Year of the Hawk by James A. Warren

Author:James A. Warren
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scribner
Published: 2021-11-16T00:00:00+00:00

Pacification Around Saigon

The seven provinces adjacent to Saigon remained the top priority in the pacification effort as part of the Hop Tac (Victory) program in 1965. Resources were comparatively plentiful in this area, and the GVN was more responsive to the needs of the province chiefs and their American advisers here than elsewhere, for obvious reasons. MACV was heavily involved in the Hop Tac program, the goal of which was to clear the Vietcong out of the strategically vital area around Saigon. Yet like most of the other pacification initiatives, Hop Tac languished for lack of coherent leadership, and ultimately failed to eliminate such VC strongholds as the Iron Triangle and War Zone D. VC-infested areas were frequently attacked and cleared, but the enemy would inevitably retreat to sanctuaries in either Cambodia or deep in the jungles of Vietnam, and come back after the US/GVN maneuver units had left. In Quang Nam Province, the GVN had earmarked thirty enemy-controlled villages for pacification by the end of 1965. Only eight had been secured by that date, and the government’s hold on several of those was tenuous.

In one of the many ironies of the allied strategy during the war, the pacification program was continually undermined by conventional military operations of both the Americans and the South Vietnamese. High-powered air and artillery support, some of it indiscriminate, laid waste to hundreds of South Vietnam’s 2,600 villages. In August of 1965, the US Air Force announced it had destroyed 5,300 structures in South Vietnam and damaged another 2,400 thus far that year. By year’s end, an estimated half a million South Vietnamese peasants had flooded into Saigon, Danang, and other cities to escape the destruction. There, they took up residence in squalid camps without proper sanitation or housing. Small slums of sheet metal and wood shacks sprang up on the outskirts of Vietnam’s two largest cities. Gangs of small children wandered these disease-ridden communities begging and scavenging for scraps of food from garbage piles. Cholera was a common problem.

Senior American military and civilian officials recognized that pacification efforts needed to be streamlined and better rationalized, but it was an uphill climb. Robert H. Miller, head of the State Department’s Vietnam Working Group, speculated in October 1965 that there were simply too many high-priority projects in place for any of them to work properly. Perhaps, he suggested in a report, the United States was trying to force too many changes on the South Vietnamese too fast? As Miller put it:

I can’t escape the conviction that the general thrust of our present effort in Vietnam is increasingly in the direction of assuming governmental functions for ourselves and pushing the GVN aside because of its general inadequacy and incompetence. At the same time, our effort is not attacking what remains the central Communist challenge—gaining control of the country through erosion and subversions at the village level. I fear our present course could lead increasingly to something resembling a U.S. occupation of South Vietnam without our getting at the real, long-term Communist challenge.

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