9781422279007

VIETNAM WAR

Chapter One THE FATAL COMMITMENT

E ven as Rolling Thunder was being fought in the skies over North Vietnam, the military situation on the ground in South Vietnam was deteriorating steadily and, it seemed, inevitably. At a time early in March 1965, the Military Assistance Command Vietnam (MACV) forecast was that if the current trends persisted, South Vietnamese strength would soon be confined to district and provincial capitals, which would be essentially unmanageable because of the huge numbers of refugees which would overwhelm local services and administrative capabilities. In his capacity as head of the MACV, General Westmoreland believed and said that South Vietnam could be

Words to Understand Communist: A person who believes in communism or is a member of a communist party. DMZ (Demilitarized zone) An area in which there is an agreement between nations forbidding military activities. Insurgency: A revolt against a government but less organized than a revolution.

wholly in Communist hands within 12 months. Early in 1965, therefore, the only hope of bringing the Communists to a halt, if not actually defeating them,

seemed to lie not with the South Vietnamese ground forces, with limited U.S. technical and logistical support, but with U.S. air power striking deep into North Vietnam in Rolling Thunder, in the misconceived hope of persuading the North Vietnamese to negotiate, and of severing the lines of communication (in particular the portion of the Ho Chi Minh Trail in eastern Laos) by which the North Vietnamese were able to nourish and bolster the Communist ground effort in South Vietnam. In the light of the Communist attacks on the bases at Pleiku and Qui Nhon, however, Westmoreland had very little confidence in the ability of the South Vietnamese army to provide an effective defense of the airfields on which U.S. aircraft were based for the support of the selfsame South Vietnamese army. Westmoreland’s intelligence staff estimated that no fewer than 12 Communist battalions, with 6,000 men, lay within striking distance of the air base at Da Nang, a large and crucially important facility containing large matériel dumps but protected by only a comparatively small and badly-trained South

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