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Vietnam's Lessons For Iraq: Vietnamization Of Troops

A.K. Starbuck - 12/18/2005

Desperately seeking a solution and hoping to appear to be fulfilling his campaign promises, Richard Nixon, now finally President of the United States tried to rid himself of the millstone of Vietnam by decreeing that the United States would complete in high speed the training of the Vietnamese to defend their country. His military commanders, equally desperate to get out of the deteriorating situation, began the process of speedy withdrawal by first outlining their various timeframes for the final completion of the United States' role in the war. It was no longer expedient to stay in country and give lofty speeches about domino effects and rampant Communists at the gates. Now the Administration's "happy talk" concerned a victory won by having the South Vietnamese trained and competent to fight against the battle hardened troops of the North and the homegrown Viet Cong. The North Vietnamese takeover was yet to come but was becoming increasingly inevitable. Now was the time to speak of working to train the Vietnamese to take over the job of policing their inland rivers and coastal waters. In short, the Vietnamization of the South Vietnamese Navy (VNN) must happen and must get underway. No longer would the United States Forces patrol. Instead, the new plan would have the U.S. Navy accelerate the plan by having the South Vietnamese Navy trained and able to defend their watery borders.

If it seemed like undue haste and poor planning by the U.S. Navy, it was Admiral Elmo Zumwalt, Commander Vietnam Naval Forces who proposed the shortened timeframe short circuiting the longer duration plans of the U.S. Air Force and U.S. Army for divesting the United States of this ill-conceived and increasingly unwinable war. When Zumwalt seized the imitative and proposed this radical shortening of training and preparation to take over naval vessels that had a certain degree of sophistication and technology unknown to the largely rural South Vietnamese population, he was given the green light from military commanders who should have known better. Zumwalt created what came to be known as Accelerated Turnover to the Vietnamese, code named ACTOV, in the fall of 1968. This program marked the real Vietnamization of the Vietnam War.

Politically it was expedient and certainly more feasible to employ this form of "doublespeak" rather than to acknowledge what President Richard Nixon as Commander in Chief knew and was committed to achieve as quickly as possible. The media, long the nemesis of Richard Nixon, would have seized the opportunity to slice and dice this change in direction and terminology, if the plan was made a matter of public knowledge. It was by far better to speak in glowing terms of Vietnamization than to finally say the correct term, "de-Americanization" of the war. Anti-war protests plus general distrust and dissatisfaction with a war that appeared to have no foreseeable conclusion and more importantly, the fulfillment of Nixon's campaign promises, clouded the political skies of Washington and the Nixon Administration.

For Nixon the war was a hangover from the previous Administration that he must unload. Increasing pressure at home on his new administration to successfully conclude the increasingly unpopular war and the escalating anti-war activism in the United States made Vietnamization the best solution to ending the conflict.

Lyndon B. Johnson, Nixon's predecessor, had fallen deeper and deeper into the escalation game in Vietnam, which became increasingly, and irrevocably an American war rather than a Vietnamese war. Nixon came to power with the understanding that the war must end. The public became more and more alienated by the daily body counts, the returning tagged body bags endlessly being unloaded on tarmacs, and both the military and Defense Department's glowing reports of seeing the "light at the end of the tunnel." Secretary Robert McNamara's pronouncements at news conferences continually had him speaking also of the elusive and ever present "light at the end of the tunnel." Many of the military actively engaged in the field by the enemy failed to have this tunnel sighting and saw only more and more battles that were fought and re-fought in the same areas of the country. Territory gained was not necessarily territory held for more than a few days. The war had turned into battles of attrition, inflicting casualties on both sides to no real end. Both countries were being bled dry of their young and even those of any age unable to evade the battles and the bombs.

Nixon's stated plan was to offer the United States an honorable disengagement that was not contingent on the enemy's cooperation, which certainly could not be had at any price. Unfortunately, many questions needed to be settled if the Nixon plan was to be put into operation. For years the American military had placed first, military advisors in the country, then more and more active combat personnel into the escalating war situation. If Nixon's plan was to have any effect in honorably and politically, or at least very speedily, detaching the United States from this morass, it had to include all parts of the Vietnamese military establishment, not just the land forces. Enemy movements had to be contained. Intensive bombing by B-52s had not ceased the infiltration along the intricate Ho Chi Minh Trail. U.S. Navy patrols didn't stop the enemy traffic on the internal and coastal waterways.

Inevitably, the United States Navy was given the onerous task of training and equipping the fledgling South Vietnamese Navy to take over patrolling the inland waters and the coastal waters of South Vietnam. This was no small task that lay ahead. It had a long history of failure. The South Vietnamese Navy was the unwanted stepchild of the Vietnamization program. As far back as 1955, a combined French and American combat mission called TRIM had initiated a plan to install both French and American military advisors to support and train the South Vietnamese Navy. Following the departure of French naval advisors in May 1957 from the Naval Academy at Nha Trang, the South Vietnamese Navy had a modest fleet of approximately 100 modified landing craft, two LSMs, two PCEs, and three MSCs, which were leftovers from the French in the Indochina War. The strength of the South Vietnamese Navy at that time was 1900 officers and men, few of whom spoke English in any fluency nor were trained for this type of warfare. The South Vietnamese Navy was more political than military in nature.

In July of 1960, having experienced very slow growth during the interim, the South Vietnamese began to get assistance from the Navy Section of the U.S. Military Assistance Advisory Group (MAAG), which at this time was increased in size to sixty officers and men. The South Vietnamese Navy was divided into two groups, the River Forces and the Sea Forces. The River Assault Groups were patterned after the old French Division Naval D'Assault and had not experienced any change in structure since 1955. Naval groups were essentially controlled by the regional Army commanders and were used mainly in logistic support of encamped ground forces. The South Vietnamese Navy was therefore in an inferior political position and totally under the control of the Army. Further, the river groups did not go on combat missions or assaults on Viet Cong river positions.

Despite more happy talk coming from Washington and the Nixon Administration, the struggle to move the South Vietnamese Navy into being a viable fighting force that could fulfill its mission of patrolling, protecting, and intercepting the infiltrating North Vietnamese regulars and the Viet Cong along the internal and external waterways of South Vietnam was daunting and virtually impossible to implement and achieve. Pressure from the higher echelons of the U.S. Navy and the Administration made implementation difficult because it was coupled with the louder demands of the American public demanding swift withdrawal from Vietnam. The existing, inadequate, and antiquated South Vietnamese Navy was not able to comply with the increasingly shorter time frames for American withdrawal.

At the Saigon Conference of American military commanders held on November 2, 1968, General Creighton Abrams demanded changes in the latest timetables, which for his current timeframe were set too far in the future to be of any use in the situation developing in the United States. Admiral Elmo Zumwalt, commander of Naval Forces Vietnam made his presentation in that tense, emotionally charged room. He presented a plan that promised an accelerated Navy turnover and projected a date of June 20, 1970 for a revamped and effective South Vietnamese navy.

To state that this date for the turnover and the expected birth of an effective naval arm that could decisively seize the initiative and control one vital aspect of the war was overly optimistic and somewhat laughable to experienced American naval personnel, both officers and enlisted. However, Zumwalt was never a man to shy away from an impossible situation. He may even have relished the challenge.

From the outset, the simple and improbably mandated training scheme divested of extraneous wordage and pumped up South Vietnamese capabilities, was a sort of "man for man" scheme. Each U.S. Navy crew was assigned a South Vietnamese Navy crew to train fully and completely in the duties on board the naval craft. The way it was projected was for a U.S. seaman to train a South Vietnamese sailor in the duties of his position. Thus each position on the American crew would be taken over eventually by the South Vietnamese sailor assigned to that same position. All South Vietnamese sailors would be trained by U.S. Navy crewmen and would then be expected to fulfill the same duties and be fully capable of doing this job when the American sailor or officer left. One by one, each American crewmember would train in the shortest possible time his South Vietnamese counterpart starting with the ordinary seaman and continuing upwards until only the American Captain of the vessel was left. The American Captain would then relinquish his position on the vessel to the South Vietnamese Captain and he additionally would at that point also turnover command of the vessel.

On paper and in planning sessions this plan sounded very workable and certainly feasible. In practice however, the American crewmember could not be relieved of his assignment and more importantly, returned to the United States until the South Vietnamese sailor was signed off as a fully trained member of the crew. One by one, the U.S. sailors, enlisted and officers, signed off and returned stateside, leaving an increasingly South Vietnamese crew on board. There was no incentive to not sign the documents. To delay in signing would lengthen the American's time in Vietnam. At this point in the war, most Americans wanted a ticket home.

Prior to this "hands on" training, the fledgling sailors began their first steps toward manning the about-to-be-acquired boats at the U.S. Navy Small Boat School in Saigon. In their first courses, the recruits were given an introductory course in conversational English from American instructors as well as courses in nautical terms and equipment during a twelve-week course. The next step was a minimum of twelve weeks on the naval craft with their American counterparts. The American plan also included turning over its riverside bases under a program called Accelerated Turnover of Logistics to the Vietnamese more familiarly called AcToVLog. These bases needed trained personnel to operate and keep the logistical flow at optimum levels. The bases were the lifelines for the river crews.

As the ACTOV program moved through a succession of phases and adjustments, many problems became apparent. The South Vietnamese navy had strengths and weaknesses and each unit varied according to its commander, officers, and non-commissioned officers. American advisors assigned to the units reported problems of discipline, low morale, inefficient employment of assets, supply problems, weaknesses in the training system, and poor maintenance practices. The greatest problem for the program was that the South Vietnamese Navy had always been dominated by the politically powerful army. It was reported by Brigadier General James L. Collins, Jr., that "too often advisors did not take firm stands with their counterparts on key issues nor recommend the relief of unsatisfactory commanders for fear that such recommendations would reflect badly on their own abilities." This fear of possibly offending people they worked with each day put an added burden on both the advisors and the overall program.

The irony of the roles assigned to the U.S. Navy in ACTOV was apparent to most advisers and trainers. For more than ten years, the U.S. Navy advised and trained the South Vietnamese Navy yet had not been able to transform it into a viable, robust, skilled fighting force. In less than two years, Nixon and his high level advisors, and of course Admiral Zumwalt, insisted that the South Vietnamese navy be converted into an effective fighting force that would be able to take over the brunt of river and sea operations.

In designing the accelerated instructional and operational program, the first decision was to forego teaching the American instructors and crews the Vietnamese language, after it was discovered that the language did not support the required technology or its translations. It was found that words would have to be invented in the language. Therefore the Vietnamese, largely from the agrarian countryside were taught to speak English, not always perfectly. The Vietnamese language did not have the necessary technical terminology.

In addition to the language problem, the living conditions for the South Vietnamese sailors were Spartan and primitive at best. They slept in companies of 200 crowded into a building where there were no mattresses or mats to sleep on. The recruits' beds at Lam Son were concrete floors and their clothing was the bedding. They ate outdoors squatting in the dirt while passing trucks stirred up the road dust in billowing clouds. Bathing was accomplished by a once weekly trip to the river. The recruits came down with either dysentery or malaria or both.

The ACTOV schedule made it necessary for the Naval Training Center at Cam Ranh Bay to train 1200 students at a time with a staff of 192 instructors, consisting of 12 officers, 85 petty officers, and 95 seamen. The conditions were not conducive to learning. Added to these problems and conditions was the fact that the Vietnamese sailors had families to care for and their domestic problems distracted them from their training and duties. The U.S. Navy in a valiant but futile effort to alleviate and reduce the problems began the Dependent Shelter and Animal Husbandry Program. Homes were built for the sailors' families to give them affordable and improved living quarters. Anything was an improvement over the shantyvilles in which they lived near the base.

Small livestock were imported into South Vietnam for distribution to the families. This program became known as "pigs and chickens" among the American sailors. It chief benefit was to add protein to the substandard Vietnamese diet and had the added advantage of being self-perpetuating. Even with these improvements, there were still many "absentees" and outright desertions. The recruits were mainly unwilling conscripts.

Vietnamization did not progress as swiftly or as well as Zumwalt's schedule forecast and it did not create the navy that South Vietnam needed to carry out its mission. On May 15, 1970 Admiral Zumwalt was relieved as commander Naval Forces Vietnam. The program was nowhere near the target deadline.

The U.S. Navy tried to fulfill its difficult mission in the time allotted. It was dealt a mission that had never succeeded in all the previous years with all the previous well-intentioned plans. The Vietnamization program worked only to the extent that the United States pulled and prodded it along. The time element, the training, the translation problems, the living conditions for the recruits and their families and finally the weariness of the American public for a war that seemed never to reach a conclusion worked against any orderly transition. Instead, as the Americans left South Vietnam, having tried to bring stability and reform to a rural country and to its armed forces, their mission could only be deemed a failure. Additional time probably would not have helped. With the best intentions by the officers and enlisted personnel of the U.S. Navy in Vietnam, their mission failed and the end became inevitable because the South Vietnamese military and quasi-political structures were not able to carry forth the grand scheme in the race for an end to the war.