The other war
The Vietnam War is usually remembered through its battles, but American and South Vietnamese leaders always described the conflict as having a second front: the effort to win the loyalty and secure the safety of the rural population. The word for it was pacification, and the pacification programme was a standing item in every official report. In 1967 this effort was reorganised, the South Vietnamese held national elections and the war’s effect on civilians became harder to ignore. The title speaks of escalation, and the military build-up was indeed continuing, but this article concerns the parts of the year that had little to do with the large operations.
Why pacification mattered
The idea behind pacification was simple. The enemy’s guerrillas lived among the villagers and drew food, recruits and information from them. If a village could be protected and its people given a reason to support the government, the enemy would be starved of support. Large sweeps could clear an area, but they did not hold it, and units that left often saw the enemy return. Critics in the American military and government said that the war was being fought as if it were mainly a contest of firepower, when it was in large part a contest for control of the villages.
Earlier schemes had a mixed record. The strategic hamlet programme of the early 1960s, which moved peasants into fortified villages, was widely considered a failure, and by 1967 the word “pacification” carried that history with it. Operations such as Cedar Falls had also shown how military clearing of an area could mean forcibly removing its people, a method that sat uneasily with the aim of winning them over.
CORDS and Robert Komer
One of the main problems before 1967 was organisation. Various American agencies, including the military, the State Department, the aid agency and the CIA, ran their own programmes, and coordination was poor. In May 1967 the United States created a combined structure called CORDS, short for Civil Operations and Revolutionary Development Support. It brought civilian and military pacification work under a single chain of command within the military headquarters, led by Robert Komer, a White House aide who had been pressing for such a change. Komer was a civilian but was given a senior position as a deputy to General Westmoreland, which gave him unusual authority over military advisers.
CORDS put advisory teams in provinces and districts across the country. It worked with the South Vietnamese Regional and Popular Forces, local militia that provided village security, and with programmes of rural development, aid and local government. A programme of “Revolutionary Development” teams of South Vietnamese cadres was meant to live in hamlets and carry out projects. Later in the war the structure also became associated with efforts against the enemy’s political organisation in the countryside, although the best-known of those efforts developed mainly after 1967.
Assessments of CORDS remain mixed. Supporters say it was the first serious attempt to coordinate the civilian side of the war. Critics say that its measurements, which rated hamlets on a scale of security, encouraged optimistic reporting and that many of the gains in security were fragile. The sceptical view had considerable force after the Tet Offensive of 1968, when enemy forces appeared in places that official ratings had called secure.
The September elections
South Vietnam’s political system was also changing. After a period of instability in which generals replaced one another, a new constitution was completed in the spring of 1967, and elections followed. On 3 September 1967 voters chose a president and vice president, and also a senate.
The military leaders had to decide who would run. Nguyen Van Thieu, the head of state, and Nguyen Cao Ky, the prime minister, reportedly negotiated their way to a joint ticket, with Thieu for president and Ky for vice president. They won with roughly a third of the votes in a crowded field. A civilian candidate, Truong Dinh Dzu, who campaigned for negotiations, came second and did better than many observers had expected; he was later arrested after the election.
American officials hoped the elections would give the government more legitimacy. Observers, including a group of American visitors, judged the voting itself to be reasonably open, though critics said the campaign was shaped by the military’s control of the process and that candidates likely to attract strong support had been excluded. Whether the result strengthened the government in the eyes of its people is still debated. The vote at least showed that a large number of South Vietnamese were willing to take part, even where enemy forces threatened to disrupt it.
Refugees and civilians
The war displaced very large numbers of people. Bombing, artillery and ground operations, along with forced relocation and fear of both sides, pushed villagers into towns and camps. Estimates of the numbers vary, and they differ depending on what counts as a refugee and when counting starts, but they are generally given in the millions over the course of the war. Cities such as Saigon grew rapidly, and many new arrivals lived in crowded settlements with poor services.
The effects were disputed at the time. Some officials argued that moving people out of contested areas had a protective purpose and could shift the population toward government-held zones. Others, including some in American relief organisations and in the press, said that it was uprooting rural society and creating resentment that helped the enemy. In 1967 congressional inquiries and press reports drew attention to civilian casualties and refugees, adding to the criticism that the war was damaging the people it was supposed to protect. Such concerns were part of the wider debate described in accounts of hawks and doves.
A war measured differently
The non-combat war of 1967 was neither simply won nor simply lost. It produced a better-organised American effort, a more formal South Vietnamese political structure and a large humanitarian problem that no organisation was prepared to address. What it did not produce was a decisive shift of rural loyalties, and the events of early 1968 showed how far there was still to go.