Marines CAP mission in Vietnam by Linh Yoshimura Via Flickr: June 11, 1967. Marines CAP (Combined Action Program) mission in Vietnam. Notice, during 1965 and 1966, the Marines in I Corps had fought a number of battles at the battalion and regimental level with Viet Cong and NVA forces, resulting in tactical victories for the Marines. Additionally, smaller Marine units regularly conducted sweeps, patrols, and ambushes to gain control over rural areas. Senior Marine officers, however, believed that permanent, meaningful success in Vietnam would result primarily from efforts at "pacification." These Marine leaders included Lieutenant General Lewis W. Walt, commander of III Marine Amphibious Force (III MAF), and Lieutenant General Victor H. Krulak, commander of Fleet Marine Force, Pacific (FMFPac). Prior Marine Corps experiences combatting insurgencies in Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and Nicaragua earlier in the century and the influence of the Marine Corps’ Small Wars Manual influenced officers to believe that the real war lay within the villages. Several American and South Vietnamese programs aimed to carry out the pacification strategy. Since August 1965, III MAF had been committed to the Combined Action Program (CAP), in which one squad of Marine infantrymen and two squads of men from a Vietnamese village formed a “combined action platoon.” These units were responsible for the security of their respective villages; additionally, they facilitated the training of the villagers for their own self-defense, denying resources and manpower from the villages to the Viet Cong, establishing civic action programs that improved the quality of life, and weakening the Communist guerrillas’ hold over the population.The growth of CAP in I Corps paralleled that of the new Civil Operations and Revolutionary Development Support (CORDS) program, carried out principally by the South Vietnamese government and the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN). In CORDS, South Vietnamese troops established physical security in hamlets and villages and then worked with the village chiefs to improve the quality of life. By late 1966 and early 1967, General Krulak and other III MAF leaders saw much of the Marines’ role in I Corps as providing a tactical screen behind which counterinsurgency and civic action operations could proceed. Finally, Marine forces in I Corps continued to carry out their own civic action programs, providing advice and assistance for construction projects, schools, medical care, and resettlement of refugees, and to secure local support for the government’s cause. Pacification efforts in I Corps were beginning to show positive results and likely influenced the Communist government of North Vietnam to send the NVA’s 324B Division across the DMZ in mid-1966. The Marines’ approach to fighting the war, however, consistently clashed with General Westmoreland’s, whose thinking was perhaps influenced by his own Service’s experiences fighting large-scale conventional forces in the world wars and in Korea. In 1965 and 1966, for example, Marine leaders had favored an “enclave” strategy, by which Marine units would secure and pacify an area, gradually extending the expanse of U.S. and government control like a “spreading ink blot.” Westmoreland did not completely discount the importance of the Marines’ pacification efforts but, in comparison to the Corps, he placed more emphasis on a search and-destroy approach in which U.S. units would leave their bases and enclaves to locate and defeat large Viet Cong and NVA units in a war of firepower and attrition. Marine leaders, especially in the case of Khe Sanh, originally chafed under Westmoreland’s pressure to put more emphasis on these types of operations than on CAP.
