The Marines, Counterinsurgency, and Strategic Culture

172 Chapter 6
tonight,” you know. That would tell me that something was going
to be happening in the area tonight. So of course, being Marines,
we went in there. But that’s how we got our intelligence was mainly
from the people. The intelligence we got from the Marine Corps,
oh, God, it was just absolutely terrible. It was always way out in
left field somewhere and it really never pertained to anything that
happened to us. . . . And what intelligence they did have a lot of
times just didn’t come out to us, so most of the time we just relied
on the Vietnamese. 196
For others, the familiarity of living in the ville—the ability to detect small
changes that meant that the VC were in the area—served as their most
important intelligence asset. 197 When villagers were mum, intelligence could
still be gleaned contextually: “Our main mission was to prevent the VC
from stealing the farmers’ rice and harassing them. One way of knowing
if the VC were in the area was to keep an eye on the vats the farmers kept
their rice in. If they were empty, Charlie had passed through. The farmers
would never tell us anything, so we didn’t know if we were helping them or
hindering them. It was very frustrating.” 198
One CAP squad member summed up the rather obvious distinctive
quality of CAP intelligence rather nicely:
Q: Your CAP seems to be unusually successful in gaining intelligence
from the people. To what would you attribute your success
in this regard?
A: Well, the first reason is, and one of the main functions in the
program, is to work closely with the people. I think in the
past guerrilla wars that have been carried on that the Allied
forces or the American forces or French or whoever it may
be separated themselves from the people and did not allow
themselves to get the information the people have to offer. 199
Unfortunately, much of the intelligence that the CAP squads had to offer
was ignored at strategic levels. One of their serious frustrations was that
their intelligence was often dismissed since it was passed forward by junior
Marines rather than officers. This included warnings in advance of the Tet
Offensive. 200 CAP leaders’ observations and analysis were not translated
up the chain of command because command did not put enough stock in
enlisted opinions. “That was one of the problems with the CAPs—we didn’t
have any officers with us. They thought we exaggerated.” 201 As a result, most
CAP intelligence was gleaned and applied locally, which was helpful in that
immediate area but a missed opportunity for larger strategic effect.
Looking back, a number in the Corps deem the CAP program largely
successful. It undermined VC influence in the villages where it operated, won