Vietnam

 

The Battle Behind Vietnam

-and a World War II Hero’s Return to Freedom’s Defense

An interview with CORDS II Corps Tactical Zone Director James Megellas,

35 years after his tour in Vietnam. By Kenneth David Hall

            James Megellas was barely out of Ripon College, Wisconsin when he answered the higher calling of America’s national defense. As a member of the 82d Airborne in World War II, he jumped into the major killing fields of Europe, garnering Silver Stars, Purple Hearts-and the Distinguished Service Cross along the way. It wasn’t until 20 years later that he would return to another battlefield of America’s history; Vietnam.

The history of the war in Vietnam’s II Corps Tactical Zone (CTZ) was one of large-scale battles followed by smaller engagements, followed again by new and heavy fighting against the communist forces of North Vietnam. But there was “another war” taking place behind the battlefield lines in II Corps CTZ – pacification.

Assigned in support of the U.S. Army’s effort in establishing an efficient infrastructure in the Republic of Vietnam, (RVN) Megellas was the head of Civil Operations and Revolutionary Development Support (CORDS) in II Corps CTZ. This was a lofty position with the equivalent rank of major general that commanded 4,000 active duty service members and civilian contractors from Vietnam and other nations.

Megellas chose to bring his wife Carole and young sons Jim and Stephen to a safe haven in the Philippines, where family visits were very infrequent while he served 

the CORDS mission to help get support organizations in sync in Vietnam.

Q:  Sir, in 1968, you were given the daunting task of running the civil affairs operations in the largest area of Vietnam. How was the command structure set up?

A:  “There were a lot of organizations trying to make good things happen while I was in Vietnam from 1968 through 1970. All these groups reported to one commander and that was General Abrams. The CORDS organization was set up to provide oversight for all the military and civilian organizations that were there lending aid and support. All reported to CORDS, and as one of the four CORDS directors, I reported to the Field Force Commander who reported to General Abrams.

“We would all get together every few weeks. We could bring resources through my efforts and my advisory efforts throughout the country. I thought that was a good thing to have a single manager. Some of us were from the state department, and some were former military. My boss was Lieutenant General W. R. Peers. We brought together all the assets that were related to village security under one manager. Most of the people in my organization were active duty military.

Megellas’ first mission when he arrived into the II Corps CTZ was to improve the quality and effectiveness of Region Forces/Popular Forces units to provide security at the village level.

Q: Sir, with the Vietnamese government’s public relations campaign driving the effort to bring it’s citizens back to their homes, did the promises from Saigon ever really have an effect on the people?

A:  “The most important thing for them was security. The regional or popular forces in the area would be able to provide security, but until those forces were in place, the villagers were very reluctant to come back. Even though the government would make various promises, the security was most important to them.

“…the way insurgency works.”

“When the Viet Cong would come through their area, they were very tough on people. There were assassinations of town officials, extortion of money with heavy taxation and they did all kinds of intimidation, which is the way insurgency works. The key to a positive change was the security.”

CORDS integrated American aid programs targeting the social and economic development of South Vietnam. These efforts were viewed as a foundation upon which to build the Vietnam nation and win the “hearts and minds” of the Vietnamese people in the face of communist political and military opposition. In this fashion, the communists would be largely denied their regular population base.

Q: Sir, when Saigon fell in 1975, the American airlift through Guam to the refugee camps in Southern California brought more than 130,000 Vietnamese refugees onto American soil. Were you able to foresee this humanitarian disaster on the horizon?

A:  “Many thousands of people were displaced during the war, and we had a miserable problem of trying to provide for refugees, and my area had an awful lot of them. Working with the government, we had a program called ‘Return to Village Program’ and under that program, they returned back to their villages and rebuilt their homes. They were given resources like cement, tin, five thousand piastors, rice, and other things to get them started. When they came back, they literally had only the clothes on their backs.

“CORDS could not continue without security. Once the determination was made to begin the drawdown, the big question was ‘would the Vietnamese be able to take over the control of their security?’ The same question applies today in some degree in Iraq.  As we eventually begin to withdraw our forces, which obviously we want to do-‘will the Iraqi’s be able to take over the control of their security?’

 “We got our answer for Vietnam somewhat later and I’m very familiar with what happened in the process. Five years after I left Vietnam, Saigon fell. Another humanitarian rescue event was born – The Indochina Refugee Evacuation Program, and I was nominated as the Deputy Civil Coordinator. I arrived to Camp Pendleton on the morning of April 29, 1975, literally just one hour before the first wave of refugees were flown in from South Vietnam, a 20 hour trip by air. Again, they arrived with only the clothes on their backs.

The Reality of Dejavu

“Among them was my Vietnamese counterpart during my two years in CORDS there, LTG Lu-Lan, and his 14 year-old daughter. He related his experience to me of boarding a barge on the Saigon River to the China Sea just hours before the city itself was completely over-run, to be later on be picked up by a U.S. Navy vessel on the open ocean soon after.”

Q: Sir, what was the single most important aspect of the successes and shortfalls of CORDS?

A: “The world can see now that CORDS didn’t really function without the military security. The military provided the overall security against the enemy forces from North Vietnam. Within the CORDS organization, we had platoons and companies of local militias. They didn’t have the capabilities to deal with the large North Vietnamese forces. As we began to withdraw the U.S. military armed forces, then security was left up to the local forces, and they were not up to the job.”

Training the South Vietnamese civilians and having respect and understanding for their people and their way of life were the noble tools for fighting the “other war” behind the battle lines of Vietnam. During Megellas’ tenure as CORDS II Corps CTZ Director, the U.S. agency for International Development, (USAID) program was in place to resettle displaced villagers across the country.   Returnees were given job training, welfare services, resettlement assistance and were also integrated into the Army Republic of Vietnam military units.

While serving several years in Yemen and Panama for USAID in the years leading up to his two-year tour in CORDS II Corps CTZ, Megellas had a good working knowledge of what it took to assist in the rebuilding of entire communities, one village and one hamlet at a time.

Q: Sir, after the security system was stood up, what was the first concern on the minds of the villagers who were able to return to their homes?

A:  “Once the returning refugees had security in place, then all the benefits were available to them. They really needed everything, and the first thing they needed was rice. The area I served in had a lot of rice farmers and that was their main means of subsistence. Even with all the USAID benefits looming on the horizon, the refugees were still reluctant to return unless the security forces in place. It was a question of people having to take over their own operations and for us to get out of the business.                                                      

“Under the Return to Village Program, once the refugees returned we kept a close eye on them to see what was going on. In the CORDS program, we had district advisors and military personnel in place and when incidents happened in the villages they would report back to the command, and every morning I had a briefing with the generals in the field. The briefers would tell us what happened.

“The rice will grow just as well under either side.”

“On one occasion, the Viet Cong had penetrated into a village in the Binh Dinh province and extracted taxes and forcefully recruited villagers into their force structure. This incident reflected the amount of control we had-or didn’t have over that particular area. After that briefing, I choppered out to that village that same morning, and I had some people with me. I wanted to go out there to see what had really happened in this new result of the Return to Village Program. It didn’t take me long to figure out that the Viet Cong had gotten into that village the night before and got all the village people out into the center of the village, and lectured to them about what they were going to do with them when they took over, and they ran down the government, then distributed hand-written leaflets to these people, telling them the benefits of being under their control, but they didn’t do any damage other than tax collection and recruiting.

“I had an interpreter with me that morning. The villagers were very prone to talk with me, but I did meet this one farmer who was willing to talk with me. I said to him ‘You’ve returned to here under the Return to Village Program and the government has promised to do good things for you, and provide you with assistance. The Viet Cong came through here last night and has offered you things also. Whose program do you think will be the best for you?’

“He paused and looked at me rather solemnly and said ‘The rice will grow just as well under either side.’

“I will never forget that. That was an indication that in the hearts and minds that we were trying to win-at least in this one village, that their big concern was how the rice would grow. They relied on the land and each other and to the farmers in this village it didn’t make a real difference if the Viet Cong were running things or the government. This was one example of the Return to Village Program which we had sponsored.”

“When the security lessened, the enemy became more active.”

In the months prior to the TET Offensive in February, 1968, there were efforts to bring the various aid groups positioned in Vietnam into one arena and under one command. This is when CORDS began and it picked up the pace and became the driving force of command and control to further the organizing efforts in the rebuilding of the war ravaged South Vietnamese countryside.

Q: Sir, the images of young American men coming home in coffins became all too common on the evening television news, causing the public support for the defense of South Vietnam by American forces to dramatically lessenen as the war entered into the early 1970’s. In the areas it supported, did CORDS do enough to allow the South Vietnamese to ‘stand alone’ against the ever-encroaching communist north?”

A: “I don’t think the CORDS organization –what we were doing, when we began to slim down towards 1973 didn’t have that much negative effect until we began to lose our security, and when the security lessened, the enemy became more active. Some of the resources we had been providing became less forthcoming and that had a detrimental effect on the South Vietnamese.

“It was a total U.S. advisory effort from the top on down to the province level. There were no regular army forces and the CORDS program implemented training to the regional forces, popular forces, peoples self defense forces, and the local police. It was a total effort on their part. They had no regular army and we did and we tried to get their army to take over the security structure with the training programs. It was recognized that if we were going to succeed the South Vietnamese were going to have to take over and we were going to have to get out as it was their country.

“When we began to withdraw our forces the burden fell upon the South Vietnamese. I went back in 1973 and toured the entire country to see what was happening with the drawdown of U.S. forces. What had happened was that when we left we took certain capabilities with us that the South Vietnamese didn’t have. Their big problem was that we left a lot of sophisticated equipment there and they didn’t have the maintenance capability nor the supplies to maintain their new equipment. It wasn’t that they couldn’t fly a plane or a helicopter-they couldn’t maintain it all.

“We must have air support or  we’re finished…”

“They told me at that time that they were going to defend their country but we had to recognize that when we finally left, they had to defend their entire country, and they would have to spread out their forces in such a way that they would end up pinned. They asked us for one major thing and that was air support as they didn’t have that capability.

“We denied them that when we pulled out. Congress passed a law that we would not spend any money to provide air support for them. They told me right off that without air support there would be no way they would be able to hold back the North Vietnamese from coming into their country.

“I watched all that very carefully, having spent part of my life in Vietnam and I was very dedicated to what I was doing. I thought we had a chance to keep the strength in South Vietnam so that they could resist communism and that would have been a victory for us to help them remain independent of the north. In my judgment, if there is any shame involved with Vietnam, it is the way we left them there with the inability to hold off an attack.”

Q: Sir, what has been your recourse for your overall Vietnam exxperience since you left the refugee camps in Southern California in 1975?

A: “When we left Vietnam, it was proclaimed by Secretary of State Kissinger and President Nixon that it was ‘peace with honor’ but there was no peace and there was no honor. Even today, there is still no honor. I’ll say that now.  Clearly, we’ve not had honor in Vietnam, and it was not peace. The real and true honor was all those who served over there, trying to help the South Vietnamese.

 “We were over their trying to help the Vietnamese and we were trying to come out of that with something out of the episode, and then there was the shame. There was a lot of shame in Vietnam. We’ve swept it under the rug and we tend to forget about it, people like me who were there for two years saw it – I know the caliber of the men who did the fighting, the ones people generally have called “grunts,” which is a demeaning term to begin with – sending them out into the boonies, and many of them coming back for second tours, and some more than that…risking their lives -  they were dedicated to what they were doing and we should honor those people.” The real shame is in how we continue to bury all those years under a rock.

“We should finally say that the men who did the fighting there were the best of their generation; just as it’s now said about my generation from World War II. For those of us who were there and dedicated to the cause, we believed that we could accomplish something, we felt pretty bad that we pulled out of there the way we did and left them there to fend for themselves knowing full well that they couldn’t do it. A very large majority of the remaining refugees we had initially aided years before fled Vietnam out of fear for their personal safety and their families.

“I don’t know if things would have turned out different if they had the airpower defense as we don’t know those things in war.  Certainly, once you decide that you’re pulling out, and you’re pulling your resources out, you’re throwing in the towel so-to-speak, and that’s what we did. What irritates me to this day is how we could say we had peace with honor, and how Kissinger could accept the Nobel Peace Prize.

Q: Sir, do you feel the South Vietnamese carried their weight while American forces were on the ground?

A: “We put a lot of effort into Vietnam, but we were doing a lot of things that the Vietnamese should have been doing. If indeed we were guests in their country, which was a term we really liked to use – ‘we were guests’ as it was not our country. We were invited in. According to the relationship between guest and host, the host does not put the guest between themselves and their enemy, the host protects the guest. I think we should have made a greater effort to strengthen Vietnamese forces and their capabilities rather than wage the major battles that we did. A lot of the major battles fought in Vietnam were fought by American forces.  It should have been the Vietnamese at the front doing the fighting. To an extent, they were organized and they did fight.”

Q: Sir, what has been  a defining Vietnam moment that has stayed with you for the past 35 years?

A: “As the war drove on and steadily became unpopular in the U.S., I remember a meeting I attended with General Abrams, and he frequently came out and talked with his field force commanders, and his CORDS directors would also attend. I remember him telling General Peers that back home in the U.S. the public was not willing to accept the casualties that were mounting up as the war drove home every night on television. He said to General Peers ‘if we could keep the casualties down to 50 a week, it might be a price the American people will be willing to pay for us to continue and try and achieve our objectives.’”

The Inhumane Politics of War

“Now, how does anyone tell the tactical commander he’s got to ‘limit his casualties?’ When the protests were going on in the U.S. casualties became more than just a tactical unit in my judgment. I wrote a book about my experiences in World War II where one side kills the other side and the survivors win. This wasn’t necessarily true in Vietnam. They didn’t have to kill all of our soldiers to win.  They could work on the American public opinion to continue the war, and that would be by raising the level of casualties. We even see that now in Iraq. When the enemy targets U.S. Marines and American soldiers – that raises the political pressures here.  A casualty is more than just a tactical loss. It’s also a political unit.

            “We did do things to protect our troops on the ground- we made sure they were never alone on guard. We cut back on high-risk missions to lesson casualties.

The Koreans had two divisions in my area. There were several other groups of soldier son the ground and everyone had an AO. Yet, it wasn’t a continuous ‘front line;’ it was more like a ‘leopard spot.’ There were troops deployed all over the place. The Vietcong operated out of secret bases. They would hit us with small units in raids and I observed that when the demonstrations were reaching a fever-pitch in the U.S., the Vietcong increased their efforts to specifically kill Americans. In so doing, they would bypass a Korean outpost and even a local unit to attack an American position. They could have killed Korean soldiers but they had no political advantage in killing the Koreans because the Koreans did not report casualties the way that we did. Their casualty rate did not raise any political back wash in Korea and they had two entire divisions there.  So, in my judgment, the demonstrators in the U.S. were a direct factor in the opposition in what was going on was a direct factor in the killing of U.S. forces on the ground. These are things that I observed from my vantage point, in direct control of several thousand military and civilian forces in what amounted to half the land area of Vietnam.

            “I’ve carried this around with me for 35 years, and when I first came home I talked about the raising effects of the demonstrators and the political costs of how the enemy took advantage of that.

Q: Sir, has America learned from its mistakes?

A: “The lesson we learned from Vietnam is today in Iraq and Afghanistan we have to support our troops. If we go out and do what we did in Vietnam, especially with the vast array of today’s 21^st century media at the public’s disposal, we will surely endanger our troops on the ground.  If we fail to stand united, the enemy will continue to seize upon the energy from the demonstrations and the protestors and kill more Americans. Weather people think the war is right or wrong in Iraq, the fact is we have to support our troops.”

 It has been 32 years since American forces withdrew from Vietnam, taking the security the CORDS mission needed to enable the South Vietnamese to continue rebuilding efforts and survive. Among the decorations Megellas received from the South Vietnamese government for his service in CORDS were the National Chieu Hoi Medal, the Psychological Warfare Medal, and the Revolutionary Development Medal.

In 2003, Megellas, now 88 decided to write about his experiences in World War II as a member of the 82d Airborne’s 504th Parachute Infantry Regiment. Megellas’ first-ever literary effort is now highly acclaimed Random House publication “All the Way to berlin; A Paratrooper at War in europe”now in it’s 7th printing.

Further information can be found at www.jamesmegellas.org