A Blast from the Past

"Sarge" and friends, Vietnam, 1967

Confession being good for the soul, I will admit a special connection to one of the pop tunes of my wayward youth. Every time I hear the Four Tops rendition of "Just Walk Away Renee" I find myself flashing back to the last half of 1967 and to "Papa Three,"  the Combined Action Platoon I served with in Vietnam.

      The sergeant in charge of our platoon--Bill Cooke, or "Sarge" for short--joined Papa Three after a 30-day leave back home, his reward for extending his Vietnam tour of duty by six months.  One of the things he brought back from "The World," as we called it then, was a small battery operated tape recorder.  Along with the recorder he brought some tapes of "the latest sounds."  

      I suppose that my memories of that tape recorder remain vivid for two reasons:  

• First, before going to Vietnam, I had one very much like it.  My mother, who worked for a wholesale electronics company, had purchased two battery-operated miniature reel-to-reel recorders--one for me and one for my girlfriend.  Mother thought my girlfriend and I would like to record and send tapes back and forth to one another.  We used our recorders a few times when I was stationed at Camp Lejeune, but I did not take mine to Vietnam.  
• Second, it was strictly a voice recorder, meaning that it didn't have the dynamic range necessary for recording and playing music.  Hence, while the music Sarge had recorded was still recognizable, it played with a screechy, almost metallic sound.  

"Just Walk Away Renee" is the one song that stands out in my memory.  I don't think Sarge played it more than any of the other numbers he had recorded.  I think it was because that song, for some reason, really taxed the limits of Sarge's recorder and sounded so bad that it was almost good.  It was at least memorable.  

      Of course, I have no way of recreating that distinctive sound.  I can only share a tolerable You Tube video of the Four Tops singing their version of the song.  The title to this post is a link to that You Tube video.

      I am still in touch with four of my fellow Papa Three Marines.  I am hoping they can remember some of Sarge's other selections.  --EFP

Everything Old Is New Again!

{Korean-American Woman Marine visiting an orphanage, Yechon, Korea, 1984)


I was intrigued to read in today's Seattle Times that the Marines are forming and training "Female-Engagement Teams."  These will be teams of four or five enlisted women Marines (WMs) whose mission it will be to try to win the hearts and minds of Afghan women living in traditional villages, which bar women from speaking with men outside their families.  As part of their cultural sensitivity training, these WMs are being told to allow their pony tails to stick out from behind their helmets, so that the villagers will be able to tell that they are women; to wear head scarves under their helmets, or to don them upon removing their helmets; and to make small talk (through an interpreter, of course) and to play with the children before asking direct questions.  According to the article, the main question they are to ask is what the village most needs.
       Talk about "deja vu all over again," this was the very same question that we in Combined Action were supposed to ask in an effort to ingratiate ourselves with the people in traditional Vietnamese villages.  As I recall, when we asked this question at Papa Three, the answer was "nothing."  The village chief couldn't think of anything the village needed that we could provide.
       I wish the dedicated women Marines volunteering for this endeavor well.  I really do.  But I do have to wonder about two possible impediments.
      First, is the traditional Afghan culture as xenophobic as the village culture of Vietnam in the 1960s?   If so, Afghan women are not likely to open up to young American women, especially women who have embraced roles essentially alien and perhaps unimaginable to Afghan women.
      Second, I wonder if Afghan villages have a well-entrenched enemy infrastructure largely invisible to us, such as we faced in Vietnam?  Even if they don't, these Female-Engagement Teams, and the grunts accompanying them, are only passing through.  They're not settling in to say.  ("Clearing and Holding" is the phrase for it.)  Hence, the village women may be afraid to open up to these WMs, knowing that the Taliban could soon return to punish even the appearance of collaboration.
      The article also mentions that these WMs will be armed with M-4 rifles, a shortened version of the standard M-16s carried by the men.  The subtext seems to be that the smaller M-4, in this case, is gender appropriate.  Should they also be pink?
      Sorry,  I couldn't resist that one.  But, on a serious note, I see a mixed message that may undercut the mission here.  On the one hand, these women are supposed to be putting a kinder, gentler face on our presence.  On the other hand, they are dressed and armed like warriors.  Can these two roles really be reconciled?  It occurs to me that this was essentially our liability in CAP.  We were supposed to be both warriors and ambassadors in green.  But in our case, at least, the disconnect was not accentuated by gender.
      I worry that our cultural overtures in Afghanistan are grounded in the same naive presupposition that led to our defeat in Vietnam--namely, that, deep down inside, people everywhere are just like us.  It's just not true.  You'd think we would have learned that by now.  --EFP  

"Tiger Papa Three" Revisited

[A Papa Three Popular Force soldier, summer, 1967]

A British Ph.D. candidate found my Combined Action Vietnam memoir, "Tiger Papa Three," and asked if I thought my experience had been "exceptional."  He also asked how Vietnam-style combined action compares to the current Provincial Reconstruction Team approach in Iraq and Afghanistan.  I thought I would share my response.  --EFP 

Dear Craig Wood,

       Thank you very much for your interest and your kind words about my CAP memoir.  I suppose I am an iconoclast when it comes to the Marine Corps' Combined Action Program in Vietnam. To be sure, some Combined Action platoons were more successful than Papa Three. The best measure of that success, I've come to realize, is how often and how aggressively they were attacked.  But many of those who celebrate, and even romanticize, the Combined Action Program tend to ignore or minimize some of the cultural and political realities of that time and place.

       First, the fact that villagers and Popular Force soldiers could be superficially friendly didn't necessarily mean that they were on our side.  The Viet Cong infrastructure was well-entrenched and pervasive throughout the countryside in Vietnam.  It had been there, in a dormant stage at least, since the First Indochina War, and it certainly came to life again with our entry into the war.  As we came to realize at Papa Three, the villagers and even our PFs had made their accommodations with that infrastructure.  They may not have all been enthusiastic supporters of that infrastructure, but many of its members may have been their friends and neighbors.  The reality was that our PFs had to live among the local VC, and we couldn't protect them once they went home. 

       Now, in hindsight, I can hardly blamed our PFs for refusing to patrol with us.  A pop culture allusion/analogy comes to mind.  In the film "Chinatown," someone asks Jack Nicholson's character what he did as a policeman in Chinatown.  His answer:  "As little as possible."  I imagine that's the way our PFs felt. I know that's the way many of us felt--if we're honest with ourselves.  We found ourselves caught up in an inscrutable (pardon the cliché) cultural contest.  When you don't even understand the game, much less feel that you can win it, it's better to try to sit it out.

        In later life, at an academic conference, a Vietnamese woman told me that my cultural insights were sound.  She told me that, even though she is Vietnamese and speaks the language, she couldn't go into a strange village and expect to be taken into anyone's confidence.  That traditional Vietnamese culture was insular and xenophobic.  How could we expect to know what was going on in the villages to which we were assigned? 

        Second, an absence of enemy contact didn't necessarily mean that a village was "pacified."  As we discovered at Papa Three, that VC infrastructure was a highly disciplined organization that could bide its time so as not to jeopardize the larger strategy.         

        Third, to my fellow CAP veterans who romanticize the program, I have always posed this question: If the program really was successful in winning the hearts and minds of villagers and PFs, why did none of these supposed allies tip us off about the impending Tet Offensive.  We now know that the VC infrastructure was helping with the NVA infiltration and the logistics of the offensive.  I have to believe that we, the Americans, were the last to know.      

        This is not to say that we couldn't and shouldn't have done better at Papa Three.  The problem was that we really weren't given enough of a cultural and historical orientation.  As I believe I pointed out in "Tiger Papa Three," the guiding premise of the program was that young Americans are inherently likeable and could win over the people.  The Marine Corps ignored the cultural conditioning of my generation and even the realities of our military indoctrination.  Most young Americans in those days were raised in an atmosphere of pervasive racism--influencing our attitudes toward Asian people as well as people of color.  Our military indoctrination likewise reinforced the prejudice that Asian people were inferior and couldn't be trusted.  It was a tall order to take those same, largely uneducated young Marines and expect them to be culturally sensitive ambassadors in green.

        As for the current conflicts, I see one important advantage that today's military enjoys.  I think that the current generation of young soldiers and Marines are much more tolerant of multiculturalism and diversity than we were. That has to help.  Also, I am told that they are getting much more of a cultural indoctrination than we got.  Finally, I understand that the PRTs represent a much more comprehensive and larger scale, coordinated effort than the Combined Action Program of old.  Our great liability, as I've written, was that Combined Action was very much an enlightened gesture of dissent against a search-and-destroy strategy that clearly wasn't working and which would ultimately prove to be self-defeating. The Marine Corps was very much going it alone, with little help or encouragement from other agencies. 

       On the other hand, I do see the same disconnect happening in Iraq and Afghanistan that proved self-defeating in Vietnam.  Every time a Predator drone strike kills 15 civilians and maybe one bad guy, we have, in effect, created more VC/Moslem extremists than we killed.  As William Lederer long ago tried to remind us, iin his book Our Own Worst Enemy, in a counterinsurgency, it’s the people that count. 

       And one other reservation comes to mind:  As I understand it, the Afghan government has even less influence and control over the people in the countryside than the late South Vietnamese government had over its people.  I'm told that it's very much a tribal society and another highly insular culture.  Can we really win hearts and minds among the  Afghan people, especially when we don't have the means to provide physical security for all those tribes dispersed throughout a country larger than Vietnam? 

        But, in all fairness, I only know what I've read and been told about Iraq and Afghanistan.  Note that I am copying Chuck Armstrong on this message.  Chuck Armstrong is a retired Marine colonel and a counterinsurgency specialist who has been involved in preparing Marines for the current conflicts.  He has also gone to Iraq and Afghanistan--several times, as I understand it.  Chuck could tell you much more than I could about how the current PRT approach is working. 

        Note that I have also copied Larry Scroggs, who served with me at Papa Three and who also served in a more successful CAP platoon.  Larry and I don't always agree on the effectiveness and legacy of the program, but he is one of the CAP veterans who deals in well-informed reasoned opinion. 

        I think you would find both Larry and Chuck both to be helpful.  Sorry to go on at such length, but I found this to be a welcome distraction from the online teaching I should be doing this morning.  Thanks again for contacting me, and good luck with your dissertation. 

Sincerely,

Ed Palm

"Puff the Magic Dragon": A War Story

Blogger’s Preface:  It occurred to me that, in terms of the potential for self-defeating collateral damage, Predator drones probably come in second to another weapons system we’re employing in Afghanistan.  I wrote this commentary about a year ago, but I think it’s still relevant.  The photo is of a Vietnamese Popular Force Soldier.  I took it in 1967.  --EFP

  “A dragon lives forever, but not so little boys.”

            That line resonates with me as a Vietnam veteran.  It comes from “Puff the Magic Dragon,” the sixties hit by Peter, Paul and Mary.  I couldn’t help but think of that song and that line [last year] when I read that Afghan President Hamid Karzai was  complaining that the indiscriminate use of our firepower in his country is killing more civilians than the Taliban.  As it turns out, I know something about how airpower in particular can prove to be not only immoral but also self-defeating in an insurgency.         

I was especially concerned to learn that one of the weapons we’re falling back on in Afghanistan is the AC-130 Specter gunship.  The Specter is essentially a new and improved version of a weapon I knew as “Puff the Magic Dragon.”  The “Puff” of my day was an updated version of the venerable old C-47 transport plane.  Puff sported the latest in electrically driven 7.62 mm Gatling guns capable of firing 6,000 rounds per minute.  Puff also carried a seemingly inexhaustible supply of parachute flares and, in our area at least, was employed primarily at night in hopes of catching concentrations of North Vietnamese Army troops out in the open. 

Watching Puff in action could be an amazing spectacle, an awesome sound and light show.  The extremely rapid rate of fire made the tracers blend into an unbroken stream of fire stretching between the plane and the ground, and the overlapping reports of the guns would meld into an eerily familiar sound—sort of like the loudest and longest fart you’ve ever heard.  Rumor had it Puff could put one round in every square yard of a football field with just one pass.  We believed that.  As it turned out, we had good cause to believe it.

“We,” in this case, were the members of a Combined Action Platoon.  We were 12 enlisted Marines and one Navy corpsman sent out to live and work in a Vietnamese village alongside the village’s self-defense force—Popular Forces, or “PFs,” for short.  While we were supposed to train and inspire the PFs to root out the VC infrastructure and to keep the VC out of their village, in the main, ours was not to search and destroy.  Ours was to win hearts and minds. 

Our platoon, “Papa Three, was trying to win those elusive hearts and minds in a village called Cam Hieu.  We had established a permanent compound (complete with wire, sandbag bunkers, and a tin-roofed wooden building or “hooch.”) on a hill alongside South Vietnam’s northernmost East-West route, Highway 9.  We were not out in the jungle.  We were just seven kilometers west of Dong Ha in Quang Tri province. 

On clear nights, from up on our hill, we had a ringside seat to the war.  We could see B-52 strikes up on the DMZ—and we used to watch “Puff the Magic Dragon” work out on the hills to the south and west of our position.   

But one night in early November of 1967 was different.  Always, before, Puff used to stay two or three miles away from our compound.  On this night, however, he first appeared only about a mile to our west, and he seemed to be working toward us. 

"Do you suppose he knows we're here?" one Marine asked.

"Of course he knows we’re here," Doc,” our corpsman answered. "He has the location of all friendly units plotted."

The next thing we knew, one of Puff’s flares blazed forth almost directly over our compound, bathing us all in an eerie yellow light. 

We heard the buzz and cracking of bullets before we heard Puff's distinctive report.  Most of us instinctively dove into a long trench the Seabees had dug when they first built our compound.   Fortunately, for most of us, the ditch was deep enough and the angle of fire was steep enough that the bullets hit over our heads.  I was stung by some rock fragments and dirt kicked up by bullets that must have hit within inches of my head.  But I wasn’t hurt.  Others were not so lucky.  

            One Marine, who had been asleep in our “hooch,” took a round through the thigh.  Another Marine, who had frozen out in the open instead of jumping into the trench, was hit at the top of one buttock.  The round came out at the bottom.

            (I still remember that Marine.  Every unit has one.  He was the guy who never got the word, who never quite got with the program.  Even after he got hit, he didn’t take cover.  He kept hopping up and down at the edge of the trench, pitifully holding his rear and hollering, “I’m hit!  I’m hit!”

            When he hopped within arm’s reach, another Marine and I reached up and grabbed his pants’ legs and pulled him into the trench.  He landed right on his wounded buttock—resulting in an even louder and somewhat bitter complaint, but at least he was then as safe as the rest of us.)  

            Unfortunately, the fire must have come down at a steeper angle on the eastern half of our compound, where our PFs used to segregate themselves.   One was hit squarely on the top of his head.  The bullet came out just beneath his nose.  Two others had been hit, one in the forearm and the other in the abdomen.  That PF, too, died.  

            Fortunately, our radio operator had gotten though to our headquarters in time.  If Puff had made a second pass, all of us would have been killed.  

            The next day, a delegation of PFs accused us of deliberately calling in Puff to get even with them.  They had long been refusing to patrol with us.  So much for “Combined Action.”

            The two wounded Marines came back in a couple of weeks.  They said they received Purple Hearts and that their wounds were listed as due to “enemy artillery.”  They also said the pilots visited them in the hospital and apologized, explaining that it is difficult to know exactly where you are over Vietnam at night. 

            To the best of my knowledge, no one came out to our village to apologize to the families of the PFs who had died or the one who was wounded.  

            “Collateral damage,” that’s what we called it in Vietnam when we injured or killed innocent civilians or allies, or when we destroyed a town like Ben Tre in order “to save” it.   Now, forty years after Puff inflicted collateral damage on my unit in Vietnam, the Specter, also known as “the witch,” is working out over Afghanistan and Iraq.  And whereas Puff fired only 7.62-mm copper-jacketed rounds, Son of Puff, the Specter, also fires 25-, 40-, and 105-mm explosive shells.   

That’s a lot of potential for collateral damage.  I just hope that the people now employing the Son of Puff remember that “a dragon lives forever, but not so little boys.”  

--EFP