The funniest thing happened to me; I went out to breakfast Friday to pitch some new business, and wound up having breakfast with a guy who used to work for John Paul Vann.
Vann is one of the legendary counterinsurgency guys – along with Lansdale. My breakfast companion had served under him as one of the Civic Action team members – where small groups of four or five Americans would bunk in a village, and lead locals in improving the illage and defending it. He told a story of a resupply helicopter showing up; Vann got off with “a toothbrush and a carbine” and spent the night.
It was an amusing anecdote, and then Joe posted his piece on counterinsurgency via black ops; it got me thinking, and I started to Google Vann a bit to see what he’d said on the subject.
I came across a fascinating article. There’s apparently an organization of former advisors called ‘Counterparts’; they publish a journal called ‘Sitrep’ The following is from an article from that journal, posted here on the web:
COUNTERINSURGENCY: The John Paul Vann Model
By Rich Webster
In November of 1968 I can remember the legendary John Paul Vann speaking to our graduation class of newly trained advisors at Di An, South Vietnam. You cant win a guerrilla war by dropping bombs from the air, he said. You may kill some of the enemy, but you will alienate the people you are there trying to help, and they will turn against you.
John Paul Vann was our Lawrence of Arabia in Vietnam. He spent 10 years there, first as an American infantry officer, then later as the main architect of the Vietnamization/Pacification program.
Other words of his I remember were, You need to go after the guerrilla with a rifle at the village level and kill them face to face. And to do that effectively, you need local Soldiers from the area to assist you. If the locals are properly led and equipped, they will do the job.
What Vann was saying seems to me to be applicable to Iraq today. You need the support of the local population and indigenous troops to combat the guerrillas/terrorists/thugs on their own turf. Large conventional American military infantry units aren’t necessarily best suited for this task.
Most think that it was just the Special Forces who were conducting counterinsurgency operations in Vietnam. Very few have heard about the Co Van Mis (Vietnamese for American Advisors) and the mobile advisory teams (MATs). After 1968, fewer than 5000 assisted, advised, and to use a recently coined term, were embedded with a 500,000 Regional Force/Popular Force Army that took the war to the enemy at the local level for a period of over five years.
There were 354 mobile advisory teams made up of five U.S. Army personnel (two officers and three NCOs). The MATs were really a scaled-down Special Forces team with one of the NCOs being a medic and there was a Vietnamese interpreter for communication purposes. As a young lieutenant, I served with a number of Popular Force platoons and Regional Force companies while a member of Advisor Terms 49 and 86.
…
Sheehan then skips five years of the war effort where the Regional Forces/Popular Forces held their own against the NVA/VC and defeated them in most of the smaller unnamed battles of the war at the village level. Then he picks up again with the 1972 Easter Offensive where Vann was killed, not by enemy contact, but by a helicopter crash during the monsoon rains. Barely 30 pages of Sheehans book are devoted to Vanns success with Vietnamization. There was hardly mention of the Regional Forces/Popular Forces [RF/PF] the home militias, the little guys in tennis shoes, who inflicted over one-third of the casualties against the enemy.
I spent almost nine months with these little guys as a lieutenant taking the fight to the VC at the hamlet and village level. Not all the RF/PFs were great soldiers, but many of them were if properly led, just as Vann had told us at the advisor school.
Nicknamed the Ruff-Puffs, they were not configured to stand up against a large force of NVA regulars, but they could provide security for the locals in a hamlet or village. The Soldiers either had their families living with them, or in the nearby village. Who better to know when the enemy was coming into a village than those who lived there?
There were many times when I knew when the Vietcong were coming into the village at night to recruit or create havoc. And then instead of being ambushed, I and my little band of Popular Force Soldiers became the ambusher. We beat the guerrillas at their own game. We took the night away from them. We no longer patrolled endlessly and aimlessly looking for a needle in a haystack, waiting for the enemy to initiate contact.
We waited for them in the darkness of the night, and kicked hell out of them. In today’s military vernacular, we preempted them. Thats how you fight the guerrilla and the terrorist and beat him at his own game.
I cringe now watching news clips on TV as young American Soldiers in Iraq are ambushed by snipers and blown up with the new version of the command controlled booby trap, the IED (improvised explosive device). But how would the young American Soldiers be able to distinguish the al-Qaida terrorist from a local Iraqi civilization? The simple answer is, they cant.
And how do they find the IED? The answer is they cant unless an informer warns beforehand as to the location.
I believe the answer to this problem is found in the type of force that Vann created in Vietnam, coordinated by CORDS (Civil Operations for Revolutionary Development Support). So different was this approach to conventional warfare tactics that Vann insisted it be operated under civilian control on equal footing with the military hierarchy. Vann really wanted the U.S. military advisors to be in command of the Ruff-Puffs instead of being advisors, but Robert Komer, the first director of CORDS, resisted this idea.
Vanns approach to counterinsurgency was the blending of all civilian agencies in Vietnam under CORDS with a loan of 1800 U.S. military personnel to serve as advisors to local Soldiers to provide security for all aspects of the U.S. effort in Vietnam. These were the front line guys who made up the mobile advisory teams, who moved from one RF/PF unit to another accompanying them on day and night time operations.
It seems to me we are always waiting for the enemy to ambush us in Iraq. The first strike is always thrown by the terrorist, and then we react by sometimes killing Iraqi civilians as the sniper fades away into the crowd. This unfortunate response is, in itself, a tactic of the terrorist/insurgent/enemy combatant.
Dont we need to pre-empt the terrorist as he is preparing the IED to blow up an unsuspecting U.S. Soldier and dont we need to know that a terrorist cell from outside Iraq has begun operating in a neighborhood? To do so, we need intelligence from the local civilians and Soldiers from the area who understand the language, customs, and dynamics of the local situation, who can easily point out strangers in the area even though they speak the same language, but look different.
The best of the MAT teams helped perform all of the above missions because they lived with their Vietnamese counterparts 24 hours a day, ate their food, got to know their families and developed friendships that last even today, 28 years after the war. The Co Vans did not retreat back to a secure base camp far removed from the people they were trying to help and defend.
…
I believe that what Vann said in the 1960s in Vietnam is relevant today in Iraq as it relates to counterinsurgency. All the high tech gadgetry and firepower that our military has today, leaves us relatively helpless when it comes to fighting the insurgent who blends in with the civilian population. An innocent civilian killed translates into a win for the terrorist. To avoid this, it takes the Soldier on the ground with a rifle taking the fight to the terrorist, in an area that he previously thought was a safe sanctuary. And to do that, you need local Soldiers familiar with the terrain, the language and the customs of the area. John Paul Vann understood that.
The Vietnam Was has been misremembered, misunderstood, and misreported in regard to John Paul Vanns effort with Vietnamization and the fighting ability of the South Vietnamese Soldier. Sheehan has done them a great disservice in hi book, A Bright And Shining Lie, from which a movie of like title was made.
Few know that the Viet Cong lost the war, and that they were no longer a viable force after 1968. The Viet Cong could not have won the war and bested the South Vietnamese Army in battle. The advisory effort in Vietnam wasnt perfect, but the South Vietnamese forces held their own in the 1972 Easter Offensive by the North.
The South Vietnamese Army (ARVN) was finally defeated in 1975 when they were invaded by the fifth largest army in the world. They were invaded by 17 divisions of the North Vietnamese Army to include over 700 tanks that steamrolled everyone in front of them. The North Vietnamese were still being supplied with war materiel by their allies, the Soviets and Chinese, while the allies of the South Vietnamese, the United States, abandoned them in their hour of need.
The ARVN were also disadvantaged and vulnerable because they had to defend everywhere, and the NVA could concentrate superior forces at weak points in the South.
The myth perpetuated by the anti-war media was that the South Vietnamese military was no good. I returned to the province capital of Xuan Loc, Vietnam, in 2002 and visited the large communist cemetery there filled with 5000 graves. This is where the last battle of the Vietnam War was fought, where the 18th ARVN Division defeated three NVA divisions before finally being overrun by 40,000 of the enemy.
Would Vanns model of counterinsurgency work in Iraq today? Thats a good question, but what is the alternative? Our Soldiers now are getting tired, and our forces are being stretched too thin to continue the mission indefinitely.
The architect of the 1975 invasion of South Vietnam, North Vietnamese Tein Van Dung, in an indirect manner, gave Vann a complement for his conduct of the pacification program. In his book, Great Spring Victory, he never once mentions revolutionary warfare or the guerrilla tactics of the Viet Cong as aiding him in his final assault on the South. Thats because Vann’s program of Vietnamization had basically wrested control of the south from the guerrillas who we no longer a viable fighting force.
Thats rather ironic, isnt it? The myth exists today that peasants wearing rubber tire sandals employing guerrilla tactics won the war in Vietnam.
Our officials in Iraq are saying it will take three to five years to build an Iraqi Army. With Vanns model, we could have taken the best of the 500,000 former Iraqi military, and put them under the control of U.S. military advisors. Instead of having young American soldiers patrolling the streets of Baghdad and the smaller cities around the country, surely we could have used Iraqi soldiers advised by several thousand American military personnel. Instead, we sent them home to do what?
Unlike Vietnam, there is no outside Army that is going to invade Iraq in division-size strength and overwhelm our military units there. Our powerful and well-trained military units, with the aid of the British, have already won the big battles of the war. Now we need small units of local Soldiers taking the war to the enemy at the village level. I see no other way to preempt the terrorist before he has the time to act.
Correction, Marc. Joe posted his piece on killing enemy leaders and key players with far less regard for Westphalian diplomatic conventions. In the process, I explained where it fit as ONE PART OF counterinsurgency, not to mention national security policy generally, given future trends that are already playing themselves out.
Joe, I think the thing I commented on – and still see – was the question of where this (targeted killings/attacks/snatches) fits in the toolbox.
As I’ve described it, it fits in as an opportunistic act; or as a part of a Civic Action program as described here. But in neither case is it the dominant warfighting strategy I took you to imply.
Looking back at your post, it’s not clear to me where you mean it to it in, if not as a dominant warfighting strategy…so that’d be a useful clarification.
A.L.
Gentlemen,
It is interesting to actually get deep into the parts of Vietnam where we had success. I read most everything I could find on SF ops in Vietnam and then expanded out to Vann and other conventional operations. We made considerable progress only to see it all turn to hell for those we abandoned.
I hope the concept as detailed here is what we are doing in Iraq. The sooner we are not the muscle or the face of the security, the easier dealing with the populace becomes.
The non-civil war, and more specifically the ability of the Iraqi forces and people to handle it, is a hopeful thing. The idea of nation-building teams is likely to come up in other contexts. Learning how to do that now in Iraq ought to pay dividends there and elsewhere.
Cordially,
Uncle J
Would Vanns model of counterinsurgency work in Iraq today? Thats a good question, but what is the alternative? Our Soldiers now are getting tired, and our forces are being stretched too thin to continue the mission indefinitely.
I agree with Victor Davis Hansen: we have a great army in place, and right now it is doing what is should be doing.
The alternative to a change of model is just to keep going on as we are, and I think that’s a great alternative. Elections and the political work of negotiation go on steadily, and the terrorists never succeed in stopping anything. You can say our forces are “getting tired” and being “stretched too thin” but it seems to me the terrorists are suffering “headline fatigue” – where they have to do more and more atrocious things, beyond the point where it’s productive, just to get attention – and the winning solution (build the Iraqi armed forces) is being implemented steadily.
I’m not saying: don’t respect the Ruff-Puffs, don’t respect John Paul Vann, don’t consider different ideas.
I do say don’t talk as though we had a tiring, fading army that needs to be rescued from a losing pattern. We’re not the ones with no political model in view and no conventional forces endgame to look forward to, the terrorists are. We’re not the ones that have to blow up a historic mosque just to try and get some attention and maybe shake things up and break out of a losing pattern.
Also, I think we used some doubtful methods early and made a lot of bad decisions early, four of the worst being lack of planning to control Iraqis because we thought we were liberating them not conquering them, and continuing to use Abu Ghraib and all that went with that, and the first retreat from Fallujah, and not whacking Al Sadr – the earlier the better, not just after it was a promise that he was going in jail or under ground. (A promise that was not kept!) Given that we are finally, belatedly on what seems to be a good pattern, in the kind of war where you have to persist, persist, persist with a good/winning pattern for years to do the job, I have a certain hesitancy in endorsing suggestions we should mess with what our excellent officers want to do now.
Our officials in Iraq are saying it will take three to five years to build an Iraqi Army. With Vanns model, we could have taken the best of the 500,000 former Iraqi military, and put them under the control of U.S. military advisors. Instead of having young American soldiers patrolling the streets of Baghdad and the smaller cities around the country, surely we could have used Iraqi soldiers advised by several thousand American military personnel. Instead, we sent them home to do what?
I don’t think this is a strategy now.
I also don’t think we could have effectively cherry-picked the best of the Iraqi army then, given that it had walked home without consulting us, given that we were kind of busy at the time, and given that we didn’t have the knowledge to do anyway. Remember the “friendlies” we picked to control Fallujah? They were Ba’athists, the enemy pure and simple. As a smart blogger said at the time, the top local “friendly” in this fiasco looked like Saddam with fifty extra pounds – and we looked like idiots. Nobody intended to arm and train Ba’athists to fight against us, so obviously we didn’t have the knowledge to do better.
So: did we really have to take years to build the Iraqi Army? Yes! And we’re doing it, and facilitating the construction of a political system for it to fight for. This is the winning solution.
It could have gone much better and faster, I think if we had not made a bunch of terrible decisions, but regrets are not a strategy.
I “vote” with Victor Davis Hansen: more of the same, please.
No.
There is an article in Foreign Affairs (sorry don’t have the link right now) that persuasively argues that Iraq is NOT Vietnam and treating it as such is a disaster.
In Vietnam, the article argues, you had an ideological struggle for “hearts and minds” over which side had the best prescription for nationalism and good government in a nation devoid of community or sectarian or tribal factions or groupings. In Iraq, there are no hearts and minds because the conflict is tribal or group-level as in the Balkans. Kurds are on the Kurds side, Shias on the Shia side, and Sunnis on the Sunni side. There is no crossover because not just individual but group level survival is at stake.
Thus the LAST thing you want to do is build up an effective Iraqi Army because the side that controls it will use to kill the group that is it’s biggest enemy. And everyone knows it. So you simply make a dynamic where the losing tribal grouping fights desperately before the Iraqi Army is used to wipe them out.
Instead the article argues, the US should threaten to tip the balance of power to broker a communal settlement that gives up total dominance for a guarantee that no side will be wiped out (through genocide). Thus either threaten to LEAVE or intervene on one side convincingly.
An example would be Sunni intransigence believing that they can intimidate the Shias or Kurds. The US simply intervene on the side of the Shias and Kurds and start the process of massive casualties (or threaten convincingly to do so); or simply threaten to leave and have the Sunnis unprotected from Shia militias with most of the arms and the ability to kill great masses of Sunnis.
I was convinced by the logic. Thus embedded anti-Guerilla forces are a disaster. Instead we should be leaning on the tribal leaders to come to an agreement or face totally being wiped out.
Jim, what do you want us to achieve in this war, and why? You just said how you think we should get it.
Here are my answers.
Why
I think what’s driving the global jihad is Muslim hope that they can get us, driven by a bunch of things including demographics, oil money, highly Muslim states (Iran, Saudi Arabia), and the obvious fact that they have gotten us (in tell-tale incidents like the Iranian hostage fiasco, the retreats from Lebanon and Somalia, and the Iranian nuclear negotiations fiasco) and are getting us in cataclysmically huge, consequential ways (in Europe). The guy with the sign that said “2030 THEN WE TAKE OVER” had hope.
My basic formula for victory is: destroy hope. When the enemy no longer has any plausible hope of victory to sell new recruits, that will crumple up their will to fight, and that’s how you win at war.
Hope must be crushed in this world. The purest and most fanatical must drink most deeply of the dismal dregs of defeat.* They must be shamed as publicly and showily as possible – we can’t overdo it. The occasion to the tail-kicking is secondary, what matters is to struggle with constant energy and never soften the blows or the shame. Which means never doing anything like stopping the Fallujah assault and letting the terrorists there dance as winners.
There is religious hope, the hope of the suicide bomber, and that has to be fought too, but that’s a whole different topic. It’s not part of the fight in Iraq. Iraq is going to remain Muslim and is going to crush its non-Muslim minorities whatever we do.
What
What I want from Iraq is a huge, very bloody humiliation for Al Qaeda, which should squander tens or preferably hundreds of thousands of fanatical recruits, and still see the successor state in Iraq built and functioning, with a regime that has a permanent interest in intolerance to Al Qaeda.
The more committed Al Qaeda is, the worse they will hurt when they lose. Al Qaeda are now very committed. Their leader Abu Musab Al Zarqawi appears to be a stubborn and bloodthirsty lunatic. Good. We should harvest that bumper crop of potential shame.
I’d also like some other things, like a successful model for Muslims to turn to. But I don’t have a whole lot of confidence in that (for reasons including Turkey’s drift from what seemed to me to be the correct Kemalist hard-line secular model towards Islam, and my increasing scepticism about the merits of Muslim culture). And it’s only the notional whipped cream on my strawberries anyway. To the extent that Sunnis in Iraq are co-belligerents with Al Qaeda, I’m quite happy to see their interests compromised.
How
What we are doing, building an Iraqi army and facilitating the construction for a federal state for it to defend (with a tacit exception for Kurdistan), seems to me to be the way to get what I want for the reasons I want it.
I can’t see a solution worse for Al Qaeda, or more discouraging for Muslim communities thinking of becoming allies or co-belligerents with Al Qaeda.
I remember a Vietnam era cartoon, with an American general saying he was all for peace, but not as an end in itself. What was said then as a joke at the expense of the militarism and belligerence of the Americans, I now say for real. I’m for peace in Iraq, but not as an end in itself.
We have to win the total jihad war, that is impose a winning counter jihad to crush the global jihad that’s coming straight at us. (I don’t have a crusade in mind, as my remarks on protecting polytheism and my glee at Bush’s new diplomacy with India should establish.) We must win or go under. So everything else becomes a means to that end, and whatever happens to Iraqi Sunnis (who seem to want Saddam back), happens. They have their survival to worry about, we have ours.
* Stan Lee comic book prose is barely enough when it comes to asserting ourselves against militant Islam. This war calls for Batman’s fist in Bin Laden’s face, not nuance.
Armed Liberal et al: Good couple of posts. Recommend Lewis Sorley’s Book: A Better War about the post 1968 US effort under Creighton Abrams for anyone who wants to understand what really happened in vietnam. Vann was not the only one to advocate the type of operations that AL refers to.
In some ways Vann was counterproductive by presenting his views to reporters such as David Halberstam in a narrow and onesided way so that they failed to see that advisory/embedding operations like COORD were part of a larger strategy that included conventional operations to destroy the Main Force VC and PAVN units, along with Phoenix type operations to destroy the VC embeded infrastructure. So, when the PAVN shifted their tactics to a conventional invasion and Vann responded with a B-52 bombing campaign in (’72?) Halbertstram and most of the rest of the American Press thought this was a violation of the counterinsurgency “Bible”. In fact Vann was changing tactics to counter a change in enemy tactics.
re: Iraq. to a large extent we are already doing those type of operations. If you know what you are looking for you can see it in the open source material coming out of Iraq. The one piece we are not doing is creating and embedding forces with a RF/PF type units. We are concentrating on the Iraqi National Army. We have various training academies. We have embedded advisors with every Iraqi unit. The Iraqi equivalent of RF/PF is the various tribal militias. Vietnam, for the most part, did not have a tribal/clan based organization to the extent Iraq does. ( there are exceptions of course the Montangards and Nung tribesmen are two and the Buhdist and Cao Dai (sic?) religous organizations were two others; and each extended family among the villagers and elite looked to their own interests ahead of the country at large but not in the same way we see in Iraq). These tribal militias are a potential threat to the central government and so we do not support them in the same way. We are searching for a way to integrate them into the national Army, but this will be difficult.
In Vietnam the organizational effort by the communists was based on class and geography. They had a “student” front, a “worker” front and so on, and then they had the various village, hamlet and regional organizations. This was partly ideology and partly cultural. Iraq seems to be organized differently.
In Iraq the organization of the insurgency is varied. In the case of the native Baathist and more general Sunni insurgency it is mostly clan and tribe based. A clan/tribe may have a home town but these tribes are huge and dispersed. So the decisions of a tribal sheik or collection of sheiks reach across a larger geographic area…to wherever the tribe members reside. Many towns/villages/neighborhoods have (or at least had) members of several tribes/clans in it. It is not the homegenous unit that a village in Vietnam was (relatively speaking, since even in Vietnam there were division within the village based on family, religion etc).
Al Queda, however, is different. They seem to have tried to take over various geographic units. It seems, usually in conjunction with a tribal ally that is dominant in that region. But the killings and intimidation that they have used in their various strongholds from Fallujah to Mosul indicate that their tribal allies are not even majorities in most cases. This approach does not appear particularly succesful.
It seems that the counterogranizational effort by the coalition forces is mostly geographic at the small unit level..because that is the easiest ways to deploy units (it is impractical to tell a Mech Infantry Battalion to deploy against a tribe spanning hundreds of kilometers). But, I think that the politicians are working on the tribal/clan level. Recent reports of various Sunni tribes proscribing the foreign fighters of Al Queda are hopeful signs in this regard.
I think, given the differences in the two situations, our guys are doing mostly the right things. However, progress is painfully slow and there are many potential threats. In some respects we are ahead of where we were in Vietnam. It took us 4 years in Vietnam (’64 – ’68) to understand Abrams “one War” idea. We wanted to “Iraqize” the Iraq War from the begining and began really serious efforts to do this in 2004, about a year into our effort (once we realized that the Iraqi Army could not be reconstituted quickly and that we would have to start from scratch). The question is will we have the stamina to support the fledgling democracy until it can stand on its own.
Thanks for posting that, L.A. I have a good e-friend who owes his life to a personal intervention by John Paul Vann in the spring of ’72. I’ll make sure he sees it.
Jim Rockford,
The Foreign Affairs article is by Stephen Biddle and is posted online at the foreignaffairs.org website.
Biddle is correct in his diagnosis of the situation in Iraq but not in his solution. We have already tried to take one side against the other, first in trying to crush a Sunni insurgency with our own forces, and then in recruiting an almost entirely Shia-Kurdish army to crush it. The problem recently is that we have threatened to withdraw our patronage of the Shias and now nobody in Iraq trusts us. Unless we can purge the army and police of militia members, any talk of brokering a settlement is nonsense, and if war breaks out with Iran in a few weeks Iraq will be academic anyway.
Regarding Vietnam, it amazes me how doggedly retrospectives on the war insist on separating two strategic options that should have been conjoined at the time and recognized afterward as having been in need of conjunction. The first was to fortify the DMZ and extend it to the Mekong river in 1965 so as to keep North Vietnamese conventional forces out of the South. The other was civilian counterinsurgency. Instead of recognizing that these were complementary and mutually indispensable strategies, nearly everyone continues to argue that the war must be defended or attacked in terms of the way it was fought.
William Page, the gentleman I referred to in my earlier comment, tried to leave a comment on this post and ran into some sort of technical difficulty. This is my attempt at posting his comment, which he emailed to me after he was unable to post it here. Everything that follows was written by Mr. Page, a Battle of Kontum vet who owes his life to John Paul Vann:
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Thank you Bill Faith from Small Town Veteran for bringing this discussion and blog to my attention. It is very important to discuss this strategy. IMO we ARE in what the SOF types call a “Reverse Crusade.” Differing tactics must be explored and employed if our nation is to survive.
Many former Vietnam Veteran Advisors have been discussing this strategy for quite sometime. Some of them are STILL on active duty serving in the Advisory capacity in the GWOT. Please refer to the same article (different title) on this website: (hope I don’t screw up the columns)
[*BF:* The link William wanted to post here is being rejected due to containing a phrase the WoC spam filter doesn’t approve of. It points to a copy of the same Rich Webster article A.L. included above on the “thebattleofkontum.com”:thebattleofkontum.coml website.]
As a matter of fact, one of John Paul Vann’s Advisors who fought the NVA/VC in 1972 in the Kontum AO remained in the N.G. all these years. He was recalled to duty last year in Iraq and has recently returned. His job there was to advise and train the Iraqis. Maybe some of the tactics being discussed in this forum have been taught to the Iraqis?
I know of dozens of other American officers who were recalled for similar Advisory work. These graying, experienced warrior/advisors could be one reason the Iraqis are making such forward progress?
The personal experience Bill mentions is when Vann and a very brave pilot rescued some of us in a very tight situation. It is written up here:
“thebattleofkontum.com/memories/33.html”:thebattleofkontum.com/memories/33.html
For those of you who are history buffs, there is a book soon to come out written by a very smart and seasoned American Vietnam Advisor that will include some of the overlooked actions noted at these websites:
“thebattleofkontum.com/”:thebattleofkontum.com/
“jebanicki.com/towco.html”:jebanicki.com/towco.html
And when the chips were down as mentioned in this Province Report, our few remaining troops, Advisors, and Allies, literally beat the *shit out of the NVA.
“jebanicki.com/ma/provincereport1.html”:jebanicki.com/ma/provincereport1.html
“taskforceomegainc.org/y007.html”:taskforceomegainc.org/y007.html
William Page
1st Cav RVN (11B)
3rd Bde (Separate)
Co. B, 2/5th Cav 1971-’72
Co. D, 1/12th Cav 1972 MR II Easter Offensive
(Co. D OPCON to MR II “Director” “MR.” John Paul Vann)
I wrote the above article-for more articles about Vann and Counterinsurgency -see http://www.thecovan.blogsport.com. I have conducted successful counterinsurgency operations in the villages of Vietnam sleeping in ditches with the RF/PF on ambushes and moving my position every night. We kicked the hell out of the VC in the villages because the locals turned on them when they saw we were there to stay and lived and ate with them and drank tea with their families. That’s called HUMIT in military terminology-getting good intelligence and acting on it immediately. Rich Webster-the covan