Interviewer: Okay.
Interviewer: Why don't you start off with this first subject about the pressures from Washington?
Komer: Well, you know I didn't become involved in Vietnam until the president called me in in the spring of '66 and said he wanted me to be his assistant for the other war in Vietnam.
Komer: Now, the other war, the war that I was involved with was the attempt to win the hearts and minds of the rural population, ah, and to provide security in the countryside.
Komer: So, basically, ah, even by the time I got involved LBJ was eager for results as, indeed, was ah the American electorate.
Komer: Ah, I think the president was merely reflecting ah his own political judgment that the Americans would not sit still for a long and possibly stalemated war of the sort the British had fought in Malaya where it had taken no less than twelve years to put down an essentially Chinese Communist dominated insurgency.
Komer: So, from the beginning LBJ wanted results.
Komer: I'd add another very important factor, and that is, that Vietnam was what one analyst called a war without fronts.
Komer: In WWI or WWII you could tell whether you were winning or losing.
Komer: The front line moved forward or backwards.
Komer: In Vietnam there was no front line.
Komer: And, as a result, ah, you had to invent which the military did such things as body counts and stuff like that in order to figure out whether you were attritting the enemy or not.
Komer: It was the same thing in pacification.
Komer: Many of these elaborate ah reporting systems that we developed like the hamlet evaluation system were designed to give us some kind of a snapshot as to what the trends were in security and ah ah popular attitudes in the countryside.
Komer: So, under the circumstances where it was very difficult for the military commanders or the President or the Secretary of Defense to make clear whether we were winning the war or losing it.
Komer: The pressure for some kind of a way to calculate results became naturally intense, and I attribute this to the nature of the war and not to the personality of Lyndon Johnson.
Interviewer: Could you give us some examples of those pressures?
Komer: Yes.
Komer: Well, I'm not sure I would call them pressures but ah LBJ, for example, got together half the cabinet.
Komer: Ah, the Secretary of Agriculture, Orville Freeman; the Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare, he sent them out to Vietnam you may remember in an airplane and said come up with programs to help the Vietnamese people and they came back with a whole set of some good and many not so doable recommendations.
Komer: I recall ah my complaining to him about the port congestion in the Port of Saigon and how the military authorities were claiming priority for military cargo so I couldn't bring in relief supplies, for example, and he said, "Why doesn't the mayor of Saigon lay down the law?" And I said, "Well the civil administration in Saigon isn't very efficient."
Komer: "Well, what do you think about sending out the mayor of Houston," he said to me.
Komer: He said, "Remember we had military government in WWII.
Komer: Well, I know the mayor of Houston," he said.
Komer: "He's pretty damn good.
Komer: He'll get out there and clean the whole port situation up in no time at all." I said, "Mr. President, he doesn't even speak Vietnamese.
Komer: He wouldn't even be able to communicate with his own administration!" A couple of times he suggested to me that we again ah put, set up a military government.
Komer: I told him that in my judgment a military government would be a total disaster in Vietnam.
Komer: We would be utterly incapable of managing it.
Komer: We'd be kidding ourselves.
Komer: Now, I was never under any direct pressure from Lyndon Johnson for results.
Komer: That's not the way LBJ operated.
Komer: That's not the way a politician would operate.
Komer: Notice he made relatively few changes in the high command.
Komer: Westmoreland was defeated and kicked upstairs as a result of the Tet Offensive which was a wrenching surprise to us all.
Komer: Not because...but Westie'd been there already four, going on five years.
Komer: Bunker came out and stayed four years as I recall.
Komer: Lodge came out twice.
Komer: So, the pressure for results did not mean that ah he kept doing what Mr. Lincoln did in changing his generals every time they took a good defeat.
Komer: Ah, therefore, you know, in this kind of war where it's not clear whether you're winning, where the media was saying repeatedly that we were getting trapped in a stalemate.
Komer: Where you couldn't say that pacification was moving very fast.
Komer: Where you couldn't contend that you were destroying the enemy's units when his units could always disengage and run away into sanctuary.
Komer: Under those circumstances there grew up a great frustration in Saigon and above all in Washington to try to find credible indications that indeed we were accomplishing results commensurate with the enormous investment in blood and treasure.
Interviewer: Tell us about some of the problems you had with the military, the civilian...the other war versus the other war.
Interviewer: Particularly if you could get into the question of money.
Interviewer: Okay.
Komer: There were lots of conflicts between the civilians and the military in my business in particular because I felt that the other war was a terribly important war and was getting the short end of the stick.
Komer: You know up to the time when we created the new model pacification program in 1967, pacification techniques had been tried frequently ah on an experimental basis by the French in the First Indochina War.
Komer: Then by us, but we based our techniques much more on what the British had done in Malaysia.
Komer: After all, they won and the French lost.
Komer: Nonetheless, pacification up to '67 had not been a failure as McNamara called it.
Komer: As I told him when he contended that in a 1966 report pacification hadn't failed.
Komer: It hadn't really ever been tried.
Komer: Now, if you were going to try it on a large scale, even in a country the size of Vietnam where you had 10,000 hamlets, forty-four districts.
Komer: I'm sorry two hundred and fifty districts.
Komer: Forty-four provinces.
Komer: You had to try it on a rather large scale which meant you had to have resources and which meant that you had to equip the local security forces, you had to provide money for agricultural productivity.
Komer: You had to bring in consumers goods so that if the farmers grew more rice they could buy something with what they got paid for it.
Komer: You had to repair all the roads.
Komer: This took resources.
Komer: And I found that the program that we advised the Vietnamese to run was constantly having to compete with the military for resources.
Komer: I mentioned one critical point.
Komer: Even if we could get the money and buy the goods we needed, we couldn't get them in through the Port of Saigon in 1966 because military cargo had absolute priority.
Komer: Now, we resolved that after pressing the military because they decided to build the new port right out of Saigon and that took care of most of their needs and we could use the regular Saigon caves.
Komer: But, constantly we had to suck hind tit and I feel, of course, that that was one of the mistakes we made in the Vietnam War.
Komer: We over-funded and over-invested in a military war we couldn't win the way we fought it, and we didn't really do enough for what was even from the outset proving to be at least a limited success and that was the pacification effort.
Interviewer: What, do you have any idea of the ratio of money spent for military or pacification?
Komer: Oh, certainly.
Komer: I could give you a better guess than most people.
Komer: Remarkably in today's fiscal 1982 dollars, the Vietnam War cost over a decade some three hundred billion.
Komer: I notice the figure given the other day of a hundred and fifty billion.
Komer: That was in then-year dollars.
Komer: In today's dollars, the kind we use to buy groceries, it was a cool three hundred billion bucks.
Komer: Now, out of that I would say at the outside the pacification program got on the order of eight to twelve.
Komer: The reason I can't be more precise on that is that most of our pacification expenditures which were, were for personnel were funded in piasters which we got from counterpart and counterpart is a drain on the local economy.
Komer: So, the Vietnamese really paid a very high proportion of the cost of pacification.
Komer: So, it's not proper to really compare the three hundred billion I was talking about to the eight to twelve billion for pacification.
Komer: So ah, it was peanuts.
Komer: Now, it doubled and tripled after I got involved because I went out vigorously to scarf up all the resources I could.
Komer: I stole trucks from the military.
Komer: If we needed cement for our roads, we borrowed them from the military and then I got the idea of putting pacification under the Vietnamese and American military establishments precisely so we could get the level of logistic support we needed, and, of course, that happened with my arrival in Vietnam in early May 1967.
Interviewer: Did you feel that you had conflicting objectives with the military?
Komer: By and large we were fighting two wars in Vietnam.
Komer: One was the so called big unit war against the VC main force units, and the increasing numbers of North Vietnamese battalions and regiments that kept coming down the Ho Chi Minh Trail.
Komer: But that war was overlaid on an already existing insurgency war.
Komer: A civil war if you will.
Komer: I have no compunctions about calling it that, and, indeed, called it that at the time.
Komer: The insurgency war.
Komer: The Viet Cong guerrillas and the Viet Cong infrastructure all of course dominated and led by Hanoi was the war for the control of the rural population in the countryside.
Komer: That was what the war was all about right up to about 1964 when you had the beginning of NVA infiltration.
Komer: North Vietnamese, of course.
Komer: But then you had two wars.
Komer: You had the Viet Cong insurgency continuing in the hamlets and villages and you had an increasing big unit war as the North Vietnamese kept sending more regular units down the trail, and as the Americans came in.
Interviewer: We ran out of film.
Interviewer: Just out of film.
Interviewer: We've run out, so we've got up to...
Interviewer: Pick it up where you were talking about the two wars.
Interviewer: Are you turning Paul.
Interviewer: Ya.
Interviewer: Beep.
Interviewer: Mark it.
Interviewer: Thank you.
Interviewer: On seven.
Interviewer: Camera is set.
Komer: There were really two wars in Vietnam.
Komer: First was the longstanding insurgency or civil war, if you will, which had been going on really ah since about ah ah 1960 or so.
Komer: This was the kind of classic communist-led insurgency that had occurred in Malaya and in ah in other places.
Komer: But, by 1964 and '65 when regular North Vietnamese Army units started coming down the so-called Ho Chi Minh Trail, and when in the spring of 1965 the Americans responded by sending the Marines and then the Army, you had an increasing big unit war overlaid on the continuing insurgency.
Komer: So, you had the sort of hamlet war in the hamlets, but you had the big units chasing each other around the countryside.
Komer: Now, there was a lot of competition.
Komer: Not just for resources because in pacification our objective was to bring security to the hamlets and to push out the insurgents, the guerrillas, but, if at the same time, the big unit war was running big sweeps in search and destroy operations ah of the Americans or attacks of the North Vietnamese of the Viet Cong main force units ah they got involved and the whole thing became a very messy situation.
Komer: So, security ah which we could establish against the guerrillas was not really all that possible against main force VC or North Vietnamese units.
Komer: Now, there were other aspects to the ah relationship between the civil and military which bothered me.
Komer: The first, of course, was that military operations did tend to create refugees, did tend to wreck the rice patties, did tend to level villages; this was both sides, and that meant oh ah that meant ah it was so much more difficult for us to develop the kinds of programs in the countryside that we wanted.
Komer: Second, there is just no doubt in my mind that the bombing had a very...and the artillery fire, the so-called harassing artillery fire, harassment and interdiction, ah created substantial civilian casualties.
Komer: That, of course, became the responsibility of the people on the Pacification side.
Komer: Now, I tried to solve the problem of the competition between the military and the civilians which was really a competition between an elephant and a rabbit because they were so much bigger than we were.
Komer: The ah reason ah I proposed, it was really my proposal and President Johnson approved, putting the American pacification support effort under the military command in Vietnam was so that we could resolve some of these differences so that we could work them out and also so that we in the Pacification Program could get a much better handle on military resources since the military had all the trucks, all the aircraft, all the cement ah and everything else in country, and all the engineers.
Komer: Now, it's wrong to call pacification a civil program as opposed to the military program because, of course, it became part military and the Vietnamese military, in particular, tried to carry out an increasing number of pacification-type static security operations after the American big units came in and sort of took over the main force war against the North Vietnamese Army.
Interviewer: But let me get a little more specific.
Interviewer: Talking about the impact of the of the big unit war or the bombing of the artillery.
Interviewer: If people were driven out of villages because of bombing or artillery of the big unit war, did you consider those villages, pac...the villages pacified?
Komer: Of course not.
Interviewer: Could you go into that a little bit?
Komer: Yes.
Komer: The ah this gets into the causes of the refugee flow.
Komer: I always thought that ah we got rather a bum rap on the refugee business.
Komer: In the first place most of the big unit war took place outside the populated areas except, of course, during the Tet Offensive.
Komer: Most of the big fighting was out in the boondocks because that's where we pursued the enemy with our helicopters and our artillery, etc.
Komer: Now, there were repeated occasions, particularly up in the northern provinces like Binh Dinh, Quang Ngai, ah and Quang Tin where the ah ah Quang Nam where the ah mountains came right down close to the sea.
Komer: Those areas you had a lot of civilians sort of mixed up in the fighting, but, basically in the south that was much less the case, and of course, most of the population lived in the region around Saigon and down in the Delta.
Komer: So, most of the refugees were not created as a result ah of the Americans bombing and artillery or for that matter as a result of the North Vietnamese or the VC.
Komer: I think most of the refugees ah just found it so hard to make a living in the countryside that they tended to go to the cities.
Komer: It was safer in the cities.
Komer: There were more jobs in the cities because you had an artificial war induced boom and after all let's remember that there has been a trend of population movement from the countryside to the cities in all sorts of countries in the twentieth century and the movement in Vietnam was no larger than that in countries like let's say Brazil or India or for that matter China.
Interviewer: Do you remember particularly, could you describe or do you remember the situation in Quang Ngai in particular the generation of refugees in that particular province? Can you describe that?
Komer: Well, I don't remember.
Komer: That was fifteen, sixteen years ago.
Komer: Ah.
Komer: I don't remember the situation in Quang Ngai as well as perhaps I should.
Komer: My priorities in pacification went from south to north because the more fighting there was with the North Vietnamese Army, the less the opportunities for pacification.
Komer: Therefore, my priorities were first the Delta.
Komer: Second the area around Saigon.
Komer: Third so-called II Corps on the plateau and only last Quang Ngai.
Komer: Ah, Quang Ngai had been a long time communist guerrilla stronghold since before the First Indochina War.
Komer: I think if you go back you will find that the Indochinese communist party began in that particular area of North Vietnam.
Komer: I mean insofar as it developed a local base.
Komer: Now, ah, Quang Ngai was a place where the population was quite hostile as a result, and where you had all sorts of ah difficulty in sorting out the enemy from the farmers.
Komer: Indeed, if I'm not mistaken My Lai was in Quang Ngai Province, wasn't it.
Komer: Or was it in Quang Tin.
Komer: So ah I...Quang Ngai was an atypically difficult situation for pacification and one where because there was constant fighting up there and constant big unit engagements, we ah were not able to accomplish, in my judgment, ah as much as I would have liked.
Interviewer: You talked earlier about, you know, hearts and minds.
Interviewer: Could you get any fixed feeling for what the attitudes of refugees were towards the Americans, towards the South Vietnamese government? Or, towards the Viet Cong government?
Komer: You know, there's one thing about the refugee movement.
Komer: It, ah, various Americans have said that the refugees voted with their feet.
Komer: I think that's a reasonably accurate way to put it.
Komer: Back in 1954 when the Geneva Settlements ended the First Indochina War over a million Vietnamese opted to move as they were allowed to do under the Geneva Agreement.
Komer: All the million moved from north to south.
Komer: It was the same thing throughout the entire Vietnam War.
Komer: All the refugees, almost without exception, wanted to come to the security of the areas and the cities which were controlled by the GVN and the Americans.
Komer: This, it seems to me, speaks a great deal about attitudes.
Komer: But, we went further than that.
Komer: After I left Vietnam, the outfit I left behind me developed a very good technique for polling.
Komer: They developed wha...scientific samples.
Komer: They got advice from the best polling outfits they could in the United States and they had Vietnamese interviewers who were not known to be working for the Americans to go around and ask a whole series of questions on a monthly or bi-monthly basis, and they did generate some very interesting evidence on refugee attitudes, as I recall.
Komer: And, it was that somehow the refugees did not blame the government of Vietnam and the Americans half as much as I would have thought they would have.
Komer: Ah, even if they said we were driven out by bombing or our hamlet was flattened by a fight ah which resulted from an American sweep or something like that.
Komer: So, ah, I must say that we nowhere found that the refugee population was fertile ground for Viet Cong recruitment, for example.
Interviewer: Where did pacification stand let's say at the end of 1967? Could you describe it?
Komer: I think it's worthwhile mentioning that there were three fundamental differences between the so called pacification program and the so called big unit war.
Komer: First of all, they were incommensurately different in size.
Komer: I always argued that we should have much more of a balance between the pacification effort and the big unit war, that after all this had begun as a ruralist insurgency and that if we wanted to win the hearts and minds of the rural population and to contest with ah the VC for their hearts and minds, we had to have ah the kind of program that could work.
Interviewer: Start off with where was pacification at the end of '67.
Komer: The real pacification program that had such later success in South Vietnam only began with the creation of the American pacification advisory outfit called CORDS in May of '67.
Komer: We had done some other preliminary work beginning let's say in late 1966.
Komer: But, essentially '67 couldn't be any more than a year of preparation.
Komer: We had to create the kind of pacification assets that we had never had before.
Komer: For example, I grabbed advisory responsibility for the so-called Rough Puffs the regional and popular forces, the village and province local security forces which MACV let me have like ah a shock, and we started to re-arm them MC-16 rifles which was Westie's decision.
Komer: I always thought a splendid one.
Komer: It improved their morale.
Komer: We had to gather supplies.
Komer: We had to do an awful lot.
Komer: Ah, we thought at the time we were going to increase the pacified area by a modest 150 or 200 hamlets as I recall.
Komer: This was the Vietnamese goal because you must remember that from the outset pacification was a Vietnamese program and not an American one.
Komer: We were the bankers.
Komer: We were the logistics supporters.
Komer: We provided an awful lot of advice and we wrote their report cards in the hamlet evaluation system.
Komer: But, it was their program.
Komer: And, anything Vietnamese took twice as long to get done as if it were American.
Komer: Nonetheless, we thought we were doing pretty well in moving out in the countryside and were quite surprised when we discovered at the end of 1967 that really we had not accomplished very much.
Komer: We had apparently been going around in certain circles insofar as increasing the size of the pacified area was concerned.
Komer: Now, this was demonstrated by our own hamlet evaluation system.
Komer: It's gotten a lot of criticism as a computerized analysis system.
Komer: It was no such thing.
Komer: We used the computer in Bangkok as an adding machine to add up the reports we got every month on about ten thousand hamlets.
Komer: Well, that would take a lot of clerical work.
Komer: So, we borrowed one evening a month on the machine.
Komer: And, that's where all this computerized baloney came from.
Komer: But, our own hamlet evaluation system which gave us a monthly snapshot of what the US advisors thought the state of security and development was in each rural hamlet as of the end of that month.
Komer: Ah, it showed us that we had not made a great deal of progress in 1967.
Komer: Nonetheless, I think it only fair to say that the investments we made in 1967, the reorganizations that we laid on and the assets that we managed to gather together, were the indispensable groundwork for the great success of the pacification, accelerated pacification expansion program, which came after the Tet Offensive of 1968.
Interviewer: What were your measurements, what were your criteria for whether something was working or not?
Komer: We had some rather elaborate criteria.
Komer: Ah, you know had the hamlet been mortared? Were there any incidents in the hamlet? What kind of incidents? Were there fire fights? Had there been any booby traps? How much activity? Now, that's something that American advisors can tell.
Komer: Second, and we had an advisory team in every district.
Komer: Second were a whole set of criteria with respect to development.
Komer: Was the school open? Was the teacher there? Was the potable water well we had dug producing potable water? Was the rice crop being gathered or sowed or whatever?
Komer: So, it was a very practical set of concrete criteria which an American district team of a captain or a major and seven or eight other Americans could really figure out.
Interviewer: To what extent did you have situations where you could go into any area in the daytime and the Viet Cong can take it over at night? I mean, how did you figure those? How did you, did you consider that as success?
Komer: We considered it only a partial success.
Interviewer: You've got to start...
Komer: Oh yes.
Komer: The...I have to admit that in a substantial number of cases we could impose security in the daytime when we could travel the roads and when we could see what was happening in the village and we were much less successful at night when the guerrillas came out.
Komer: Ah, sometimes the guerrillas who were armed were able to intimidate the local population.
Komer: So, you couldn't say that just because a hamlet was insecure at night that it was necessarily owned by the enemy.
Komer: The people just went in their hooches and ah didn't dare to come out because they might get assassinated by the VC terror campaign.
Komer: And, as you know, the VC used terror as an instrument of war in, against pacification.
Komer: They assassinated or kidnapped school teachers.
Komer: They assassinated or kidnapped all the local officials.
Komer: Ah, they would attack the people who were digging wells.
Komer: They tried to prevent the distribution of the rice crop.
Komer: In some cases they tried to steal the rice crop for themselves.
Komer: I can understand that.
Komer: And, ah, ah, they were terrible ah ah on the police.
Komer: They really tried to knock off the village policeman right, left and every other place.
Komer: So, as a result you had a situation where security was only relative.
Komer: We had ah as I recall several numerical...alphabetical categories.
Komer: An "A" hamlet was really totally secure.
Komer: A "B" hamlet was mostly secure and mostly developed.
Komer: A "C" hamlet was only relatively secure and most of the hamlets up to about 1969 were "C" hamlets.
Komer: So, when we said that we had ah sixty-eight percent of the people living in "C" category hamlets or better, we meant that that was relatively secure.
Interviewer: But, you were touching on a basic issue of the whole war which was, I'd like you to comment on it since it’s been said numbers of times we could go into any area of the country, but we couldn't hold it.
Interviewer: Ah, and, that was what the war was all about.
Komer: That...It's quite true that while we could go anywhere in the country, we then proceeded to go and leave.
Komer: We were rotating around as if we were a bunch of whirling dervishes.
Komer: My view of pacification was that there was no point in putting security and starting to develop a village unless we could provide continuous security.
Komer: Therefore, we stressed heavily building up the regional and popular forces which were mostly local inhabitants in the first place and garrisoning them right there in the hamlets and the district towns permanently.
Komer: This new program of ours of taking security to the people on a permanent basis, not just with the regional and popular force platoons and companies, but also with the RD Cadre, the famous fifty-nine man teams of rural workers in black pajamas.
Komer: Ah, the police and especially the police field force.
Komer: We tried to provide permanent security in the countryside and we managed generally to do that ah reasonably successfully in the great bulk of the countryside - the populated countryside, of course - in 1968, '69 and 1970.
Interviewer: Let's go back a moment to Viet Cong terror that you were talking about.
Interviewer: How would you characterize it? Would you say it was discriminate, indiscriminate and what effect did it have on pacification?
Komer: We used to try to analyze the effect of the terror campaign very carefully because it was important to know whether it was discriminate or indiscriminate.
Komer: And, I have to admit that while we deployed a lot of Vietnamese and American talent on that subject ah we never could come up with a definitive answer.
Komer: It really seemed to vary with local option.
Komer: One Viet Cong province committee favored indiscriminate terror.
Komer: They just favored shooting up civilians, kidnapping everybody, etc.
Komer: And, there was sort of a reign of terror in those provinces.
Komer: This tended to be the case more in the northern provinces.
Komer: In other provinces the VC use of terror was very discriminating.
Komer: They would wait until we had carefully built up the one room schools in the hamlet and then what would happen? They would kill ah the school teacher or kidnap him.
Komer: They would focus on local officials like school teachers, like tax collectors and people like that.
Komer: That was a more discriminating form of terror.
Komer: So, I would say they used both and the numbers which we very carefully collected ah are simply astronomical.
Komer: There were cases sixty-five, seventy-five a hundred thousand terrorist casualties in the course of ah one year.
Interviewer: And what impact did this have on pacification, in general?
Komer: The impact of this terrorism on pacification was notable.
Komer: I mean what's the point of investing in building a lot one room village schools and training a lot of Vietnamese teachers if the schools get blown down as soon as they're built and the teachers get killed or kidnapped.
Komer: I mean that program can't really yet going very much.
Komer: We had lots of programs to increase the peasant's take from the rice crop.
Komer: After all, rice is the main cash crop of Vietnam.
Komer: But, if the VC and the North Vietnamese mine the roads, ah, they couldn't get the crop to market.
Komer: So, there was absolutely no doubt in my mind that terror was one of the most serious problems that we confronted in Vietnam.
Komer: It really made it very difficult for the Vietnamese government which after all was running pacification.
Komer: We weren't.
Komer: It made it extremely difficult for the Vietnamese government to restore a presence in the countryside because all the people they sent out there were getting knocked off.
Interviewer: What did Tet do to...
Interviewer: We're, we're out.
Interviewer: We'll start off with Tet and the pacification of Tet.
Interviewer: Try to remember to repeat the...
Interviewer: Okay, turning.
Interviewer: Mark it.
Komer: The great success of the Vietnamese Pacification Program, of course, occurred after Tet 1968, and the reasons are interesting.
Komer: In the first place I argued immediately after Tet that the enemy had taken up all his guerrillas, et cetera, in the countryside and had shoved them into the cities.
Komer: As a result I argued there was vacuum in the countryside.
Komer: The hamlets were just being left out there.
Komer: Our pacification forces had pulled in to defend the cities, of course, and the VC had just gone right through the countryside into the cities.
Komer: So, I argued that if we would only get back out there we could find out that we could recover all of the territory that we thought that we had lost.
Komer: This debate raged for about ah six months because a lot of people lost their nerve, and then I was all tied up with taking care of the city refugees from Tet.
Komer: We had this great recovery program and since I had the only advisory organization that was, seemed to be able to do anything, Ambassador Bunker appealed to me to ah sort of lead the Vietnamese government ah into taking care of all the homeless refugees in ah thirty-six out of forty-four cities in South Vietnam, which I did.
Komer: And, then there was, of course, another mini-Tet you remember in May when they got into Saigon again.
Komer: They even tried a third one in ah in September.
Komer: But, when we finally got out into the countryside in an accelerated pacification campaign which I sold to President Thieu ah in the early fall, we found out that I was right.
Komer: That there was still a vacuum in the countryside.
Komer: You know Hanoi pushed most of the best Viet Cong cadre into the cities during Tet.
Komer: And, so, the Tet Offensive really destroyed the flower of the Vietnam ah insurgency.
Komer: The guerrilla and ah ah ah infrastructure capabilities which meant that the countryside was ripe for pacification, if only we could get out there.
Komer: Moreover, after Tet you remember Thieu finally mobilized the Vietnamese.
Komer: He declared general mobilization and that gave us a lot more people and by that time we had an awful lot of resources coming in.
Komer: At any rate, we jumped off on the first of November, 1968 in a program to take over, as I recall, about five hundred to a thousand additional hamlets.
Komer: I left just at that time though I had the...right after we launched the offensive.
Komer: And, it turned out that I was right.
Komer: It turned out there was a vacuum in the countryside.
Komer: The VC, had lost the southern Viet Cong had lost a lot of their capabilities, and as a result, we had a steady expansion of the pacified area that continued right through 1969, '70 and '71.
Interviewer: At the rate we were spending money in Vietnam, I want to evoke this anecdote from you, this line from you – we really could have bought off the Viet Cong for about what?
Komer: Well, if you take in then year dollars of a hundred and fifty...
Interviewer: Start again.
Komer: Yes.
Komer: The ah, you know, with all the money we were spending in Vietnam ah it might not have been so bad as some people suggested to just buy them all off.
Komer: We could have paid them each one hundred and fifty thousand dollars, given them forty acres, a mule and ah a lifetime supply of rice.
Komer: Ah, I actually...this business ah we were, it was an enormously wasteful war.
Komer: I remember one time ah when I was having dinner with my war college classmate ah General ahhh...I can't even remember his name.
Interviewer: You better start it again.
Komer: Ya.
Komer: Okay.
Interviewer: It was an enormously wasteful war.
Komer: Who was the last JCS chief before Dave Jones?
Interviewer: Start of with it was an enormously wasteful war.
Komer: Oh, it was an enormously wasteful war.
Komer: Ah, it ah, ah, we ah just spent money like it was water to no good purpose and many times were very counterproductive ends.
Komer: I remember when I had lunch one time with my old war college classmate, George Brown, who at that time was commanding the seventh air force and later became the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Komer: Ah, George was running all of these bombing campaigns down south, and I said George, you know, if you would just stand down your seventh air force for one week, we could save enough money to finance my pacification efforts for one solid year.
Komer: And, I'll tell you I'll accomplish ten times as much as you will dropping all that scrap iron on the rice paddies where we're trying to grow rice.
Komer: Well, suffice it to say, George didn't think that was very funny.
Komer: But, it's true.
Komer: Pacification was unquestionably the most cost effective part of the combined Vietnamese/American effort in Vietnam, and since it was Vietnamized from the outset, since at most we had only about ten thousand American advisors advising and helping out maybe a million Vietnamese, if you conclude all, include all the RF and the PF, the police, the ah revolutionary development cadre, etc.
Komer: Ah, and since we were spending only at most ah maybe three or four billion a year when we got up to our peak effort and most of that was in piasters, I don't see how anyone can avoid reaching the conclusion that we should have started this kind of a pacification effort long before we actually ended up doing it very late in 1967 and '68 through '70, '72.
Interviewer: I have two questions, Stanley.
Interviewer: Go ahead.
Interviewer: Ah, is there a lesson, and was it worth it?
Interviewer: Okay.
Interviewer: What is the lesson from Vietnam?
Komer: Is there a lesson from Vietnam? There are many lessons, but one of the most important operational lessons that I learned was that atypical conflicts and Vietnam was certainly atypical in our experience, demand unconventional solutions.
Komer: We went and fought the Vietnam War as if we were fighting the Russians in the plains of Central Europe for a very simple and straightforward reason.
Komer: It's be...eh, that was what we were trained, equipped and configured to do.
Komer: We designed the American Armed Forces to fight Russians in the defense of Europe.
Komer: We did not design those forces, air as well as ground forces, to go over and fight a guerrilla war in Vietnam.
Komer: And, all the time we were there we never learned that one lesson.
Komer: That was why the pacification program was such a late bloomer.
Komer: That was why it was never seriously supported or funded until Bill Colby and I got into the field.
Komer: I might add with full support from General Westmoreland without which we couldn't have done it.
Interviewer: But the lesson is looking back, can we learn how to fight a guerrilla war? An atypical war?
Komer: I think we can.
Komer: I think we can ahh learn how to fight an atypical war.
Komer: And, remember the next one, if it happens, will be very different from this one.
Komer: I think the experience of CORDS, however late in the day, the experience of our pacification advisory effort and the way we were able to turn around the Vietnamese is proof positive that if you have the kind of high level backing and the kind of dynamic leadership and support that is necessary, you can make major changes in the way you do business even in the middle of a war.
Interviewer: Was Vietnam worth the effort?
Komer: With all the wisdom of hindsight Vietnam was a disaster.
Komer: Obviously, this enormous effort, as I said, some three hundred billion of today's dollars, almost fifty thousand dead, far heavier Vietnamese casualties, was all of this ah ah a wise investment in a war we couldn't win the way we fought it? Of course not.
Komer: But more than that Vietnam was a disaster because the three hundred billion in today's dollars we spent in it, plus the sharp reductions in US defense spending which were a result of the Vietnam War, you remember the big reductions in US defense spending during the '70's because we were expiating Vietnam are in my judgment one of the major reasons why our military power has fallen so far behind that of the USSR.
Komer: Therefore, for that reason alone, if no other, Vietnam was a disastrous strategic diversion which contributed significantly to the decline of US military power vis-à-vis that of the Soviet Union.
Interviewer: Okay.