Phoenix Program by Douglas Valentine

Author:Douglas Valentine
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3, pdf
ISBN: 9781497620209
Publisher: Open Road Media

CHAPTER 17

Accelerated Pacification

The election of Richard Nixon in November 1968 signaled a shift in U.S. policy in Vietnam. Reflecting the desire of most Americans, in the wake of Tet, for an honorable withdrawal, the policy balanced negotiations with the bombing of North Vietnam. Called the Nixon Doctrine, the policy had as its premise that the United States has a moral obligation to support foreign governments fighting Communist insurgents, on the condition that those governments supply their own cannon fodder.

Shortly after taking office, Nixon instructed his national security adviser, Henry Kissinger, to start negotiating with the North Vietnamese in Paris. On the assumptions that Tet had dealt the VCI a deathblow and that the Thieu regime was firmly in control of the country, Nixon began planning for troop reductions. Following in the footsteps of the French, U.S. forces began a gradual retreat to coastal enclaves. And MACV, under General William Westmoreland’s replacement, General Creighton Abrams, prepared to fight a sanctuary war based on CIA estimates that forty thousand NVA soldiers hunkered down in Cambodia constituted the major outside threat to the Thieu regime. The bombing of these potential invaders began in February 1969, with the consent of Cambodia’s Prince Norodom Sihanouk, whose agents provided the Special Operations Group (SOG) with information on the location of enemy forces, many of which were located in densely populated areas. Conducted in secret, the illegal raids into Cambodia were revealed in May 1969 and resulted in increased opposition to U.S. government conduct in Southeast Asia.

The Nixon Doctrine as applied in Vietnam was called Vietnamization, and the man upon whom the mantle of Vietnamization fell was William Colby, godfather of the Covert Action program that had set the stage for American intervention ten years earlier. In November 1968 Colby was appointed DEPCORDS, replacing Democratic party loyalist Robert Komer, whom President Johnson had named U.S. ambassador to Turkey. Colby reported to Henry Kissinger, who supported Colby’s ambitious pacification program, geared to facilitate Vietnamization.

Colby subdivided his pacification plan into three main categories, beginning with military security, which he called “the first step in the pacification and development process”—in other words, borrowed from Nelson Brickham, “shielding the population from the Communist main forces,” a job which “is the task of the Vietnamese regular forces.”1

Often generated by Phoenix intelligence, the resulting air raids, artillery barrages, and search and destroy operations were an integral part of pacification, insofar as they created defectors, prevented guerrillas from assembling in large concentrations, and, by creating refugees, separated the fish from the water.

Part II of Colby’s strategy was territorial security, the 1969 manifestation of Revolutionary Development, in which the Regional and Popular Forces—thereafter called Territorial Security Forces—were advised by U.S. Army mobile advisory teams (MATs) under the auspices of CORDS. In combating VC guerrilla units and the VCI, Territorial Security Forces were assisted by the People’s Self-Defense Forces.

In a Defense Department report titled A Systems Analysis of the Vietnam War 1965-1972, Thomas Thayer says that as of 1968, “The Revolutionary Development program had significant problems in recruiting and retaining high quality personnel.

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