.10 Ev said that he witnessed an enthusiastic reaction from local people, and President Diem appeared excited in response. But thereafter, and especially following an assassination attempt in 1957 at Banmethuot, he retracted back into the security of family and palace. Ev actually laughed and said that even the palace was not as safe as Diem expected, since paratroopers surrounded the grounds in 1960, and recently two air force planes had dropped bombs on it.11

A fundamental mistake, Ev continued, was that beginning in 1956 and intensifying in 1957, the government conducted a countrywide campaign to identify everyone who had fought against the French, had supported anti-French activity, or had relatives involved with the Viet Minh.12 More than anything else, this operation and inherent abuse of police power made it easier to resuscitate the residual communist apparatus in the South. So the December 1960 announcement of the Liberation Front for South Viet Nam was a step the Viet Nam Communist Party would have eventually taken anyway, but was made more plausible by government stumblebumming.13

Approaching the line at the ferry landing, Ev drove right to the head of the line, passing vehicles that were already waiting their turn. When we took lunch at a kiosk by the side of a small lake in Ben Tre, I asked him if it were not contradictory for us to advocate a different way for government to relate to citizens and then take our own advantage by seizing the head of line at a ferry landing. Ev bristled. The Vietnamese employee who we were escorting to Kien Hoa answered for him by saying, “If we lived in Kien Hoa, Ong Buom would certainly wait, but he has to hurry so that he can have you home again tonight.”14 Ev sulked for a bit, and I thought perhaps my asperity would mean a long, silent ride back to Saigon. But pretty soon his need to educate overcame his irritation. Ev spoke, while we ate, of Kien Hoa during the French war period, when the province was under command of Colonel Leroy, a French/Vietnamese officer who armed Catholic militia and suppressed Viet Minh activity but unintentionally so fractured the province that it was now a seed bed for communist expansion.

We met briefly with the Kien Hoa province chief, Tran Ngoc Chau, and spent more time with the head of the Vietnamese Information Service (VIS). Ev described our representative in the VIS office as a link intended to improve USIS support to information work in the provinces. Nothing was said about our representative link reporting to us on provincial conditions and developments.

Departing Ben Tre, once again we went to the head of the line at the ferry landing. Ev kept looking in my direction, checking reaction. I simply said, “I know, you have to get me home tonight.” He grunted affirmation, not particularly in good humor, adding, “And we are going to make a short stop outside My Tho.” Returning to his tutorial mode, he spoke admiringly of Province Chief Tran Ngoc Chau. He described Chau, a former Viet Minh officer, as one of the few independent thinkers not hounded into detention or irrelevance by the Diem family. Strangely, he added, the previous Kien Hoa province chief was also former Viet Minh,15 but his being Catholic might have afforded some protection, whereas Chau was Buddhist. Ev continued by saying that although the past province chief had a reputation for honesty and was now assigned strategic hamlet responsibilities, Chau developed an approach to governance that could have applicability in other provinces. Ev explained that Chau’s way depended on respect for the people, identifying their grievances, and taking steps to resolve problems. I thought that seemed pretty basic, but Ev informed me that in almost every respect Chau was exceptional.

The province files that he assigned for reading were impressive by detail and volume, and I asked Ev how he acquired so much information. I told him that half the time the sense of what he conveyed seemed far from what I was told in Washington just a few weeks earlier. Ev smiled rather grimly and responded that it did not surprise him that I barely knew anything about Viet Nam, or that what I thought I knew was irrelevant or just plain wrong. He said the important question was whether I would make a consistent effort to learn, to really learn. He went on to say that nobody would ever know as much about Viet Nam and the Vietnamese as they knew about each other; second, everything he knew was taught by Vietnamese; and third, he would always need to keep learning.

A short drive from the Dinh Tuong province side of the ferry crossing brought us to an American advisory detachment north of My Tho. Ev said this compound, originally built as a Catholic seminary facility, was the location of the advisory team for the ARVN 7th Inf...

Table of contents

• Contents
• Illustrations
• Preface
• 1: Initiation
• 2: An Lao Valley
• 3: Deterioration
• 4: Demise of the First Republic
• 5: Long An Hamlet Survey
• 6: Quang Ngai People’s Commandos
• 7: Expansion and Control Issues
• 8: Upgrading District Forces
• 9: Long Way Home to Central Viet Nam
• 10: Binh Dinh Conflict
• 11: Roles and Missions
• 12: Office of Civil Operations/MACVCORDS
• 13: Away but Still Connected
• 14: Borneo and Return to Viet Nam
• 15: Headquarters MACVCORDS
• 16: Adjustments
• 17: Elections, Governance, and the 1972 PAVN Offensive
• 18: Negotiations, Ceasefire, and Land Rush
• The Last Chapter: Deterioration and Collapse of the Second Republic
• Appendix A
• Appendix B
• Appendix C
• Appendix D
• Notes
• Index
• About the Author