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.Taylor (center), chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, arrive in SouthVietnam on a fact-finding mission for President Kennedy.General PaulHarkins (right) guides them through a field headquarters in Saigon,September 28, 1963.(National Archives) 36VIETNAM WARThe men of the U.S.Army Special Forces were assigned a special rolein this new strategy.The Special Forces, headquartered in Fort Bragg,North Carolina, had been established in 1952 to wage unconventionalwarfare: fighting behind enemy lines, living off the land, and enlistingand training local populations for guerrilla operations.In Vietnam theSpecial Forces would find themselves used for a somewhat differentpurpose fighting guerrillas with guerrilla-like tactics.The first SpecialForces units had been sent to Vietnam in 1957 to train ARVN troops incounterinsurgency tactics.Kennedy believed that Special Forces repre-sented the kind of flexible response capability the United Statesneeded to counter the Communists in such places as Vietnam.Heordered their expansion and authorized them to wear the distinctiveheadgear that gave them their popular nickname, the Green Berets. By the spring of 1961, Kennedy had already sent an additional 400Special Forces soldiers to Vietnam.The Fifth Special Forces Group wasset up in September 1961 to coordinate the mission of the Green Beretsin South Vietnam.They shifted their activities from training ARVNTroops of South Vietnam s army watch training demonstration bymembers of U.S.military advisory group attached to their division,October 21, 1961.(National Archives) 37KENNEDY S WARRobert McNamara s Second ThoughtsIN 1995 ROBERT McNAMARA PUBLISHED A MEMOIRentitled In Retrospect.It had been 28 years since he had resigned assecretary of defense, at the height of the Vietnam War, to assume thepresidency of the World Bank.For all those years he had remainedsilent about the conflict that in the early 1960s had sometimes beencalled McNamara s War. Now, in looking back on the Vietnam War, he confessed that he andhis fellow policy makers in the Kennedy and Johnson administrationshad been wrong, terribly wrong. The war in Vietnam had been a civilwar, not a war of foreign aggression.The enemy that the United Statesfought in Vietnam was motivated primarily by nationalism, not by adesire to spread communism beyond Vietnam s borders.The fall ofSouth Vietnam posed no serious threat to U.S.security interests.Amer-ican leaders, both political and military, had an unfounded faith in thepower of technologically sophisticated weaponry to counter a popularguerrilla war.The United States could and should have withdrawn fromSouth Vietnam in 1963, when less than 100 Americans had been killedthere.And finally, the United States did not have the God-given rightto shape every nation in our own image or as we choose. McNamara s second thoughts won him few friends.Vietnam vet-erans were outraged by his suggestion that they had been sacrificed inan unwinnable war. McNamara should volunteer to spend a few dayseach month at some [Veteran s Administration] hospital, one retiredair force major wrote. Maybe then he d see what his missed opportu-nities cost others. The New York Times declared editorially that theformer defense secretary s regret cannot be huge enough to balancethe books for our dead soldiers.The ghosts of those unlived lives circleclose around Mr.McNamara. soldiers to advising South Vietnam s Civilian Irregular Defense Group(CIDG).The CIDG enrolled men from the remote hill tribes of SouthVietnam, such as the Montagnards who lived along the country s ruggedwestern frontier with Cambodia and Laos, into a paramilitary (nonreg-ular army) force.The CIDG forces specialized in small-scale backcoun-try operations, attacking with sudden raids and ambushes, designed toharass and spy on the Viet Cong.The Special Forces advisers lived inremote villages under primitive conditions.They shared living quarters 38VIETNAM WARand food with the tribesmen and often forged close relationships withthem.In fact, the Montagnards who were looked down on by otherVietnamese felt a greater loyalty toward the Americans who armed andpaid them than to the South Vietnamese government.The Special Forces set up 18 CIDG border surveillance camps by1964 and had nearly 20,000 CIDG fighters in arms by 1965.From thebeginning, the American public developed a special affection for thesoldiers of the Special Forces; they were celebrated in one magazinearticle as the Harvard PhDs of warfare, and inspired the only popu-lar song to come out of the Vietnam war, S.Sgt.Barry Sadler s 1965 hit, Ballad of the Green Berets. Highly trained and motivated, many ofthe men of the Special Forces signed up for repeated tours of duty inVietnam.But by the mid-1960s their efforts would be overshadowedby those of more conventional U.S.military units assigned to Vietnam.The army s top brass, never as enthusiastic about counterinsurgencywarfare as Kennedy, were concerned that Special Forces units weredraining too many experienced combat veterans away from other armyunits.In 1970 the last Special Forces were withdrawn from Vietnam.American military strategy in Vietnam from 1961 to 1963 was two-pronged; while the Green Berets were out fighting an unconventionalwar in the bush, American advisers and equipment would be employedto help the South Vietnamese military fight a more effective conven-tional war against the Viet Cong.In August 1961 advisers were author-ized to accompany ARVN battalions and even company-sized units onfield operations.Soon afterward, American pilots began bombing raidsin support of ARVN operations.In October 1961 Kennedy sent Maxwell Taylor and Walt Rostow ona mission to assess the military situation in South Vietnam.Theyreturned to Washington two weeks later to report to the president.Tay-lor urged Kennedy to provide increased logistical support for theARVN, including air strikes and helicopters for troop transport andprotection.He also called for the dispatch of 8,000 U.S.combat troopsto provide security for American bases in South Vietnam
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