The Marines, Counterinsurgency, and Strategic Culture

Setting the Stage 151
with them the informal tutoring of mentors who had served in the Caribbean.
66 Out of this mix an experimental Marine- driven program within
Vietnam was born. Fewer than 1.5 percent of the Marines in Vietnam served
in the CAP program. 67 Its impact on the annals of studied counterinsurgency
history, however, has registered far above its numerical weight.
Vietnam: The CAP Program
Several official histories of the CAP program cast it as a direct outgrowth of
the Banana Wars experience. Victor Krulak, one of the program’s strongest
and most senior supporters, argued, “Senior Marine officers and those who
had an interest in Marine Corps history knew that the Combined Action
idea had been applied with success before—in Haiti . . . , in Nicaragua
. . . and, probably most effectively, in Santo Domingo.” 68 Other Marine
voices are more circumspect about the CAP program’s Banana Wars heritage.
William Corson, one of the program’s most famous and controversial
directors, challenged the assumption that the CAP program represented a
natural follow- on to the Banana Wars experience or that it duplicated its
lessons. He argued, alongside others, that the CAP program, rather than
being an accumulated set of “lessons learned” from previous irregular eras,
was instead a program that fell much more along the lines of Marine innovation—an
evolving project of many fathers that grew organically out of
an effort to protect airfields and lines of communication running through
hamlets. 69 The program sprang from a need to augment limited personnel
numbers along defense lines. In response, some enterprising Marine officers
decided to team Marines with Vietnamese Popular Force (PF) soldiers
already present in the respective areas. 70 The program ran in continually
evolving fashion from 1965 to the end of 1970, at which time it was phased
into a separate program that watered down many of the CAP’s distinctive
features. 71 The CAP program’s mission was entirely dissolved after six years
(in spring 1971). 72
The CAP program was so innovative that many saw it as outside traditional
Marine boundaries. Bruce Allnutt, who in 1969 completed a comprehensive
nine- month review of the program, claimed that even at its height
some “traditionalists” were decrying the CAP effort as being “outside the
Marine Corps’ historical mission.” 73 Further evidence of that sentiment
comes from the enlisted CAP Marines themselves. When asked what advice
he would pass along to a new Marine joining his unit, a seasoned CAP
Marine cautioned, “The major thing is . . . you must be open- minded because
this line of work is different than anything else . . . in the Marine Corps.” 74
A review of the CAP program’s beginnings and evolution does seem to
indicate that as much as the Caribbean may have been in the minds of the
Corps’s most senior ranks, the corporals and privates who served in the