The Marines, Counterinsurgency, and Strategic Culture

Counterinsurgency Readiness 209
“never effective” because a steady stream of battles showed villagers that
Marines could “get their butts kicked.” The security context played a central
role in the effectiveness of any particular CAP unit. 47
The first generation of CAP units set up day compounds in their villages
where they slept, cleaned equipment, and offered the medical services of
the corpsman—“medcaps”—for villagers. During the CAP program’s early
years, a number of compounds were lethally overrun, and it became increasingly
clear that their static structure represented a juicy target for often overwhelming
forces of the VC or infantry from the National Vietnamese Army.
In response, Marine Corps leadership made a bold break to “mobile” CAP
squads. 48 Such Marines didn’t “live” anywhere—they remained constantly
on the move throughout their village, taking up randomly selected day sites
with village families (often the family would abandon its hooch for the day
and turn it over to the Marines). Not all Marines were enthusiastic about
the switch. Arguing for the compound approach, CAP scholar and former
CAP Marine Michael Peterson notes:
As a center of pacification, the compound . . . was a focal point for
civic action. The peasants knew where to come for medical help
(although they also knew where a mobile CAP could be found—the
“bamboo grapevine” was very efficient). The CAP compound could
be a much- needed haven of safety for hamlet officials and elders.
And they were a warehouse for supplies earmarked for impending
civic action projects. This is much more important than it appeared
at first glance. 49
Some Marines agreed. One argued strongly against the mobiles, saying
that they were terrifying, didn’t allow the men to build up supplies, or even
acquire sufficient food. In addition, “civic action duty just fell by the wayside.”
50 The mobile life certainly lacked in creature comforts. In one Marine’s
description: “We stayed on the move constantly. At night, when we could,
we slept in the cemeteries. The Vietnamese believed that to enter a cemetery
of their loved ones was bad. We also slept near dung piles out in the middle
of rice paddies. The Vietnamese stayed away from there for obvious reasons.
Our CAP always slept in full combat gear, rifles across our laps, propped up
against gravestones, trees, rocks, whatever.” 51
Robert Klyman, whose thesis on the CAP program has merited both
archiving in historical files at Quantico and a place on the CAP Marine website,
says most Marines were enthusiastic about the switch to mobile CAP
units since it required less “overhead” in time and materials invested in the
compound and it made their unit harder to find and kill. 52 Compound- era
Marines seemed to spend an inordinate amount of time fixing up the compound,
getting it “squared away,” and adding what comforts and defensive
measure they could rather than spending that time in the village. 53 Klyman