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One of the things that irritate U.S. officers is that too often one ARVN unit will not come to the aid of another when the going gets tough. One night last May, a lone squad of Viet Cong—a dozen men—staged an attack on the headquarters of a 25th division battalion, killing 31 ARVN soldiers and three U.S. advisers. The battalion's three rifle companies were dug in a scant 300 yards away—and stayed there listening to the shooting while their comrades died.
Few ARVN units are willing to move at night—they fear ambush—and they often recess the war for the weekend while officers whip off to Saigon to see their families or make the bar-hostess rounds. Patrols sometimes play transistor radios on search-and-destroy missions to warn the enemy away. More than one ARVN unit has radioed back to its headquarters that it has taken some key objective when actually it is holed up in a safe spot miles away. And the South Vietnamese are notoriously disrespectful of private property, frequently taking chickens, pigs and other peasant possessions as booty.
Understandable Reasons. Shocking to the professional U.S. adviser as such performances may be, there are some understandable reasons for them. The Vietnamese have been fighting for 20 years, in successive generations of young men, and the whole military fabric is frayed by the invisible cumulative fatigue of what seems like endless war. The long years of combat have taken their toll in officers, often the best; so, too, have the coups and intrigues of Saigon politics over the years.
The leadership gap is in fact the ARVN's greatest difficulty. Where able officers still lead, South Vietnamese units fight well. But able officers are all too few, and the rest are often chosen for their social position or their political ties—and often, too, become preoccupied with the graft that has long been part of an officer's perks in Asia.
Along with spotty leadership, the soldier in the ranks suffers from other liabilities. He is fighting an ethnic brother, and sometimes a brother in fact. Unlike the U.S. soldier in Viet Nam, who knows he will not have to fight a day longer than one year, draftees in the ARVN ranks face a three-year tour in combat. Also unlike U.S. units, Saigon ranger, airborne and marine units often spend 60 to 90 days at a stretch out in the field. In the ARVN, a division commands only two artillery battalions v. the four available to an American division. U.S. air and artillery do back up the Vietnamese forces, of course, but Americans naturally support their own forces first, and there can be long delays before help comes for a beleaguered government force.
Building Pigpens. Well aware of the South Vietnamese army's inadequacies, the Vietnamese joint general staff is at work on plans to reorganize its forces "from top to bottom," as Ky puts it. One proposal would disband the four corps commands and the ten divisions, with their tempting opportunities for warlord graft and corruption, and create more flexible units that would specialize in pacification efforts, counterguerrilla action, and search-and-destroy missions. With U.S. help, General Vien has launched several new training programs designed to help soldiers learn everything from setting guerrilla-style ambushes to assisting villagers in building pigpens.