The Foreign Service Journal, March 2007

a bowling shirt). But I think we all came to respect and appreciate what each side brought to a very tough job. The “job” varied, depending mostly on how close you were to the shooting war. CORDS built infrastructure — like schools, roads and fishponds — provided supplies, ran training sessions on everything from public adminis- tration to farming and “advised” South Vietnamese offi- cials who were often a decade our seniors. While the CORDS teams that trained local militias were made up entirely of American military, CORDS civilians helped provide security assessments and, especially in exposed areas, supported counterintelligence efforts and often coped with military threats. Those threats got more seri- ous as U.S. combat troops (whom we rightly regarded as our protectors) began to go home. I got to Vietnam in early 1971, at the midpoint of the withdrawal process. I wasn’t there to fight, but I quickly learned that the word “noncombatant” didn’t mean much where I was posted, in Hué, a provincial capital just 50 miles south of the Demilitarized Zone. A week into my tour, a sniper’s bullet whistled past my ear on the main highway. Joe Jackson, the burly Army major who was dri- ving, yelled at me to hold on and duck as he zigzagged his jeep to spoil the sniper’s aim. Snipers or not, it was the U.S. government’s policy not to issue weapons to civilian CORDS advisers in Vietnam, even to those of us in distant and dangerous outposts. The reason was not principle, but PR — and here begin the lessons for America’s war in Iraq. Shifting to “Vietnamization” Sometime in 1969 the White House, faced with unre- lenting facts on the ground and under siege from the public, had quietly made the decision that America couldn’t win its war in Vietnam. President Nixon and his national security adviser, Henry Kissinger, didn’t put it that way, of course. America was a superpower, and it was inconceivable that it could lose a war to a third-rate nation whose soldiers lived on rice and hid in holes in the ground. So the White House conceived an elaborate strategy to mask the U.S. defeat: slowly withdraw combat troops over several years, while focusing the remaining Americans on training the South Vietnamese to fight the war — and build a viable nation — on their own. As a key part of this strategy, we gave the Saigon government a series of performance benchmarks which, if unmet, would trigger a total U.S. withdrawal while shifting blame to the South Vietnamese for the debacle that would follow our leaving. This strat- egy was called “Vietnamization,” and it cost at least 10,000 more American lives, and countless more Vietnamese ones, plus billions of dollars over the next several years. It was a rigged game from the start. All but the wildest dreamers inWashington knew that the South Vietnamese would not and could not meet our benchmarks — espe- cially our demand that they create a stable central gov- ernment that would attract popular support strong and broad enough to control the rivalries that had ripped the country’s fabric for a thousand years. During the 18 months I was in Vietnam, I met almost no Americans in the field who regarded Vietnamization as a serious mili- tary strategy with any chance of success. In fact, more years of American training could not make a difference in the outcome of the war because the core missing element was not South Vietnamese combat or leadership skills, or supplies of arms, but belief in a nation worth fighting for. The White House hoped that Vietnamization would keep the house of cards upright for at least a couple of years, providing what CIA veteran Frank Snepp (quoting a Kissinger memo) famously called a “decent interval” that could mask the American defeat by declaring that the fate of South Vietnam now was the responsibility of the South Vietnamese. If they didn’t want freedom badly enough to win, well, we had done our best. To make this deceitful drama work, however, the pull- out had to be gradual and easily explained to the American people. The U.S. training/advisory force left behind also had to be large enough and exposed enough to provide visual signs of our commitment on the evening news. Part of that force were U.S. military officers attached to South Vietnamese Army (known as ARVN) units. The rest of it was comprised of CORDS person- nel. Pictures of unarmed American advisers like me shaking hands with happy peasants in the countryside would support the lie that Vietnamization was serious and succeeding. By June 1971 the U.S. 101st Airborne Division, sta- tioned just outside of Hué, had all but stood down from active fighting. The 101st had provided much of the security that allowed CORDS teams to travel more or less safely in the province that surrounded Hué, building schools and roads and training local officials. Even as that protection ebbed, we were still expected to go into rural F O C U S M A R C H 2 0 0 7 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 49