As 1967 opened, William Westmoreland’s assessment of the war in South Vietnam had changed little. Though U. S. forces had punished enemy main force units in 1966, MACV’s commander believed that North Vietnamese regiments and divisions still were capable of attacking selected targets throughout all four corps tactical zones. Moreover, the dual threat to the GVN remained. Despite the North’s capacity for large-scale attacks, Westmoreland surmised that U. S. military pressure had forced the enemy to revert, at least partially, to guerrilla operations aimed at destroying governmental effectiveness in the South Vietnamese hamlets and village. In short, both bully boys and termites warranted continued attention. The 1967 Combined Campaign Plan thus upheld Westmoreland’s earlier views on the war. South Vietnamese units would maintain their focus on pacification efforts, while the Americans would engage in assault operations to destroy major enemy base areas and deny enemy access to the people. Neither of these efforts, Westmoreland judged, would result in a decisive victory during the coming year. MACV’s objective simply was to extend government controlled areas while pummeling Vietcong and NVA units. As COMUSMACV concluded to his superiors, the enemy “is waging against us a conflict of strategic political attrition in which, according to his equation, victory equals time plus pressure.”
This continuity of strategic thought found expression on the battlefield. On January 8, U. S. and ARVN forces launched Operation Cedar Falls. The first corps-sized operation of the war, Cedar Falls targeted the “Iron Triangle,” a Vietcong refuge northwest of Saigon. Planners intended to evacuate the entire population within the triangle’s sixty square miles to facilitate U. S. advantages in mobility and fi repower. After relocating the civilians, the Americans would designate the area a “specified strike zone,” destroying residual enemy forces and infrastructure while denuding the jungle of its protective cover. Four days of intensive B-52 bombing preceded the ground assault. On the 8th, twenty-three battalions jumped off in a classic hammer and anvil attack. Two brigades established blocking positions west of the Saigon River, while units from the 1st Infantry Division, 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment, and 173rd Airborne Brigade assaulted from various points around the triangle to close the trap. It was a masterpiece of conventional military planning and execution. After nineteen days, the allies seemingly had cleared the Iron Triangle. Westmoreland, cognizant that such operations could not be undertaken as ends unto themselves, reported Cedar Falls had “permitted a speedup in the pacification area close to Saigon.”
MACV’s assessment proved misleading. Cedar Falls had not advanced the larger goals of pacification. Villages deemed insurgent strongholds, like Ben Suc in the center of the Iron Triangle, were conceded to the enemy and became targets for wholesale destruction. One correspondent believed that the army had “reversed the search-and-destroy method. This time, they would destroy first and search later.” Nineteen-year-old David Ross, a medic in the 1st Infantry Division, found the American approach equally disturbing. “So what we were trying to do was either win the village over or, if we couldn’t do that, move the people out, burn the village, put the people in concentration camps and designate the area a free-fi re zone.” As had been the case throughout 1966, military needs trumped problems associated with forced relocations. American officers presumed all civilian males in the triangle were VC. MACV concluded that the military necessity of destroying enemy sanctuaries during Cedar Falls far outweighed popular resentment caused by the creation of thousands of refugees. Staff officers and commanders instead took solace in their traditional metrics of progress: 720 enemy killed, 1,100 bunkers and 400 tunnels destroyed, and 495,610 pages of enemy documents captured. So sure of its approach- one senior officer called Cedar Falls a “decisive turning point . . . and a blow from which the VC in this area may never recover”-MACV followed its foray into the Iron Triangle with its largest operation of the war to date.
In February, Westmoreland struck into War Zone C with aspirations of locating and destroying the 9th Vietcong Division, that troublesome unit which had eluded annihilation during Operation Attleboro in November 1966. MACV hoped also to unearth and dismantle the Central Office of South Vietnam (COSVN), the leadership agency Hanoi relied upon to control and direct insurgent activities in the south. Code-named Junction City, the operation kicked off on February 22 and lasted for more than eighty days. Thirty thousand U. S. troops swept into a combat zone leveled by air force high explosives in hopes of pinning down their elusive foes. Initial MACV assessments of Junction City, mostly emphasizing high enemy body counts, overlooked the operation’s larger failures. Instead of destroying COSVN, American forces only drove VC headquarters and supply depots into bordering Cambodian sanctuaries. As in the past, the 9th PLAF Division, though bloodied, decided when to avoid battle and conserve manpower. Additionally, Vietcong in War Zone C quietly returned when American units departed to other missions. Perhaps most importantly, Saigon made few political inroads with the local population after Junction City. Westmoreland might find satisfaction in the enemy’s reversion to small unit tactics, a fact which ostensibly helped Americans cover pacification missions, but hard truths remained. After three months of difficult fighting in early 1967, it appeared to many observers at home that the American mission in Vietnam was drawing no closer to its overall objectives.
MACV’s positive assessments notwithstanding, evident shortcomings in operations like Cedar Falls and Junction City led to mounting criticism of Westmoreland’s strategy. Presidential advisors Robert Komer and Robert McNamara argued increasingly that enemy attrition alone was not enough to produce victory. With Cedar Falls winding down, Komer warned the president of a “grievous lack of integrated, detailed civil/military pacification planning in Vietnam.” The typically blunt Komer wondered aloud if Westmoreland was moving fast enough to keep up with the enemy’s shift to a “more guerrilla-type strategy.” Successful pacification depended on clearing and holding an area, yet two weeks after Cedar Falls a senior officer in the 1st Infantry Division found “the Iron Triangle was again literally crawling with what appeared to be Viet Cong.” Such discrepancies between reality and MACV’s optimistic evaluations highlighted the American staff’s chronic difficulties in measuring battlefield progress in South Vietnam. In fact, MACV’s unpreparedness to assess progress in the “other war” would become one of the most important aspects of the conflict in 1967.
As Westmoreland dutifully placed increased emphasis on revolutionary development (RD) in 1967, MACV struggled to implement a new system for measuring pacification progress and effectiveness. Unfortunately, U. S. Army staff officers and commanders had not yet resolved their issues with assessing the war of attrition before this change in strategic emphasis took hold. Believing that he was fighting two complementary wars, Westmoreland possessed flawed measurement tools for evaluating both, and time was not on his side. A growing chorus of Americans, both at home and abroad, shared Komer’s concerns that MACV was not moving fast enough. More and more, a perception of stalemate hung over the war. A throng of vocal critics began to question openly the path that Americans had taken in Southeast Asia. With the war seemingly drifting, MACV’s inability to demonstrate tangible and reliable progress in 1967 prompted a White House-led media campaign to shore up American popular support at year’s end. Unfortunately, the president’s aggressive marketing activities would hold disastrous implications when the enemy’s Tet offensive commenced in early 1968.
