Word: arvn
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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...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...curriculum-plus the innovation that officer candidates can be flunked if they fail to measure up. Next year South Viet Nam will begin its version of a war college for mid-career officers. So high is the enthusiasm for it that the general in charge of central ARVN training wants to be in the first batch of students. Americans in Viet Nam like to recall that only a little more than a decade ago there was an army with much the same set of problems now plaguing South Viet Nam: the Koreans, today as feared by the Viet Cong...