Saigon's fall was a bitter end to the long American effort to sustain South Vietnam. Ranging from advice and support to direct participation in combat and involving nearly three million U.S. servicemen, the effort failed to stop Communist leaders from reaching their goal of unifying a divided nation. South Vietnam's military defeat tended to obscure the crucial inability of this massive military enterprise to compensate for Saigon's political shortcomings. Over a span of nearly two decades, a series of regimes failed to mobilize fully and effectively their nation's political, social, and economic resources to foster a popular base of support. North Vietnamese main force units ended the war, but local insurgency among the people of the South made that outcome possible and perhaps inevitable. US Losses The U.S. Army paid a high price for its long involvement in South Vietnam. American military deaths exceeded 58,000 and of these about two-thirds were soldiers. The majority of the dead were low-ranking enlisted men (E-2 and E-3), young men twenty-three years old or younger, of whom approximately 13 percent were black. Most deaths were caused by small-arms fire and gunshot, but a significant portion, almost 30 percent, stemmed from mines, booby traps, and grenades. Artillery, rockets, and bombs accounted for only a small portion of the total fatalities. If not for the unprecedented medical care that the Army provided in South Vietnam, the death toll would have been higher yet. Nearly 300,000 Americans were wounded, of whom half required hospitalization. The lives of many seriously injured men, who would have become fatalities in earlier wars, were saved by rapid helicopter evacuation direct to hospitals close to the combat zone. Here, relatively secure from air and ground attack, usually unencumbered by mass casualties, and with access to an uninterrupted supply of whole blood, Army doctors and nurses availed themselves of the latest medical technology to save thousands of lives. As one medical officer pointed out, the Army was able to adopt a "civilian philosophy of casualty triage" in the combat zone that directed the "major effort first to the most seriously injured." But some who served in South Vietnam suffered more insidious damage from the adverse psychological effects of combat or the long-term effects of exposure to chemical agents. More than a decade after the end of the war, 1,761 American soldiers remain listed as missing in action. Vietnamese Losses The war-ravaged Vietnamese, north and south, incurred the greatest losses. South Vietnamese military deaths exceeded 200,000. War-related civilian deaths in the South approached a half-million, while the injured and maimed numbered many more. Accurate estimates of enemy casualties run afoul of the difficulty in distinguishing between civilians and combatants, imprecise body counts, and the difficulty of verifying casualties in areas controlled by the enemy. Nevertheless, nearly a million Viet Cong and North Vietnamese soldiers are believed to have perished in combat through the spring of 1975. For the U.S. Army the scars of the war ran even deeper than the grim statistics showed. Given its long association with South Vietnam's fortunes, the Army could not escape being tarnished by its ally's fall. The loss compounded already unsettling questions about the Army's role in Southeast Asia, about the soundness of its advice to the South Vietnamese, about its understanding of the nature of the war, about the appropriateness of its strategy and tactics, and about the adequacy of the counsel provided by Army leaders to national decision makers. Marked by ambiguous military objectives, defensive strategy, lack of tactical initiative, ponderous tactics, and untidy command arrangements, the struggle in Vietnam seemed to violate most of the time-honored principles of war. Many officers sought to erase Vietnam from the Army's corporate memory, feeling uncomfortable with the ignominy of failure or believing that the lessons and experience of the war were of little use to the post-Vietnam Army. Although a generation of officers, including many of the Army's future leaders, cut their combat teeth in Vietnam, many regretted that the Army's reputation, integrity, and professionalism had been tainted in the service of a flawed strategy and a dubious ally. Even before South Vietnam fell, Army strategists turned their attention to what seemed to them to be the Army's more enduring and central mission -- the defense of western Europe. Ending a decade of neglect of its forces there, the Army began to strengthen and modernize its NATO contingent. Army planners doubted that in any future European war they would enjoy the luxury of a gradual, sustained mobilization, or unchallenged control of air and sea lines of communication, or access to support facilities close to the battlefield. France's decision in 1966 to end its affiliation with NATO had already forced the Army to re-evaluate its strategy and support arrangements. The end of the draft in 1972 and the transition to an all-volunteer Army in 1973--a reflection of popular dissatisfaction with the Vietnam War-added to the unlikelihood of another war similar to Vietnam and made it seem more than ever an anomaly. New Doctrine Instead, Army planners faced a possible future conflict that would begin with little or no warning and confront allied forces-in-being with a numerically superior foe. Combat in such a war was likely to be violent and sustained, entailing deep thrusts by armored forces, intense artillery and counterbattery fire, and a fluid battlefield with a high degree of mobility. Army doctrine to fight this war, codified in 1976 in FM (Field Manual) 100-5, Operations, barely acknowledged the decade of Army combat in Vietnam. The new doctrine of "active defense" drew heavily on the experience of armored operations in World War II and recent fighting in the Middle East between Arab and Israeli forces. From a study of about i,ooo armored battles, Army planners deduced that an outnumbered defender could force a superior enemy to concentrate his forces and reveal his intentions, and thus bring to bear in the all-important initial phase of the battle sufficient forces and firepower in the critical area to defeat his main attack. The conversion of the 1st Cavalry Divison, the unit that exemplified combat operations in South Vietnam, from an airmobile division to a new triple capabilities (TRICAP) division symbolized the post-Vietnam Army's reorientation toward combat in Europe. Infused with additional mechanized and artillery forces to give it greater flexibility and firepower, the division's triple capabilities-armor, airmobility, and air cavalry-better suited it to carry out the tactical concepts of FM 100-5 than its previous configuration. Yet the Army did not totally ignore its Vietnam experience. U.S. armor and artillery forces had gained valuable experience there in co-ordinating operations with airmobile forces. Although some in the military questioned whether helicopters could operate in mid-intensity conflict, Army doctrine rested heavily on concepts of airmobility that had evolved during Vietnam. Helicopters were still expected to move forces from one sector of the battlefield to another, to carry out reconnaissance and surveillance, to provide aerial fire support, and to serve as antitank weapons systems. In many respects, the role contemplated for helicopters in the post-Vietnam Army harkened back to concepts of airmobility originally formulated for the atomic battlefield of the early 1960's, but modified by combat in Vietnam. Like the Army of the Vietnam era, the postwar Army continued a common hallmark of the American military tradition by emphasizing technology and firepower over manpower. The Army's new operational doctrine had its share of critics. Stressing tactical operations of units below the division, the doctrine of FM 100-5 neglected the role of larger Army echelons. Recognition of this deficiency led to a revival of interest in the role of divisions, corps, and armies in the gray area between grand strategy and tactics. But some strategists warned that the Army seemed to be preparing for the war it was least likely to fight. Like the strategists of the New Look in the 1950's, they viewed an attack on Army forces in Europe as a mere trip wire that would ignite a nuclear confrontation between the superpowers and thus make the land battle irrelevant. With insurgencies, small wars, subversion, and terrorism flourishing throughout Asia, Africa, and Latin America, others believed that that Army would sooner or later find itself once again engaged in conflicts that closely resembled Vietnam. Ten Years Later Ten years after the loss of South Vietnam, the U.S. Army's major overseas commitments remained anchored in NATO and South Korea. International realities still compelled it to prepare for a variety of contingencies. In addition to organizing divisions to fight in Europe, the Army revived its old interest in light infantry divisions. By the mid-1980's two such divisions, the 10th Mountain Division and the 6th Infantry Division (Light), had been activated, giving the Army once again a total of eighteen divisions. Lower active-duty strength required many divisions to be fleshed out by Reserve Components before they could be committed to combat. Nevertheless, the Army viewed its new divisions as suitable for use in a rapid deployment force to reinforce NATO or world trouble spots. Although their strength was drastically reduced following the Vietnam War, Special Forces continued to be called upon to advise and train anti-Communist military forces in Latin America and elsewhere and to participate in a variety of special activities to counter terrorism. Operations like the abortive attempt to rescue American hostages in Iran and the successful operation to prevent a Communist takeover of the Caribbean island of Grenada attested to the Army's continuing need for both rapidly deployable and special-purpose forces. The realities of a complex world reinforced the pervasive influence of flexible response on the U.S. national security policy. Many other missions fell under the doctrinal umbrella of low-intensity conflict, a vague and faddish term that became popular in the 1980's as counterinsurgency had two decades earlier. The relevance of Vietnam to low-intenstity conflict remains an open question. Nevertheless, by the 198o's the conduct and lessons of the war in Vietnam had again become the subject of lively debate in the Army. Reassessments of its role tend to center around the issue of whether the Army should have devoted more effort to pacification or to defeating the conventional military threat posed by North Vietnam. These issues stem from the ambiguities of the war and the paradox of the Army's experience. Reliance on massive firepower and technological superiority and the ability to marshal vast logistical resources have been hallmarks of the American military tradition. Tactics have often seemed to exist apart from larger issues, strategies, and objectives. Yet in Vietnam the Army experienced tactical success and strategic failure. The rediscovery of the Vietnam War suggests that its most important legacy may be the lesson that unique historical, political, cultural, and social factors always impinge on the military. Strategic and tactical success rests not only on military progress but on correctly analyzing the nature of the particular conflict, understanding the enemy's strategy, and realistically assessing the strengths and weaknesses of allies. A new humility and a new sophistication may form the best parts of the complex heritage left the Army by the long, bitter war in Vietnam. Back to Table of Contents -- US Army in Vietnam Back to Vietnam Military History List of Issues Back to MagWeb Magazine List © Copyright 2004 by Coalition Web, Inc. This article appears in MagWeb.com (Magazine Web) on the Internet World Wide Web. 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