World: Building Up the ARVN

Though the battle headlines—and of late the casualty figures—emphasize the role of U.S. fighting men in Viet Nam, the largest body of troops on either side of the war is still the Army of the Republic of South Viet Nam, some 608,000 soldiers strong. For a small country (pop. 16 million), this is a remarkably large force; it is as if the U.S. (pop. 199 million) had 8,000,000 men in uniform (instead of 3,000,000 in all services). More than 30% of the men aged 16 to 45 in South Viet Nam are in uniform, and that percentage will soon rise even higher. Last week, as part of the overall buildup of Allied forces agreed upon in Washington last month, Premier Nguyen Cao Ky announced that an extra 69,000 men will be added to the army, known to Americans in Viet Nam as ARVN (rhymes with Marvin).

Phantom Troops. The increase comes at a time when the South Vietnamese army is in transition, gradually shifting half its units from search-and-destroy operations—some quite desultory—to providing security for villagers and government pacification teams. Some 17,000 of the new soldiers, gathered by conscription, will go into the Popular Forces—the 171,000 militiamen who now defend the villages and hamlets. Another 33,000 will join the 142,000-man Regional Forces, which are roughly similar in structure to the U.S. National Guard. About 30,000 are destined for duty in the 285,000-man regular army, most of them as replacements for 20,000 “phantom troops” that Saigon discovered did not in fact exist, after the U.S. installed a data-processing system for the ARVN and gave each infantryman a serial number.

The regular army is now spread through the country’s four corps areas in ten infantry divisions, an armored division, an airborne division and 20 elite, red-bereted ranger battalions. Though more and more units are being assigned as shields for pacification efforts, government troops are still out hunting the enemy. In the Delta, the war “is still largely a South Vietnamese one, with three ARVN divisions working alongside one U.S. division. In the scrub jungles around Saigon, South Vietnamese units participate in every major U.S. search-and-destroy mission; several thousand ARVN men joined in Operation Junction City last February. Even in the war along the DMZ, South Vietnamese rangers went in with the U.S. Marines in the invasion of the zone’s southern half in May and accounted for over 300 enemy dead.

As Good as Koreans? South Viet Nam’s units vary tremendously in esprit and fighting ability. Some 115,000 soldiers deserted last year—almost one in five. This year a tough new law has cut the rate in half, but the problem of morale persists. Some harsh critics would write off up to three-quarters’ of the overall South Vietnamese forces as effective military units. And the critics are by no means all West Pointers. “I wonder if we will ever be as good as the Koreans,” Armed Forces Chief of Staff General Cao Van Vien recently said to a friend. Of the ARVN’s notori ously bad 25th division in the Delta, Vien says: “It is the worst division in the army—and perhaps in any army.”

One of the things that irritate U.S. officers is that too often one ARVN unit will not come to the aid of another when the going gets tough. One night last May, a lone squad of Viet Cong—a dozen men—staged an attack on the headquarters of a 25th division battalion, killing 31 ARVN soldiers and three U.S. advisers. The battalion’s three rifle companies were dug in a scant 300 yards away—and stayed there listening to the shooting while their comrades died.

Few ARVN units are willing to move at night—they fear ambush—and they often recess the war for the weekend while officers whip off to Saigon to see their families or make the bar-hostess rounds. Patrols sometimes play transistor radios on search-and-destroy missions to warn the enemy away. More than one ARVN unit has radioed back to its headquarters that it has taken some key objective when actually it is holed up in a safe spot miles away. And the South Vietnamese are notoriously disrespectful of private property, frequently taking chickens, pigs and other peasant possessions as booty.

Understandable Reasons. Shocking to the professional U.S. adviser as such performances may be, there are some understandable reasons for them. The Vietnamese have been fighting for 20 years, in successive generations of young men, and the whole military fabric is frayed by the invisible cumulative fatigue of what seems like endless war. The long years of combat have taken their toll in officers, often the best; so, too, have the coups and intrigues of Saigon politics over the years.

The leadership gap is in fact the ARVN’s greatest difficulty. Where able officers still lead, South Vietnamese units fight well. But able officers are all too few, and the rest are often chosen for their social position or their political ties—and often, too, become preoccupied with the graft that has long been part of an officer’s perks in Asia.

Along with spotty leadership, the soldier in the ranks suffers from other liabilities. He is fighting an ethnic brother, and sometimes a brother in fact. Unlike the U.S. soldier in Viet Nam, who knows he will not have to fight a day longer than one year, draftees in the ARVN ranks face a three-year tour in combat. Also unlike U.S. units, Saigon ranger, airborne and marine units often spend 60 to 90 days at a stretch out in the field. In the ARVN, a division commands only two artillery battalions v. the four available to an American division. U.S. air and artillery do back up the Vietnamese forces, of course, but Americans naturally support their own forces first, and there can be long delays before help comes for a beleaguered government force.

Building Pigpens. Well aware of the South Vietnamese army’s inadequacies, the Vietnamese joint general staff is at work on plans to reorganize its forces “from top to bottom,” as Ky puts it. One proposal would disband the four corps commands and the ten divisions, with their tempting opportunities for warlord graft and corruption, and create more flexible units that would specialize in pacification efforts, counterguerrilla action, and search-and-destroy missions. With U.S. help, General Vien has launched several new training programs designed to help soldiers learn everything from setting guerrilla-style ambushes to assisting villagers in building pigpens.

South Viet Nam’s version of West Point, the National Military Academy at Dalat, has added two years to its curriculum—plus the innovation that officer candidates can be flunked if they fail to measure up. Next year South Viet Nam will begin its version of a war college for mid-career officers. So high is the enthusiasm for it that the general in charge of central ARVN training wants to be in the first batch of students. Americans in Viet Nam like to recall that only a little more than a decade ago there was an army with much the same set of problems now plaguing South Viet Nam: the Koreans, today as feared by the Viet Cong as any soldiers fighting in Viet Nam. Though the South Vietnamese army has a long way to go to measure up to its potential, U.S. advisers take heart from its new efforts.