Mighty Thunder is ever ready to post honest words well spoken on the RTR website. This post is authored by a warrior who earned his row of Vietnam service ribbons where there were no showers and the air was full of hot lead looking for Marine blood. In this “rant” Shadow calls a spade a spade, as he always does.

Shadow was prompted to fire off his rant by the RTR post of 1 September, “Time to Thump the Tub” and a NYT clip with “Westmoreland” and enemy casualties in the same sentence.
Westmoreland’s grand plan for victory was wrapped up in “search and destroy” tactics. The justification for continued pursuit of his choice of tactics was based on the numbers of North Vietnamese and Vietcong dead bodies recorded and reported on a weekly basis. LBJ had an eye for these reports as a useful measure of how his war was going, too. Thus the inflated importance of “body counts, real and imagined.

Shadow’s testimony is a great addition to the RTR pages where such passion for the truth is always welcome… Thanks, Shadow, for your truth and your passion.

Mighty Thunder also wishes to thank Dutch for passing Shadow’s story on to Rolling Thunder Remembered. 

A MARINE RANT…. THE TRUTH ABOUT BODY COUNTS
Thanks to Shadow –

Well guys… the bit about casualties (in RTR of 1 September) opens up a deep wound in my heart and more than little hate in my mind. Stand by for a rant.

I’d like to take the guy by the throat, who came up with the idea that to gauge progress or success in Vietnam; was through “Body Count”. I have seethed about it for decades. And was personal witness to how it corrupted leadership and became a political ploy and was horribly misleading as the war ran on. I can tell you from experience… after 1966, most claims of enemy killed or wounded were about as accurate as counting stars visually out of your back yard. Here’s what happened.

Folks who rise to the command of a battalion or regiment were/are not… dumb shxxs. If they realize the evaluation of their success as commander’s (and future promotions), rests on the number of enemy KIA or WIA they produce after each engagement; well then, what I witnessed first hand, I believe was not only not an anomaly, but in fact, became standard practice. In early 1967, we were about to make an SLF landing off the USS Iwo Jima, down by Duc Pho, south of Chu Lai. We were to secure the area so the Army’s Special Forces could come in and set up a base camp. I was sitting in on the brief by the Battalion Commander for the various Company Commanders. After going through all the “plan”, who was going where, etc. He concluded the meeting with the following and I quote… “Gents, we will not come off the beach until we have at least 300 Enemy KIA, confirmed. I repeat, we will not quit until we have at least 300 Enemy KIA. Anyone have any questions”? Not a single soul said a word!

What he was soliciting, as far as I’m concerned, was to lie if we didn’t have a real body count. And folks, that’s exactly what happened. We were on the beach about two weeks. In truth, there was very little actual combat. A few short skirmishes, but no intense combat. If my memory is correct, I think there were less than 20 bodies, that you could walk up to and put your foot on and say… “These are dead enemy soldiers”… and seven of those were killed by an air strike before we landed on the beach. What we claimed through intimidation and cajoling… was over 300 Enemy KIA during the Operation. Made me want to puke! It has stuck in my craw the rest of my life.

The fact is… after every major engagement… the idea that we strolled around and counted bodies was a farce! Especially up in the canopy near the DMZ. Fact is… both sides tended to withdraw, dragging their wounded and killed with them. I am telling you… any number cited as to enemy dead… is at best… a WAG… and at worst, a total fabrication. I don’t trust the numbers of any historical document from that period. The best indication of success is area controlled… not how many phantom enemy were killed.

And a gent by the name of Wendell Fertig explained to us decades before Vietnam, how difficult it is to win an unconventional war. Fertig was an Army Engineer in the Philippines when the Japanese invaded. Instead of surrendering, he fled to one of the southern islands to form a rag tag resistant group. Fetig’s rag tag outfit… kept an entire Japanese Division at bay for the duration of the war. They won the hearts and minds of the indigent peoples and practiced hit and run tactics… never staying in a protracted combat with the Japanese. Like ghosts, they evaporated into the jungle after each contact. Fetig explained his tactics with a simple explanation… “It’s like sticking your fist into a pillow… as long as your fist is there… you control that finite area… but that leaves 99% of the pillow not in control. Remove your fist and you don’t control that small area any more and it reflexively pops back out”. Pretty basic stuff.

My rant for today.

Shadow