The Combined Action Platoon

Unique in the history of war 

Commemoration address for the Combined Action Platoon memorial at Marine Corps Museum
We who fought in the villages six decades ago have gathered here to dedicate this memorial to our fallen brothers. We thank LtGen Ron Christmas and MajGen Jim Lukeman for honoring their sacrifice.  

Historians remark upon the sheer audacity of the Combined Action Platoon (CAP). In the midst of a war with millions of combatants, twelve-man squads led by sergeants lived and died in villages amongst thousands of Vietnamese. Their mission: drive out the enemy, protect the villagers and train the farmers to defend themselves.1 In theory, those tiny squads, vastly outnumbered and isolated, should have been wiped out. In fact, they succeeded. Of the 209 villages protected by CAPs, not one reverted to enemy control.2 The CAP stands unique in America’s wars, never duplicated before or since.  

From 1966 through 1970, across hundreds of hamlets every mosquito-filled night, patrols of about five Marines and five farmers sneaked through the bush, with no night vision or on-call fires. To survive, they relied on stealth, laying down grazing fire, pitching grenades, and pulling back when incoming fire was too intense. Firefights were sudden and short, green and red tracers zipping past like dancing Christmas lights. Afterward, no one ventured into the kill zones. Only the next day might they hear from the villagers about enemy bodies carried off. No CAP ever relaxed. The peril of each night focused every Marine.  

During the day, CAP grunts ambled through the hamlets, eating duck eggs and bananas and peanuts, laughing and bartering with the villagers, respected but not feared. The ‘nghia quans’ (the farmers called PFs, or Popular Forces) patrolled and lived side by side with the Marines. Spending month after month inside the same few kilometers, the Marines and villagers came to know one another as human beings, with individual quirks. Six of the CAP Marines in this 1966 photo were killed in the besieged village of Binh Nghia.  

The village chief wrote a letter to the parents of Sergeant White, the CAP leader. Here is a direct quote:  

To Sgt. J.D. White Family … My name is trao, second village chief working with Sgt. White and Sq. Our people thank him very much, because he is very good man. Every day he is few to sleep he works too much … My people are poor and when they see a marine they very happy. When V.C. come to people, people come to talk to Sgt. Whte so Sgt. White can talk to P.F. and marine to fight V.C. Maybe die … I’ll say a Happy New Year to you. Jod bless you all …. Your friend always, Ho Yan Trao.3 

The cost was high. Of the 450,000 Marines who served in Vietnam, three percent were fatalities,4 rising to six percent among the combat battalions. In the CAPs, the fatality rate was above ten percent. The reason was that on average a CAP conducted a thousand patrols in a year. There was no embedded chain of command to ensure these patrols went out, no gunny, no first sergeant, no company commander. Instead, there was peer pressure. There were no nights off. In every CAP, sooner or later death called.  

Over five years, 540 CAP Marines were killed, while accounting for 4,900 enemy killed by rifle fire and grenades, with almost no employment of supporting arms.5 You don’t call in fire on the village where you live. Inflicting casualties on the enemy was only a means; the end objective was providing security and training the nghia quans (PFs). The CAPs weren’t interlinked; they were scattered across several thousand kilometers. Each CAP staked out five to seven square kilometers of paddies, shrubs and hooches, then fought to protect it.  

The ultimate test of the program came when the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese Army (NVA) launched the 1968 TET offensive. In the Marine area in northern I Corps, tens of thousands of NVA left the mountains to assault the cities. To get there, they had to pass through the hamlets guarded by CAP patrols. The CAPs absorbed fully 47% of all the enemy attacks.6 Forewarned through the network of villagers, for eleven straight days the CAPs held firm in daily combat. The NVA found no way through.   

At its peak, CAP platoons (squads really) extended across 800 widely scattered hamlets, protecting 500,000 villagers.7 This was accomplished by 2,200 CAP Marines, three percent of the Marine total force. Given that CAP was a force multiplier, why wasn’t it expanded into a countrywide strategy?  

The CAP focus upon population protection collided with the directive from the high command in Saigon to search for and destroy the NVA forces in the mountains. To quote from the official Marine history of 1968, “The problem was a lack of a warfighting (overall) strategy. There was no yardstick for measuring the amount of resources dedicated to Mission X vs Mission Y. The CAP was seen as a drain of manpower. In fact, it saved Marine lives.”8  

The high command in Saigon opposed the CAP program. Yet no top-level meeting with the subordinate Marine command was ever convened to resolve the conflicting strategies. The top commander in Vietnam, General William Westmoreland, criticized Marine tactics. His command disparaged the CAPs as “too manpower intensive and too slow in pacifying.”9 The command also consulted the British, whose top counterinsurgency expert, Sir Robert Thompson, concluded the opposite. He said CAP was “the best idea I have seen in Vietnam.”10 

After our troops left in 1972, Congress slashed aid to the South and forbade all air strikes. In 1975, South Vietnam fell to North Vietnam. Artillery and armor provided by China and the Soviet Union plus massed infantry caused the defeat, not some fantasy about a Marxist revolt in the villages. Quite the opposite. When the North Vietnamese troops poured in, they changed the names of CAP villages, symbolizing their frustration with the farmers who had staunchly resisted. A history of the CAP program in the Military Review magazine concluded, “The Battle for Hue City and the siege at Khe Sanh dominate the literature about the Marines in Vietnam. CAP, however, was the Corps’ greatest innovation during the war.”11 

Is the CAP concept useful in the future? My book describing the lives and deaths in a typical CAP, entitled The Village, was deleted from the Commandant’s Reading List because CAP seemed irrelevant. In Iraq and Afghanistan, the tribal and Muslim insular cultures did make it impossible for Marine squads to live inside isolated villages. Unlike in Vietnam, as outsiders (and unbelievers) Americans were not accepted, let alone warned of danger. On the other hand, CAP is relevant for the new antiship mission. Although Marines no longer read about the CAP, the small units training to deploy on remote Filipino islands will need its tactics. 

Regardless of where Marines next fight, there will be civilians and local forces. Marines don’t have the manpower to support a stand-alone advisory regiment. We will always seek the support of the local forces. The CAP proved that our infantry squads can adapt on any battlefield, due to the Marine ethos and training.  

>Mr. West, an assistant secretary of defense in the Reagan administration, served in CAP Lima-One in Chulai in 1966. He has written a dozen books about Marines in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan. His forthcoming book is entitled: Who Will Fight for Us the Next Time?  

Notes

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combined_Action_Program

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combined_Action_Program

3. https://www.amazon.com/Village-Francis-J-West/dp/0299102343/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&dib_tag=se&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.p-mZNDimiy50ukbcHJePqf34WcdHeY7QGVcWelymYhzsODh_dEwCC7vZOsDJOpK7wUlcKoIykKApCmsweqabshyjB1zc40ZFr6VQ_r-nrAJKhD_Jx-K7MrIOvC40_P4PwQSOUHmJnWhFBbRW64yovnGhQT2YJhe41eixBDWTobY.kMlkWTIY2hPyuRhqs2FJgFYqsYZl7bEnd8yUvSMy1Aw&qid=1723471958&sr=8-1 

4. https://www.usni.org/magazines/naval-history-magazine/2015/april/marines-vietnam-commitment; and https://www.history.navy.mil/browse-by-topic/wars-conflicts-and-operations/vietnam-war0/human-cost.html 

5. https://www.nmvetsmemorial.org/combined-action-program-monument.html

6. Weltsch, Michael D (1991). “The Future Role of the Combined Action Program” (PDF). U.S. Army Command and General Staff College. Archived from the original (PDF) on 8 February 2012. That PDF was retrieved 12 December 2007.

7. https://www.usni.org/sites/default/files/inline-files/Kopets,%20Keith%20F.pdf

8. Ibid. p. 629 

9. https://www.marines.mil/Portals/1/Publications/US Marines In Vietnam The Defining Year 1968 PCN 19000313800_1.pdf pages 619-625

10. https://smallwarsjournal.com/documents/kopets.htm

11. Military Review, July-August 2002 Found as a footnote in https://www.usni.org/sites/default/files/inline-files/Kopets,%20Keith%20F.pdf

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