ANNEX 3-4

Eric Hammel Weighs In

Book Review for the Leatherneck Magazine by Ray Stewart.

In this, his most recent book about the Vietnam War, Eric Hammel has provided a jarring appraisal of the conduct of the DMZ fight by the top-end Marine Corps decision makers – planners, operators, and leaders. To say that he “pulled no punches” would be somewhat of an understatement. However, I neither disagree with his observations and conclusion nor do I quarrel with his delivery of those thoughts in “The 1967 DMZ Campaign: Blueprint for Victory-Template for Defeat".

“The 1967 DMZ Campaign: Blueprint for Victory-Template for Defeat"

by Eric Hammel

“A unit is considered to be “ineffective” when it is “decimated”—an often misused word that in fact refers to a unit that has suffered losses of only ten percent. On any given day in Vietnam, under conditions that were considered perfectly normal, at least ten percent of a Marine battalion’s official strength (about nine hundred officers and men) was missing—and the battalion was unable to fight at peak effectiveness—because the missing men were on leave, ill, or taking care of routine dental and medical procedures (including circumcisions!), dealing with paperwork, attending some sort of school, filling out work details at rear bases, or waiting in the purgatory of administrative hold to be shipped home or to another unit.”

There was no continuity in command, there was no continuity in planning, and no one who was involved had a stake in the ultimate outcome. Quite often, a staff officer responsible for planning an operation was transferred or rotated before the plan could be executed. This caused numerous dislocations because the replacement might have no idea what was going on at some critical juncture when he was asked for an opinion. At times, the key planner actually left his post for a new assignment in the middle of an operation. So did commanders, and so did the troops. Because of this, the best efforts

"The May 8, 1967, Communist attack against the Con Thien Combat Base coincided with the anniversary of the Viet Minh victory over the French at Dien Bien Phu." The attack ‘…. triggered a new and potentially ominous U.S. response. In a virtually seamless continuation of the counterattack that apparently saved Con Thien from being overrun, U.S. and ARVN ground forces arrayed in northern I Corps swept into the DMZ. Attacking on a line from the coast to the high ground west of Con Thien, U.S. Marine and ARVN battalions swept to the Ben Hai River while fighting a series of sharp engagements with NVA units defending their hitherto exclusive domain. In its execution,

Operation HICKORY was one of the best-run combined-arms maneuver operations ever unleashed by Allied forces in northern I Corps."

Unfortunately, despite the fact that HICKORY’s opening phase had the NVA on the run and scrambling to defend North Vietnam itself, the political will to follow through did not exist. The NVA, who at the outset of Operation HICKORY, feared that a full-scale invasion of North Vietnam might be underway, responded to the Allied incursion into the DMZ with vigor. But little needed to be done. Responding to orders from on high, the attack force, composed of five ARVN battalions and six U.S. Marine battalions, turned around when it reached the Ben Hai and beat back toward National Route 9, merely content to uncover and destroy the large number of Communist base camps located in the rough terrain."

As early as March 1966, at a meeting of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, Secretary McNamara himself raised the issue of a literal barrier across the DMZ, a barrier that would stop the torrent of men and material the North Vietnamese were sending into South Vietnam. Unbelievably, the military-service chiefs requested the Navy’s Pacific Fleet commander to conduct a feasibility study of the secretary’s idea."

"“The Barrier”—known in official circles as Operation DYE MARKER—was one of the dumber ideas to emerge from the political wing of the huge mechanism the United States of America had put in place to oversee the Vietnam War

The Barrier was anchored to the east at Gio Linh, which was manned by ARVN soldiers supported by U.S. Marine artillery. To the west, the anchor was at Con Thien, which was manned and supported entirely by U.S. Marines. There were plans to build a new combat base to the east of Gio Linh and another to the west of Con Thien, and to extend the Trace in either direction, but the expansion plan never reached complete fruition. The problem with the Barrier that was easiest to spot was that, unlike the Berlin Wall, it was not hermetic; it could be bypassed on either side of the combat bases at its eastern and western extremities. This is what the NVA saw, and it is the only weakness they needed to exploit to maintain a full complement of well-supplied troops in northern I Corps, and, indeed, as far south as Saigon. Also, as long as the North Vietnamese side of the DMZ remained sacrosanct from ground attack, the NVA division operating within artillery range of the DMZ was virtually free to ply its deadly trade against the fixed combat and fire bases and the roving patrols that knitted the bases together. (Of course, the bases were simply forts in which the ostensible cavalry remained bottled up, immobile.)"

Unbelievably, the military-service chiefs requested the Navy’s Pacific Fleet commander to conduct a feasibility study of the secretary’s idea. The result, in microcosm, is a case history for all that was wrong with America’s high-intellect approach to a “dirty little war.” It is one thing for a former high-level executive of a major automobile manufacturer to ask for an opinion about his lame, uninformed idea for tidying up an insoluble result of political shortsightedness—the way to prevent NVA infiltration into northern I Corps was to clear out the NVA base camps north of the DMZ—but it is quite another problem when high-ranking military professionals pretend to take seriously the grotesquely myopic vision of the worst sort of military dilettante. The result of months of study and a year of hard labor was the Barrier, which nearly every military person who had a hand in it, dubbed the McNamara Wall, as if to deny their own culpability. In short, U.S. Marines and some ARVN units established permanent fortresses at key high spots overlooking the DMZ. These were called “combat bases” (a mutually exclusive alignment of terms) and they were supported from smaller camps to the south, which were called artillery fire bases. The combat bases and fire bases were linked by means of a series of cleared areas, which in sum were called the Trace. This was America’s analog to the Berlin Wall."

"“The Barrier”—known in official circles as Operation DYE MARKER—was one of the dumber ideas to emerge from the political wing of the huge mechanism the United States of America had put in place to oversee the Vietnam War, but it was fully consonant with the politically definitive decision not to invade North Vietnam. In a sense almost too literal, it underscored the political rationalizing behind the decision not to invade. At the same time, the Barrier is one of history’s best examples of what can occur when too much logic, too much intellect, and not enough experience are applied to the art of war. U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara and his team of former industrial whiz kids were ever on the lookout for neat, logical, usually arms-length solutions to defeating an enemy whose mindset was in every way impenetrable to these ultimate Western virtues. As early as March 1966, at a meeting of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, Secretary McNamara himself raised the issue of a literal barrier across the DMZ, a barrier that would stop the torrent of men and material the North Vietnamese"