Search and Destroy: US Tactics, 1964-68

Two Wars, Not One

By the spring of 1965 the United States had committed itself to a war it did not understand. Operation Rolling Thunder began on 2 March 1965, the first US combat marines waded ashore at Da Nang on 8 March, and by July President Johnson had authorised the deployment of 175,000 ground troops. American commanders measured the war in firepower, miles of road controlled and enemy bodies counted. The Vietcong measured it in patience, terrain and political legitimacy. The mismatch between the two ways of fighting — one industrial, the other rural and political — explains why the world’s strongest military spent four years escalating without coming any closer to victory.

Operation Rolling Thunder

Operation Rolling Thunder was the longest sustained bombing campaign in US history. It was meant to do three things at once: break Hanoi’s political will to support the southern insurgency, cut the supply lines running south down the Ho Chi Minh Trail, and reassure the wobbling government in Saigon that Washington was serious. Over forty-three months B-52s, F-4 Phantoms and F-105 Thunderchiefs dropped roughly 643,000 tons of bombs on the North — more than the United States had dropped in the entire Pacific theatre in the Second World War. Targets included roads, railways, bridges, fuel depots and factories. American commanders argued that another six months of bombing would crack the regime; six months later they argued the same again.

Rolling Thunder failed for reasons that were structural, not technical. North Vietnam was an agricultural country with little industry to bomb; what industry it had was dispersed, often into Chinese border regions where US aircraft were forbidden to fly. Soviet anti-aircraft missiles and MiG fighters made the bombing increasingly costly: by the end of the campaign around 900 US aircraft had been lost. The Ho Chi Minh Trail, which threaded through Laos and Cambodia, was repaired faster than US aircraft could destroy it — in places by tens of thousands of conscripted civilians moving by bicycle and shovel. North Vietnamese morale, far from cracking, hardened.

Search and Destroy

On the ground General William Westmoreland chose search and destroy. US battalions were lifted by helicopter into Vietcong-controlled countryside, drew the enemy into open contact and then called down artillery, gunships and tactical air strikes. The aim was attrition: to kill more Vietcong and North Vietnamese soldiers than Hanoi could replace. Success was measured not in ground held but in the body count — the daily tally of enemy dead reported up the chain of command. Officers were promoted on rising kill totals. The metric corroded itself: dead civilians were entered as Vietcong, the same casualty was counted twice on different reports, and a brutal logic spread through some units that ‘if it’s dead and Vietnamese, it’s VC’.

Search and destroy won most of its battles. In the Ia Drang valley in November 1965 the 7th Cavalry inflicted around ten times more casualties than they took. At the same time the tactic surrendered the political war. US troops moved through villages, fought through them, and then helicoptered out the next day; the Vietcong returned that night and asked the villagers what the Americans had done. By 1967 a US Defense Department study concluded that the war was producing roughly two new Vietcong recruits for every one killed.

Chemical Weapons: Agent Orange and Napalm

Search and destroy depended on being able to see the enemy in jungle terrain that Westmoreland’s commanders called ‘triple canopy’. The US response was to remove the jungle. Between 1962 and 1971, Operation Ranch Hand sprayed roughly 19 million gallons of herbicide over South Vietnam, around 11 million of which were Agent Orange. The aim was to defoliate the canopy and to destroy Vietcong rice crops. The herbicide contained the dioxin TCDD, since linked to cancers and to birth defects in both Vietnamese civilians and US veterans. American forces also used napalm — petrol thickened with a gelling agent so that it sticks to whatever it hits and burns at around 1,200 degrees Celsius. Photographs of napalmed civilians, especially Nick Ut’s 1972 image of nine-year-old Phan Thi Kim Phuc running naked from a strike, would become some of the war’s defining anti-war evidence.

Vietcong Guerrilla Tactics

The guerrilla warfare the Vietcong fought against this firepower turned American strengths into liabilities. Where the Americans wanted decisive battles, the Vietcong refused them. Small mobile units ambushed patrols and then disappeared into the jungle. Roads, tracks and rice paddies were seeded with booby traps and punji-stick pits; one Pentagon study estimated that around eleven per cent of US casualties in Vietnam came from booby traps rather than direct fire. Tunnels — most famously the Cu Chi network north of Saigon, around 250 kilometres of underground passages with kitchens, hospitals and command rooms — allowed Vietcong fighters to vanish even from territory the Americans had ‘cleared’.

Above all the Vietcong lived among the rural population. They wore peasant clothes, slept in peasant huts, and depended on peasant food and intelligence. The American principle ‘don’t fight the enemy you can see’ ran into the problem that the Vietcong were almost never visible until they fired. Tunnel networks and the Trail through Laos and Cambodia gave the insurgency strategic depth that no amount of US firepower could subtract.