The March of Folly_ From Troy to Vietnam - Barbara Wertheim Tuchman [186]
Diem reacted badly and “seemed to wonder,” according to the American Ambassador, “whether the United States was getting ready to back out on Vietnam as, he suggested, we had done in Laos.” Credibility had to be maintained and deterioration halted. Without any clear-cut decision or plan of mission, the troops began to go. United States instruction teams required combat support units, air reconnaissance required fighter escorts and helicopter teams, counter-insurgency required 600 Green Berets to train the Vietnamese in operations against the Viet-Cong. Equipment kept pace—assault craft and naval patrol boats, armored personnel carriers, short-take-off and transport planes, trucks, radar installations, Quonset huts, airfields. Employed in support of ARVN (South Vietnamese Army) combat operations, all these required manning by United States personnel, who willy-nilly entered a shooting war. When Special Forces units directed ARVN units against the guerrillas and met fire, they returned it. Helicopter gunships, when fired on, did the same.
Increased activity required more than a training command. In February 1962 a full field command under the acronym MACV (Military Assistance Command Vietnam) superseded MAAG with a three-star general, Paul D. Harkins, former Chief of Staff to Maxwell Taylor in Korea, in command. If a date is needed for the beginning of the American war in Vietnam, the establishment of Mac-Vee, as it became known, will serve.
By mid-1962 American forces in Vietnam numbered 8000, by the end of the year over 11,000, ten months later, 17,000. United States soldiers served alongside ARVN units at every level from battalion to division and general staff. They planned operations and accompanied Vietnamese units into the field from six to eight weeks at a time. They airlifted troops and supplies, built jungle airstrips, flew helicopter rescue and medical evacuation teams, trained Vietnamese pilots, coordinated artillery fire and air support, introduced defoliation flights north of Saigon. They also took casualties: 14 killed or wounded in 1961, 109 in 1962, 489 in 1963.
This was war by the Executive, without Congressional authorization, and in the face of evasions or denials by the President, war virtually without public knowledge, though not without notice. Accused by the Republican National Committee of being “less than candid with the American people” about the involvement in Vietnam, and asked if it were not time to “drop the pretense” about “advisers,” Kennedy, evidently stung, replied at a news conference in February 1962, “We have not sent combat troops there—in the generally understood sense of the word. We have increased our training mission and our logistics support …” and this was “as frank as he could be” consistent with that unfailing refuge, “our security needs in the area.” It did not satisfy. “The United States is now involved in an undeclared war in South Vietnam,” wrote James Reston on the same day. “This is well known to the Russians, the Chinese Communists and everyone else concerned except the American people.”
The American infusion succeeded for a while in strengthening the Vietnamese effort. Operations began going well. The “strategic hamlet” program, most acclaimed and favored project of the year, sponsored by Diem’s brother Nhu and highly regarded by the Americans, succeeded in actually turning back the Viet-Cong in many places, if it did not endear the Diem government to the rural population. Designed to isolate the guerrillas from the people, depriving them of food and recruits, the program forcibly relocated villagers from their own communities to fortified “agrovilles” of approximately 300 families, often with little but the clothes on their backs,