The War: Digging Out the V.C.

Riding in 430 helicopters, they came toSouth Viet Nam as the lethal, leapfrogging heralds and exemplars of a new concept of air mobility in waging ground war. It was just after President Johnson had announced a massive U.S. buildup in mid-1965, and the 18,000 men of the U.S. 1st Cavalry (Airmobile) were given a single vital mission. Their job was to swoop down out of the skies on the enemy’s big main-force units wherever they could be found, engage them in battle and then whirl back to the landing pads of the Air Cav “golf course”at An Khe in the Central Highlands to await the next alarm. Brilliantly executed, the assignment helped to turn the tide against the Communists. The Air Cav carried out 53 major leap-and-strike operations in 52 weeks ranging from the la Drang Valley near Cambodia to the coastal plains of the South China Sea, killing 5,000 North Vietnamese and Viet Cong soldiers and capturing another 1,200.

Lately the Air Cav has had a different and less dramatic mission—but one that may be even more important. In the populous, rice-rich and Viet Cong-ridden province of Binh Dinh on the South China Sea, midway between Saigon and Danang, it is fighting what the Pentagon calls “the intermediate war.” That is the layer of the war that lies between the glamorous big-unit battles and the paddy-level process of pacification, and combines a little of both. Its aim: to root the Viet Cong headmen, tax collectors and policemen out of the Binh Dinh villages that they have so long owned.

Denying Food & Taxes. In a typical operation in the intermediate war, an Air Cav company quietly surrounds a village in the predawn hours, throwing a cordon around its sleeping inhabitants. At dawn, they tighten the noose, moving into the village and taking watchful control. They do nothing else unless, as often happens, a Viet Cong among the villagers foolishly tries to escape the net. Next, in flutters a giant Chinook helicopter carrying a contingent of Vietnamese National Police armed with burp guns and long metal rods. The policemen question and search the villagers, poke the ground with their rods in search of holes hiding Viet Cong or arms. They usually flush out both, and load them into the Chinook. With that, the police and the Cavalrymen withdraw. Usually within two hours the village is alone and tranquil again—minus its Viet Cong.

The V.C. can, of course, try to come back again; but then so may the Air Cav. Some hard-core villages have received the Air Cav’s cordon-and-search treatment no fewer than eleven times. In one three-month stretch recently, the Air Cav conducted 276 such operations—screening 48,470 people, searching 16,111 houses, capturing 789 North Vietnamese and Viet Cong and killing 70. In the process, the Air Cav is denying food, taxes, recruits and intelligence to the main-force Communist units hiding in the hills above Binh Dinh, and destroying an infrastructure that the Communists have painstakingly built up among the peasants for 20 years.

Novel Harassment. The Air Cav’s quick reflexes are still always ready to respond to major ground action when heliborne muscle is needed, or to tangle with any main-force units that dare come out and fight in Binh Dinh. Since few any longer do, the division is using its airpower to harass the Viet Cong in other novel ways. One is Operation Snatch, which is employed whenever a roving Air Cav chopper spots a suspiciously large group of people in the countryside. The Cavalrymen immediately dive down to pick up a few suspects for questioning, a tactic that discourages the Viet Cong from moving around amid the protective coloration of groups of harvesters or peasants on their way to market.

The Air Cav’s switch in roles is only part of a gradual change in the use of U.S. Army units throughout Viet Nam. The U.S. 199th Brigade has been circling Saigon since December in an exclusively security operation named “Fairfax,” which is designed to keep the Viet Cong from building up strength too near the capital. The brigade’s search partners are not police but Vietnamese Rangers, working in completely integrated “supercompanies” made up of one U.S. and one Vietnamese com pany. The U.S. 9th Division is also involved in intermediate warfare, working closely with the ARVN’s 25th Division in Long An province in the Delta. All told, some 50% of U.S. forces in Viet Nam are now engaged in “operations in support of the security structure”—digging the Viet Cong out of the countryside where most of the Vietnamese people live and where ultimately the war must be won or lost.