Force Recon in Vietnam & Is WW3 Actually Possible? | Bing West

The Team House

Bing West recounts his experiences as a Marine Corps Force Recon soldier in Vietnam, reflecting on pivotal moments like deep operations in t

Key takeaways

• Local engagement and trust-building with civilians are critical to long-term stability in war zones.
• America repeatedly makes the same strategic mistakes despite lessons learned from past conflicts.

Main topics

• Vietnam War experiences
• Force Recon operations

Notable quotes

"You've gotten old, I we, meaning Captain." – A villager to Bing West decades after his service.

Conclusion

Bing West's lifetime of service and observation underscores a critical lesson:

Transcript preview

Speaker 3 (0:00) Hey, everyone. Welcome to the team house. I'm Jack Murphy here with tonight's guest, Bing West. Bing served as a Marine Corps colonel and went on to have government positions such as serving as the Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs during the Reagan administration and is the author of many, many works. A lot of, you know, boots on the ground accounts that he did from traveling to war zones and writing about them. One of the more pivotal works of his is The Village, which I believe we'll talk about. But I mean, it's based off of your experiences in the Vietnam War and reminds me actually in some ways of Jim Gant's work, One Tribe at a Time. And, you know, in the sense that the work is widely well regarded and everyone agrees this is how it should be done. But then we do something totally different. So, Bing, thank you for joining us on the show. Speaker 1 (0:56) It's my pleasure, Jack. Speaker 3 (0:59) So let's start at the beginning, because I really want to talk a bit about your service in Vietnam. Can you tell us about kind of like how you came into the service, why the Marine Corps, and kind of what your pathway was? Speaker 1 (1:14) Well, I was born in 1940, so I missed the Civil War and World War I, but I got the others. So my uncles, two of my uncles were platoon commanders in the Marine Corps, and they're on Guadalcanal. And then they come back from the island, and I was two or three, and my mom was having another baby. So she sent me up to the attic where they'd hang out with their group. And then she thought, well, they're my brothers. They're the babysitters. And the group, whenever they were coming home from the battles, they didn't know how to explain to their parents what they were doing. So they stayed in the clubhouse they had in our room, in our top of our house. So between the ages of three and seven, I was raised by Marines. Different groups of Marines would come in. I was filled with all the stories. And my mother said she knew something was really going on when the Battle of Okinawa was going on. And both my uncles were in the battle. And she was scared to death. And I had a favorite blanket that I used to hang on to. And she said, you have to do something to help Uncle Wally and Uncle Tommy. And she said, with that, I opened up the window and threw the blanket out and said, that's for the dirty yellow baskets. And then she knew something was going on up in that attic. And when I got out of... college and I was supposed to go to law school. I walked down to the South Station in Boston to get on the train. And there it said Marine Corps recruiting across the street. And I walked over and walked in and said to the captain behind the desk, I'd like to join the Marine Corps. He said, well, it's very rare I see somebody come in with a suitcase. You're really in a rush, aren't you? And that's how I joined the Marine Corps. It was ingrained in me. Speaker 3 (3:06) So you didn't have to get drafted into the war. You were ready to go. Speaker 1 (3:10) Yes. Speaker 3 (3:12) Did you go in enlisted then? Speaker 1 (3:15) No, I went to OCS. I was a grunt. I had a platoon and then an 81 millimeter mortar platoon. And the war was in 66, 65 and 66, just heating up. And the Marine generals knew they didn't know how to fight it, which was really interesting. And I had some education in writing and they said, Lieutenant, we'd like you to go out into the combat with the different units because you're a grunt and then write them up so other lieutenants and sergeants going over will know what the firefighting is all about. So I wrote the first book was called Small Unit Action Vietnam, where I took. 12 firefights I had been in all over the place with different units and put them together and tried to explain what was happening, what was happening, what was happening. And one of them... We went into the DMZ, we being a force recon, five of us. We were deep in the DMZ and it was the summer of 66 and the North Viettes were attacking, but they were assuming that we wouldn't go into the demilitarized zone. And we found an entire battalion. I mean, we were there looking at them and they didn't know we were there and we hit them with everything we had. We must have dropped. 200 rounds of 105 and 155 before they found our position and came up. And then an F8 was going up north to drop on a bridge. And he dropped two 2,000-pound bombs and just scared the hell out of us, knocked us down. But that was the end of those coming after us, and we got out the next day. So I saw a lot of the heavy action. And then they sent me into a village, which was quite different. Speaker 3 (5:14) This is with the CAP platoon. Speaker 1 (5:17) Yes, it was. They were just starting. And this one village had 5,000 villagers, and they had sent in a Marine squad, all of whom had combat experience. And they were fighting every night, every single night they were in a fight. And the colonel said, I want you to get down there and find out what's going on. Well, I went down there and the villagers were scared to death. But they just wanted to be left alone. And the North Vietcans were putting great pressure on them. And the farmers wouldn't fight back. And these 13 Marines came in. And typical Marines, they said, come on, we're going to go out and we're going to fight. Well, the first night I went out with them, and it was about the fifth night, sixth night they'd been there, we're going down the main trail, and we have the farmers, whom we call the popular forces, with us. But they had no training, and there were brambles on the path. Speaker 1 (6:24) And that was the signal that the Viet Cong would use that they were in meeting with their girlfriends or their family or whatever they were doing and to stay out of there. So the farmers immediately turned around and started going back. They wanted nothing to do with this. And the Marines dragged them through the brambles. We got to the other side of the brambles and we fought for the rest of the night. And night after night after night, we fought. But during the daytime, we'd wander around the village. You'd have duck eggs. Occasionally you'd have a beer, you'd have a lot of peanuts. People gradually began to recognize these 13 young, just teenagers, these 13 teenagers with their cocky attitude are keeping us from having to pay the taxes to the Viet Cong. The first time that they had some freedom. And we were there for almost 400 days in that village. And when we went to leave, they wanted nothing to do with us leaving. They said, no, no, no, you have to stay, you have to stay, you have to stay. And every year, I spent four or five years in Vietnam on and off. Every year, I'd go back to that village, Binh Nia, to find out how things were going. And they kept insisting. They're still there. They're out in the hills. They're waiting. We know they're waiting. And I went back in 2000, about 2000, with my interpreter, who was a great guy. And when we walked down the trail, everything was the same, except for one strand of electricity that they had. One for the entire village. And everyone could have one small light bulb. They began to yell to one another. who are they and somebody said it's the kindergarten marines and i thought they meant we were that young but what they meant was that the viet the north vietnamese after they had taken over the village changed the name of the village exhumed the bodies of the popular forces that had been killed and put in the bodies of the vietcong and north viet and i looked at that cemetery and they must have had 200 300 bodies in there. I thought, wow, I never had any idea we were doing that much damage at night in those fights. And everyone clustered around. Everyone wanted to know. And I had my book that I had written called The Village. And all these old momsoms came up and were looking at the pictures and identifying the individual Marines. And that Phil, that Terry. And I said to my interpreter, Charlie Benoit, who was a great guy, I said, I did. Charlie, this is amazing. He said, what's amazing, Ben? He said, if you were a villager and you had one half acre of rice that every day you just picked up pieces of rice, that's all you ever did in your life. And for one year you had this group of Americans there talking with you. Wouldn't you remember them? Speaker 3 (9:25) Yeah. Speaker 1 (9:25) And the thing that struck me is they looked at me and they said. You've gotten old, I we, meaning Captain. And I looked at them and I thought, I've gotten old. You should look in the mirror. But I didn't do that. Speaker 3 (9:36) Ben, could you explain to people who aren't familiar what the CAP platoons were? Because, I mean, it's fascinating. It's a kind of program that most people probably associate with special forces. But there were conventional Marines doing this during Vietnam. Speaker 1 (9:55) The Marines had the idea. Speaker 1 (9:58) Now we get into the whole issue of the war fighting. Speaker 1 (10:04) And then I'll get into the presidents in a minute. But General Westmoreland, who is in charge in all of Vietnam, is the standard old army four-star general. And he said the way to win the war was to go out against the North Vietnamese up in the hills and beat them in combat. And then eventually we would kill so many of them, they wouldn't fight anymore. And the Marines under a general by the name of Walt said, no, no, no, no. What we should do is we should go where the population is, protect the population and let them stay on the hills forever. What do we care? And they never, they didn't like one another. I was really surprised in those days. Wow. The antagonism of the generals toward each other was something to behold. Speaker 1 (11:02) They could not agree. So in the north where I was initially with General Wal, he said, I don't have the manpower to be doing this. So I'm going to take individual squads once they have six months on the line. And I'll take volunteers who want to be with the Vietnamese. And I will put 13 Marines, one squad in one village. And they will stay there until they can train the farmers, which generally took a year or a year and a half. So it wasn't short. You spent, you were there the entire time. Speaker 1 (11:41) Eventually, there were 118 of these combined action platoons, and we were protecting about 300,000 or 400,000 Vietnamese up in the north, and not one of us, not one village was ever taken by the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese, not one of 118. Speaker 3 (12:01) And a key facet of counterinsurgency strategy, right, is safeguarding the population. Speaker 1 (12:07) Yes. But what we stumbled on, and we didn't know Jack, but what we stumbled on was everyone loves to gossip. Everyone talks to everyone else. So if you have 5,000 Vietnamese and they're chit-chatting away and they're going to market, they're doing a lot of things, there's no way you're going to have a Viet Cong or a North Vietnamese battalion from the hills. beginning to come back, come down with its guards and its outflankers and everything without you knowing about it. I mean, you just don't move, you know, 500 armed soldiers into an area without one farmer saying, holy cow, and passing it on to another and another. So we always had an early warning system of when things were coming. And when Tet hit, Tet in February of 68, when they massively attacked everywhere. The North Vietnamese coming down into the area. Now, nobody had night vision devices back then. Nobody. I mean, so you fought pitch black every night. Well, that gave the North Viettes an advantage when they were moving. But on the other hand, once the villagers began to say, whoa, there are people out there and came to the... the individual combined action platoons, these squads, were scattered. The North Vietnamese had no idea where we were as they're coming down. And as a result, they kept bumping in to these small groups, all of whom were well-armed, and then having a shift. And they never got the attack against Da Nang. They got bogged down out in the rice paddies. But an awful lot of coast fighting. And the big difference in the coast fights at night... Well, two things. First, I've got to look why, but our traces are red. And so we had about one out every five. There's a green. Speaker 3 (14:07) And Speaker 1 (14:07) so at night, sometimes it was like you were watching and you didn't want to become mesmerized by it. But it's like your Christmas time. All these lights are flashing by you both ways. But the big difference was, and the Vietnamese call them bombs. Speaker 1 (14:24) We could throw a grenade. Do you know that, I guess, with the exception maybe of the Dominican Republic, because they have good baseball players, and no other country in the world knows how to put your body behind yours, and then when you're throwing a grenade or a baseball or a football. Everybody else has soccer. So they have no comprehension how to throw something. So when we get into these fights at night, when the adrenaline was going, we could throw we could throw a grenade 35 yards they couldn't throw a grenade 20 yards so it was like we had our own mortars because we'd be lobbing them and lobbing them every one of us carried six grenades every place we went and we could lob them and all they'd hear is boom and then a boom so that was the great advantage we had at night was the grenades one Speaker 3 (15:14) of uh one of my favorite stories is from a phoenix program guy who told me how the Vietnamese would pull the pins on the hand grenades and then throw them to him. They were helping him out by pulling the pin first. It was the ultimate game of hot potato. Speaker 1 (15:31) Oh. Speaker 3 (15:34) So were you in the village when the Tet Offensive happened? Speaker 1 (15:38) No, I was out of the village at that time. We weren't hit that hard on that village, but they hit us with... one night with 200 and I wasn't there when it happened but of the 13 Marines seven were killed in the village and then in one night and of of the first 13 altogether 11 were killed I stayed in touch with a lot of the families for generations um They'd ask about their uncles or about their grandfather. My God, I thought, you know, now I'm a grandfather. But, you know, eventually it was going to happen. Speaker 3 (16:22) And I wanted to ask you about the village. Like, did you write that as part of a Marine Corps study? Like, how did that come about? And how was it sort of received during the war? Speaker 1 (16:33) Well, after I had written the tactical manual, small unit action, and I always like to write, some agent picked me up. And they said, you know, Nolan's, it was in 1970 was when I was writing, and I was at the Rand Corporation at the time. The bitterness jacked toward us who had fought in the, I was out in California at the time, but the bitterness was just something. We haven't seen the likes of that since. And the intellectual community, the colleges, the literary community were 100 % against. And somehow my first manuscript was returned to me. They said, we're not going to publish this. And then Hopper decided to publish it. And the first review came back and said, Captain West claims to have lived in the village for 370 days with the Vietnamese. The question is, why didn't he write about all the Milas? Speaker 3 (17:47) What Speaker 1 (17:48) are you going to do? But gradually the book seemed to take on its own life as people realized all I was doing was telling the story of what 13, 18 to 20 year old Americans did in their sense of decency and their willingness to take a chance. Plus the fact that we initially were using M14s with a 7.62 bullet. That really tears the heck out of the place. And what people have forgotten about Marines is that in order to qualify on the 500 meter range, you have to be able to hit a target that's about this big. Otherwise, you don't qualify at all. So we didn't have anybody who didn't know how to shoot. And that made a big, big difference in the grazing fire at night. Speaker 3 (18:36) But Speaker 1 (18:36) more than anything, I'd say. It was the attitude toward dealing with the Vietnamese and the way they dealt with us, which was quite different, Jack, than my experiences later in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Vietnamese were open. We could go into their families. We could sit down. We could laugh. We could interact in ways we never could in the Islamic nations. Speaker 3 (19:03) From all of your time that you spent in Vietnam and working on these studies and papers, what are some of your big takeaways at the tactical level? I mean, you mentioned marksmanship. Were there any others? Speaker 1 (19:16) Well, boy, at the tactical level. Speaker 1 (19:29) I hated it with the large units. I just hated it when I had to go with the battalions. Because you can't move a battalion without people knowing you're moving a battalion. And then you lose the element of surprise. When I was with Force Recon, we went out in small patrols always at night, and we always hid. And it was called Operation Stingray. And our ability to find them before they found us was huge because we're out there by ourselves and we had to rely on stealth. So I would have much preferred if. Speaker 1 (20:14) if we had intersected all the different combined action platoons. Because each of us had an area that was about four to five kilometers by four to five kilometers. So each of us had 15 kilometers. But then you'd have a space before you had another one. And what I wish we had done was if we had integrated all of them, we would have saved an enormous amount of money and fought a different war. in the populated area. But ironically, General Westmoreland said, no, that was going to take more troops rather than less troops. So you get back to this huge fight that was going on at the top. And then in terms of the big battles against the North Vietnamese that generally took place in the hills. Speaker 1 (21:03) The biggest problem by far was that we, and here I get into the higher level, but I'll just say it, I think President Johnson was a disgrace as a president of the United States and a coward. Speaker 1 (21:21) He got into a war where he was calling up his friends in the Senate. That's all on the record. I put in my book, my last book called Cap Five. And he would say, I can't win this war. I can't win this war. Well, why did he send us out there to die then? And his son-in-law, who was a good guy, Johnson pulled him off the lines. Now, you don't do that. That's what came out of the Pentagon Speaker 3 (21:50) Papers, isn't it, Bing, that they knew they were fighting an unwinnable war? Speaker 1 (21:54) Well, don't get me going with Ellsberg. I think the man was a traitor. He was a traitor. And I know Ellsberg. I knew him from Rand. But if I just stay on the central point was that President Johnson got us into a war that he was afraid to win because he believed that the Chinese were going to come into the war. And he took the lesson that President Truman never ran for re-election because he went into Korea and the Chinese came in and fought him. And Johnson believed that he would be driven out of office because the Chinese were going to come into South Vietnam. That was his, and he was afraid, yet he sent us there to fight. Now, the interesting thing is that the CIA had proof positive that Mao Zedong had been so beaten up by the experience of fighting us in Korea that he had set a demarcation line for all the supply troops that he was sending into North Vietnam and said, under no circumstances will you go farther south because I don't want to tangle with the Americans. So ironically, if Johnson had had the courage, we could have won that war because the only way to win it operationally was to go into the north. use the sea, then shatter. They had no industry, no industry in the north. They were getting all their supplies from the Soviet Union and China through one port, Haiphong. Johnson wouldn't close the port because he was afraid of insulting the Chinese and the Soviets. So if he had fought a war, we could have won that and saved a lot of American lives. And I watched that, and I watched that, Jack, in other wars I was in. I did not know Johnson. I knew Nixon. I knew several of the other presidents. I didn't know Johnson. But I knew all the people who were advising him. And I knew the general who went in to brief him on the strategy at the beginning of the war where we were going to go by amphibious landings, cut the North Vietnamese off at the top, and close Haiphong. And President Johnson looked at the Joint Chiefs of Staff and said, you sons of bitches, get out of my office. I never want to talk to you again. You're going to get my ass