John G. Miller Interview

              John A. Adams ’71 Center for Military History and Strategic Analysis. Cold War Oral History Project Interview with Colonel John G. Miller by Cadet Shelby E. Sears, June 26, 2004
©Adams Center, Virginia Military Institute
About the interviewer: Cadet Shelby Sears Cadet Shelby Sears (’05), from Louisville, Kentucky, is a Corporal in the USMCR and majors in History at VMI. He desires a commission in the Marine Corps upon graduation.
Miller: I am John G. Miller, retired Marine colonel. I served between 1957-1985 in the Marine Corps. I had two tours in Vietnam, the first as a rifle company commander and battalion assistant operation officers, (S-3A) in 1965-66 and the second time as a Co-van, an advisor to the Vietnamese Marines in 1970-71.
Sears: Did you serve with Colonel [John] Ripley?
Miller: I was there a year before Colonel Ripley. He was there as a Co-van in 1971-72.
Sears: Your previous experience in 1965 — was that a good prep and how did it differ from advising the Vietnamese Marines?
Miller: It was a good prep in one significant way: it introduced us to the countryside and the Vietnamese and gave us a feel for what the war was like. Also it was a requirement. They didn’t put people into the Marine Advisory Unit without a prior successful combat tour at battalion level or below. The very first advisors — before the U.S. troops went in — weren’t able to meet that test, but once we committed ground forces a successful ground tour became a requirement to serve with the Advisory Unit. Some of the things I did as a rifle company commander I found myself doing again as an advisor, such as calling in supporting arms and working the logistics chain. So it was a valuable prep. They also sent us to a three-month advisor course at Quantico to refresh our skills. It was mostly language — total immersion in the language every day and some hands on training in fire support coordination — calling in artillery fire, naval gun fire and air strikes. So we were pretty well prepped by the time we got back to Vietnam.
Sears: I’ve understood from the three other interviews that I’ve done that one thing the advisor had to learn very quickly was how to deal with the other services, for calling in supporting arms and protocols.
Miller: Dealing with the other services – I’ve never personally called in naval gunfire, but I dealt with the U. S. Air Force directly in calling in fire from a “Spooky”. I also dealt with U. S. Army aviation untis for helicopter support. Most of the artillery I dealt with was provided by the Vietnamese themselves.
Sears: When you left for Vietnam, how much language skill did you have?
Miller: Just basic. We learned enough at Quantico to talk to the troops and schmooze with them, asking them where they were from and how big their families were. Just small talk. For important issues like dealing with fire support commands and things like that, we dealt in English because most of the Vietnamese officers had had at least a year in the United States at Quantico. So they were much better in English then we were in Vietnamese. So when it really got down to being precise, we stayed in English. The Vietnamese was handy for the social side of it and to show that we cared enough to try and speak their language.
Sears: At the end of your tour, did you come back with more Vietnamese language than you started with?
Miller: Probably — my ear was better. We first learned Vietnamese not from native instructors, but from interrogator-translators — Marines. So what we had was already one shade away from the authentic. Vietnamese is a tonal language — you almost have to sing it; if you don’t get the right tone on each word, it can change the meaning. So we learned the vocabulary, and our tones were a little bit off at first, but we picked that up once we were in Vietnam and heard native speakers. Our tones improved and we got along better. Most of the improvement over the year was in picking up tones. Sears: I remember from your book, The “Co-vans,” that you refer to language training as a “copy of a copy.” Besides one experience where you describe being sick when you first got there, did you stay healthy?
Miller: We all lost a lot of weight when we got there. We were eating “rice and roots,” but it was two small bowls of rice a day and little shreds of meat and maybe a piece of fruit; that was the daily ration. That was okay for a 110-pound Vietnamese, but for a 170-pound American, that’s a guaranteed weight-loss diet. So we lost weight, but in a way that was a healthier diet in the jungle. You didn’t need to eat a lot in there; eating a lot would put a strain on your system. I remember once coming out after six weeks in the field and going back to the First Marine Air Wing. We had steak and eggs for breakfast, then a steak dinner. My system rebelled; it just couldn’t handle all that meat. The Vietnamese developed a problem up North. They had less protein in their diet and it looked like malaria. But when they got back to the hospital, it cleared up too quickly to be malaria. The Navy doctors determined that it was a protein deficiency and they started sending up dietary supplements, which took care of that. I guess the longest-lasting effect was on my teeth. I didn’t have a nice tooth brushing experience every day and so when I got back, I had to have a lot of work on my gums to get them back in shape. We just didn’t have the water and the time for proper hygiene in the field..
Sears: When I read “The Co-vans”, I was in my first week in Bolivia and I read it over a weekend. I was struck by the similarity — obviously not in a combat situation — with being in a foreign country and not being able to communicate that well. I could ask how their day was, but it struck me that I couldn’t imagine an entire year within a combat experience with people that I can’t really communicate with. I’m sure that was a frustration for you as well in Vietnam.
Miller: The feeling of being alone was definitely there. If you were the new guy with a battalion or a brigade everybody was really watching you to see if you measure up. They did not bestow friendship automatically. But after your first trial in combat — your first firefight or whatever — if you held up okay, then they warmed up to you. But you were still alone; you still didn’t have another American to talk to. There were usually two advisors per battalion, but in the field battalions were split, with the commanding officer taking one half and the executive officer taking the other half. So you didn’t see the other advisor that often. Most of the communication with the Vietnamese was felt and implied and done with gestures, looks on the face and everything else. You were always under surveillance by the enlisted men as well as the officers. You were always under the microscope and that could get wear you down. By and large, it was something you coped with. It wasn’t one crucial thing that wore you down; you just kind of got used to the idea that when you were in the field you were never alone. In fact, that is an old military saying: “A solider is never alone.” He is always in the company of other soldiers and is being scrutinized for what he is doing or failing to do. It was just something you lived with, and in the long run I don’t think that was too horrible.
Some folks didn’t handle it too well though. I talked in “The Co-vans” about the body-building American advisors who were worried about their weight loss and who had a problem eating Vietnamese food. They wanted vitamin supplements flown in on the resupply helos. That was an insult to the Vietnamese, who expected the Co-vans to share their hardships. The body-builders were removed by the senior advisor — just pulled out of there and sent home.
Sears: Did you see a lot of that?
Miller: There wasn’t a lot of that – just two cases, as I recall.
Sears: Colonel Ray has mentioned to me that after Coronado II, he had officially earned his spurs with the South Vietnamese Marines and they considered him lucky. Was there a similar event for you where you earned the respect of your Marines?
Miller: My test was with the 6th VNMC Battalion during operation Vu Ninh XII. We were working out of west of An Hoa near the Laotian border. We had moved across a small river up on a ridge line and had set up a battalion CP. We left a rifle company behind at a river-crossing site in an ambush position, because we had a feeling that NVA units might try to come through there to cross. Sure enough — around midnight they lit off the ambush. It was raining, so there was no need to get out of my field hammock because it had a cover on it. I could stay in there and read my maps and talk on the radio. The battalion commanding officer’s hammock was right next to mine and he was there looking at his map when I heard a Spooky overhead — a gunship with gatling guns — and called up to them and got them on the line. We set up a network: I would talk to the Spooky. The company commander on the ground had a strobe light. Even through all the rain and fog, the batallion commander could see that strobe; the company commander would give the range and bearing to the target from his light and relay it up to his battalion commander who in turn would call it over to me from his hammock to my hammock. I would call it up to the Spooky. Then after the Spooky made a run, the company commander on the ground would make his corrections and we would go through it again. We had observed gunfire for probably 30-45 minutes. It worked really well and we clobbered the North Vietnamese unit. After that, things got better for me. I guess the Vietnamese thought it was kind of cool that I could call in an air strike from my hammock.
Sears: Now the other side of that – I understand that you weren’t a lieutenant when you left, but the famous idiom is that you can’t spell lost without “LT”. Was there a time when you had an embarrassing moment? General Anthony describes rolling out of his hammock and facing the wrong way, in his new book.
Miller: The most embarrassing moment was on the same operation Vu Ninh XII. We moved into an area and they were setting up for evening chow and the cowboys were setting up the hammocks. The battalion commander, Maj. Do Tung, and I were sitting down with our maps looking at what we were going to do the next couple of days in this area — a deserted VC base camp in Base Area 112. I heard a single rifle shot and I thought, “Accidental discharge. Oh boy — somebody’s heads gonna roll for that.” We went back to the map and did some more planning. I heard a little rustle behind me and I turned around to look. I was staring right into the face of a wild boar. This made me want to jump out of my skin; it was like stepping on a rattlesnake. Then my vision widened and I realized that the boar’s head was severed and a young Vietnamese Marine was holding it up with a big grin. So I settled down and said something about, “Good shot. ” But they knew they had spooked me. They didn’t laugh openly about it, but you could tell they thought it was pretty funny to spook the advisor. I guess that was as bad as it got for me. I can’t recall any moments that were horribly humiliating. We were always up on the edge so much that even a little slip would be remembered.
Sears: As you said, you were being watched pretty closely.
Miller: You always knew that, so you were sensitive to any small deviation from what was expected.
Sears: What would you say was your biggest surprise about the Vietnamese Marine Corps?
Miller: I’d say the dedication they showed. There were a couple of units that were not well led and didn’t hold up well in combat. But by and large, these were really good troops. They idolized the USMC. They sent their drill instructors to the DI school at Parris Island in the States. Their hearts were on their sleeves. You could tell they really wanted to do well. The fact was, they were almost fatalistic. They knew they were in for a long enlistment and that they were probably in for the duration of the war. Sometimes they would plow ahead — and take risks in combat that they didn’t have to — in their eagerness to get the job done. We had to hold them back so they didn’t get wasted for no good reason. After hearing a lot of stuff back in the States about how the Vietnamese were not motivated and were cowardly, to see the Vietnamese Marines — especially on a daily basis — was truly inspiring. And that is the basis of our long-term friendship with the Vietnamese Marines toda. We still have reunions together. There is one in Houston in July that’s commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Vietnamese Marines. The one we had last year in Northern Virginia was just a super event. The commandant of the Vietnamese Marines told all his officers to turn up in their camouflaged tiger suits. I walked into that big restaurant, looked around, and there were 150 or so Vietnamese Marines in tiger suits. It just blew me away.
Sears: Yes, sir. I was there with Colonel Ray. It was impressive.
Miller: I guess that was the biggest surprise. Maybe not, because we had had briefings from earlier advisors who told us how dedicated these guys were. But it was the biggest change to what I had heard before. You could really believe in these guys. Sears: Do you think you surprised them at all or did they know about advisors by the time you got there?
Miller: They knew a lot about me. Major Tung from the 6th Battalion — I was with them for eight weeks when their regular advisor was on R&R — he signed up for another six months and got some R&R in Australia. I kind of “babysat” the battalion. That is a poor term, because we worked our tails off. Major Tung was a real aristocrat and was very aware of relative seniority. We always got along because he knew I was senior to him. How he would know that, I don’t know, except that he probably did some research. He treated me with a certain amount of deference and even though I was just a temporary substitute-teacher type, he treated me pretty well. I think they had a good handle on who we were. And probably they got briefed by Headquarters Marine Corps or other places on our qualifications, because HQMC had to sell them on the idea that we knew what we were doing. Later on, Major Tung became radicalized and turned on his advisors, giving them a really rough time.
Sears: Did you clash with that aristocracy? Colonel Ripley described the officers and enlisted possessing an incredible sense of hierarchy. He believes it unnecessary to have such a difference between officers and enlisted.
Miller: Yes, there were definite differences there. There was a hierarchy. I think that’s kind of an Asian thing, where it is very hierarchical and people respect that. In fact, throughout Asia there is a pecking order: The Chinese consider themselves at the very top of the order and other folks like Japanese and Okinawans at lower levels on down. As you move out of the pure Asian to the Malaysian areas, they all kind of pay attention to that. It’s not like the American ideal where anyone can grow up to be president. I saw it in some of the dealings with the officers and the enlisted where the officers were much harsher with an enlisted man who had committed an infraction of some type than probably a U. S. officer would be. It was almost like the feudal landlord and peasant kind of relationship.
Sears: How often did you make it to Saigon?
Miller: I had a split tour. I started out as the senior brigade advisor to Brigade A (which later became Brigade 147) in Cambodia. I was only in Saigon long enough to get fitted for my uniform and get a few briefings and I was off to Cambodia until the end of June 1970, when all the advisors had to come out. So I was back in Saigon, but not for long until I went out with 6th Battalion on Operation Vu Nihn XII and stayed through that. Then we made the insert into the Solid Anchor base in the Delta. After that I was named the G-3 advisor. My base was Saigon for that. I would go out fairly often to visit units in the field, but didn’t deploy into the field again until the following February, when Lam Son 719 started. For that, the whole division went to the field and we set up and stayed there. So I was essentially in the field for the rest of my tour through May. On balance, as the G-3 advisor, I was probably in Saigon half the time.
Sears: You had a rifle company in 1965 and you were an advisor from 1970-71. Did you have a preference: leading American Marines or advising Vietnamese Marines?
Miller: It’s really apples and oranges — two entirely different experiences, though I remember them both fondly. We had a reunion of 1st Battalion, 1st Marines last year, right after the Vietnamese Marine reunion. There were about 12 members of my Delta Company marines there, including my radio operator who I hadn’t seen for 37 years. As you know the radio operator and the company commander are joined at the hip. You’re just side-by-side all the time. That was a great reunion. It was really great to see these guys again. That first tour was a building a block for the advisory experience – I wouldn’t have gotten nearly as much out of the advisory experience without the early experience with the rifle company. I can’t really say I preferred one over the other; they both were central experiences of my life and of my time in the Marine Corps.
Sears: After extensive time in Cambodia, until June, did you when you came back and were around fellow Marines – was it a strange experience for you to once again be around Americans?
Miller: Amongst the advisors it wasn’t, because most of the advisors had already been in similar experiences. We actually had two brigades working in Cambodia, which was all we had at the time. We didn’t stand up thethird brigade until well into my tour there. Most of us were in the same boat. As far the other Marines in Saigon at that time, most were on the MACV staff. I think they were a little envious of us, because we were out in the field and they were stuck in their big cave. But we got along really well with them and in fact they helped us do things. We had some really good friends on the MACV staff. There was a little bit of conquering-heroes stuff, because one of the staff directors of the MACV staff was Colonel Anthony Walker, who had the nickname “Cold Steel” because he once ordered a bayonet charge in Korea. Cold Steel really loved to have the advisors come by and give him the scoop from the field. The MACV Marines had many analytical techniques and ways of getting intelligence. I liked going over there because I could get the big picture: where North Vietnamese fronts were forming and a lot else. He liked it just to get the nitty-gritty from the field. It was a good relationship.
We had a real conflict — as I pointed out in the Co-vans book — with the Army, which for some reason seemed bound and determined to do away with the Vietnamese Marines — who went all over the map as part of the National Reserve — or to relegate the Marine division to the status of a regular Arvin division, which was by nature territorial, confined to one area. They tried to re-write the country plan to do that. A friend on the MACV staff — a Navy Captain in the planning office — alerted us to that. We brought him out and gave him a full day with the Vietnamese Marines, among other things. He looked at our training center and heard the briefing on the history of the Vietnamese Marines and everything. He said, “You guys are good for five more years,” because he was going to kill any attempts to neutralize the Vietnamese Marine division. Of course, five years is about as long as Vietnam lasted, so he was good for his word. History took care of the rest.
Sears: I mentioned to you that I’d looked at Lawrence and his position as an advisor. There is a scene in the book when Lawrence comes back into Cairo wearing the robes of an Arab, when he found himself sort of at odds with his own culture because he was neither Arab nor British. Was there ever a moment like that where it was different to be around other Americans?
Miller: The one moment like that, as I pointed out in the book, was in Vu Ninh XII We were up in the middle region out west of Da Nang after having worked in the southern region. In the south we were supported by Army helicopters flown by young warrant officers who were true daredevils. They didn’t know enough about their helicopters to understand all the funny noises they would make and what they might mean. But those guys would fly through a wall to do the job for you. We had a real love affair with the “inkeeprs,” an Army heavy-lift helo squadron. But when we got up north, we were supported by Marine helicopters and these were flown by naval aviators who were all college graduates — flight-school graduates — and they knew what every sound in that helicopter meant, and if it didn’t sound right, they didn’t want to fly. They were much more standoffish. Part of that was the culture. Normally, when they talked to someone on the ground, they expected him to be a lance corporal radio operator. Well, when they were talking to us on the ground, they were talking to captains or majors, advisors who manned our own radios in English. They didn’t seem to understand the Vietnamese and were pretty insulting: “How many zipper heads are we going to pick up today?” or “How many little brown brothers are we going to support?” This kind of stuff. Often, we couldn’t carry a radio around the whole time, so we’d take it off and lean it up against a tree and turn the speaker up real loud. If someone was trying to transmit, we would hear it and come over and pick it up. But everybody at the command post could also hear that and most of them had enough English to understand they were being insulted, so that made it rough for us.
So after Vu Ninh XII, three of us battalion advisors grabbed a helicopter at An Hoa and went back to Da Nang, where the 1st Marine Air Wing was located. We walked in on the Dimmers, the Marine heavy-lift helo squadron responsible for most of these infractions, in our Vietnamese Marine jungle camouflage uniforms or tiger suits. We identified ourselves to the adjutant by our call signs — mine was Grizzly Grips Sierra. The adjutant immediately realized that something was wrong and went to get the executive officer, Major John Carroll. John Carroll and I had sat in the same seminar at the Armed Forces Staff College a year earlier. You couldn’t ask for a better guy — he’d give you the shirt off his back. He explained very quickly that outside of the commanding officer and executive officer (John) and the operations officer, nobody knew anything about Vietnam; in fact, they hadn’t even been to Basic School because they had to fill the pilot seats too quickly and didn’t have time to send them to Quantico. So all these guys knew was the stick and their bird. We set out to devise a way to educate everybody, and were working through that. That was about the only time I recall that we came in strange attire and shocked other Americans. After I got back to the states, I wrote an article for “Shipmate,” the Naval Academy alumni magazine. It was about the advisory unit. But I had to send a picture and the most recent one I had was my official Marine advisor picture with the beret and the tiger suit. So I sent that in and they published it on the authors’ page. I was working in the special projects directorate as a speech writer for the commandant. Somebody sneeringly came by and asked if the Green Beret was part of the uniform of the special projects directorate. So that’s about all I recall about a cross cultural-thing. All the services had advisors, so everybody knew they were a slightly different breed of cat.
Sears: How did you come up with the call signs?
Miller: They were assigned by the communicators and they would vary from operation to operation.
Sears: You didn’t have a standard call sign when you said Grizzly Grip Sierra?
Miller: No – every time I went out I had a different sign. Of course these were in different regions, too. So if there was an operation, they would have a communication plan for that operation and then the planners of that operation would lay out all the call signs to ensure they wouldn’t conflict with anything else that might be in the area. But I don’t recall all of them. From Lam Son 719, I still had a sheet with all the call signs of all the people I would have to talk to for gunfire support, medevac or dust-offs, and other adjacent army units. They had to weave all this together and it was done at a fairly high level to make sure all the frequencies were de-conflicted so you didn’t wind up with a lot of people on the same frequency and that the call signs were changed. Now it’s even more sophisticated. They change frequencies several times a day. It’s easy with a digital set up. Frequencies are always changing, instead of the fixed frequencies that we had back then. They may even change call signs more often just to add to the confusion factor for any enemies listening in.
Sears: Before you left in 1965 and then again in 1970, did you study the history?
Miller: I was at the Army Infantry School at Fort Benning in 1964-65. Americans weren’t actually on the ground in Vietnam then except for the advisors and helicopter units working the Shu-Fly operations in 1964 and earlier. About two-thirds of my class, Army captains, had been advisors already, so there was a lot of emphasis on getting ready for Vietnam. I went to the library, I read Bernard Fall’s “Street without Joy” and “Hell in a Very Small Place”. I read Douglas Pike’s “Vietcong”. I was doing my homework and talked to Marines who had been to Vietnam — I guess it was advisors mostly — and they gave us briefings and some little xeroxed maps of the area, and gave us a feeling for what was happening. It was definitely prep time.
Our class at Fort Benning — the Infantry school was a resident course for nine months — it was the equivalent of the Marine’s Amphibious Warfare School. We had 400 Army captains: 25 more were allied officers, and six were Marines. That was a great year. The acknowledged stars of the class, one being a guy named Pete Dawkins who was “Mr. Wonderful” in the Army – Heisman award winner and cadet first captain at West Point, and Rhodes Scholar. Pete was on the fast track with the Army. Everybody wanted to beat him out for number one. One of his West Point football teammates, Jim Kernan actually did. So he Kernan was one and Dawkins was two. Then this unknown ROTC guy named Colin Powell was number three. All six of the Marines stuck around for Jump School after the Infantry School was over because we were there already, we didn’t need any extra TAD money or anything like that. That got us back into running shape again, yelling a lot, and ready for the field. By and large, that was a good year of preparation.
Sears: Having read Bernard Fall’s two books, did you have the action at Dien Bien Phu in the back of your mind?
Miller: Mostly what I got from Bernard Fall was what a tough place Vietnam was. The old tactics of fixed forts and defensive positions didn’t hack it for the French and probably wouldn’t hack it for us. And how resourceful the NVA were at Dien Pien Phu, where they would dismantle their howitzers and carry them up to the high ground for a set piece battle. They broke down the French defensive arrangement there and forced their surrender. What also should have been more apparent then — but it grew on me later — was how critical the will to fight of the civilian population became. Dien Bien Phu was not the end of the world in strategic terms —the French still had a lot of fight left and a lot of troops left and could have carried on — but the will to fight in Paris totally collapsed and they sued for peace. Unfortunately that played out again in the United States after the 1968 Tet Offensive, which began as a shock, but turned into a major defeat for the Vietcong and the NVA after less than a week.
This somehow was parlayed into a major defeat back for home front. Nixon was elected on his pledge to get us out of there. The mood of the nation had changed. First, it was win and get out. Then it became win or get out, then it finally became just get out. Despite his coming in with that mandate from the voters and pulling people out at a rate that scared me — I thought they were pulling them out too fast; the last folks left in contact were going to be left in for a very rough time. Nixon presided over more wartime days than Woodrow Wilson (WWI) or FDR (WWII) combined. And he went in there with the idea of withdrawing — that’s how hard it is to extricate yourself from active tactical situation like that. And Fall saw that coming; he was very prophetic, I thought.
Sears: Who is the very best Vietnam historian in your opinion?
Miller: I’ll tell you who wrote one of the very best histories of Vietnam and it’s a guy named Guenter Lewy. He wrote a book called “America in Vietnam” I think it came out in the late 60’s early 70’s. Very well documented. Dead bang on. All the antiwar people hated it because it blew holes in all the theories they were espousing and trying to sell the American people. And they could not refute it or fault its logic and research, or its conclusions. And it drove them crazy. They spent a lot of effort trying to knock this book down. Lewy was a college professor up in Maine. He just did his homework — read the documents, then cited everything and it really laid it out.
A later work written much in retrospect was written by H. R. McMaster, called “Dereliction of Duty”. This was a PhD thesis, I think, written up at West Point while he was an instructor there. He looked at the political side and all the lies that were told about Vietnam and broke them out and documented them. I think Robert McNamara led the pack with 24 major lies; LBJ next with 21; even the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Maxwell Taylor had six or eight major deceptions for the American people. McMaster detailed how McNamara effectively blocked the Joint Chiefs from getting to Johnson with their recommendations and rendered them impotent. From Day One, they were advocating things like bombing Hanoi, closing Hai Phong, sealing the borders, doing things that would keep the NVA from having free entry into South Vietnam. We would be able to pursue across the borders. Johnson would hear nothing of it. He was afraid of a wider war that would bring in the Chinese, as they had come in in Korea. I’ve also seen the notes from Admiral Thomas Moorer’s notebook when he was Chairman of the Joint Chiefs. In 1968 just before he resigned, Johnson had made one final appeal to the Joint Chiefs: “What can we do to turn this war around?” And the Joint Chiefs told him the same thing: “Bomb Hanoi. Seal the borders.” He couldn’t bring himself to do that, so he resigned instead. McMaster did a wonderful job of recording all this with meticulous research and matching everything to a document of one kind or another.
Those are two of the standout books. There are others that had an effect, but usually had a spin on them. Stanley Karnow wrote one that claimed to be a complete history of Vietnam. But Karnow was essentially a diplomatic reporter and not a military one, so the military part is fuzzy and not very convincing. There was a book called “Fire in the Lake” by Frances FitzGerald that purported to show the Vietnamese side of things. But Fitzgerald was pretty far left, and showing the North Vietnamese side of things. Another one that got a lot of play was “Bright Shining Lie,” which was purportedly the story of John Paul Vann and had some early chapters that were really good and then just kind of drifted away into a diatribe. There has not been a lot of unbiased historical writing about Vietnam.
We did a ten-volume series — The Green Book Series — at the Marine Corps Historical Center. Our object was not to write a definitive history so close after the conflict, but rather to establish a clean baseline of fact, based on after-action reports and eyewitness comments. After-action reports by themselves are not really great sources; they put you in the right time and place, but tend to be self-serving. But when they are tempered by the comments of people who were actually there, they become more reliable. What we wanted to establish was a clean, verifiable baseline so that future historians — 50 years from now — could come and see where the 1st Battalion 1st Marines was on 27 September, 1965 and get their facts straight. Then they can interpret, based on everything that’s happened in between, what it all really means. I think we did a pretty good job at that. We had a pretty thorough way of going about that and it took about 15 years to get all ten volumes out. Sears: I have seen that series. Actually, I saw it yesterday with Colonel Ripley – he pulled it out the 1971-72 volume. Wrapping up: what, in your opinion, makes a good advisor?
Miller: I think it’s the same thing that makes a good leader. He’s got to know his stuff; he’s got to be proficient infantryman or artilleryman — whatever his specialty. He must be able to demonstrate that to the Vietnamese. He’s got to be basically honest and straightforward and take care of his people — which in this case meant the Vietnamese Marines. He’s got to be concerned with their welfare and show that he really empathizes with them — which we did by wearing their uniforms and eating their chow, living with them, and speaking their language, among other things. The one hitch in that — looking out for your men — was that some advisors carried it too far. They got so much on the side of the Vietnamese that they, in some cases, lost sight of their mission and got cross-threaded with the U. S. hierarchy, because they were always defending the Vietnamese and always blaming somebody else if something went wrong. and always blaming somebody else. We had a couple of cases like that where guys just went native and pushed that final category too far. By and large, I think that the Vietnamese respected those who knew what they were doing, cared about them and who were straightforward with them. I didn’t think there was anything particularly magic about that; I think those are traits of good leaders everywhere.
Sears: I’ll be showing this final product to my friends who will be commissioning in a year, and I will as well. But what lessons do you think to pass to me, Corporal Sears, and future lieutenants? How can lessons learned back then help us today?
Miller: My hat goes off to you guys who are going to pick up the fight a year from now. When you think about it, I entered Vietnam 39 years ago, so in some ways any advice I would pass on to you would be like my hearing advice from Belleau Wood in World War I. There’s some good stuff there, but the nature of war has changed so much. In one big sense, though, it hasn’t. The call to the War on Terrorism — actually, that’s not a good phrase. That’s like saying it’s a “war on Blitzkrieg.” It’s a war on Islamic radicals who would like to kill us — meaning Western civilization and every vestige of it. So the biggest thing going in there, knowing that you’re in a war every bit as serious as the Cold War was, where we were under threat of nuclear devastation for more than 40 years. Any small war could have turned into a major confrontation between us and the Soviets who had the power to really hurt us. The war you guys are getting into — and I’m afraid even your sons may be getting into — it’s going to be just that long. And the difference between that and Vietnam is that and what I thought was one of the most shameful periods in our history – we did the Pontius Pilate number and washed our hands and turned our backs on 17 million South Vietnamese who had been our wartime allies for more than 20 years. We pulled back inside Fortress America and put our heads in the sand and tried to forget Vietnam, because there was no threat to us. But we can’t do that anymore, because we know the bad guys can hurt us and hurt us badly. The only way to remove this threat is to go after it.
There’s a new book out by Professor Barnett of the Naval War College and also of the Center of Naval Analyses. He’s been a strategic analyst for 20 years — highly respected. He’s written for The Naval Institute Proceedings and I really respect his logic. He talks about two types of nations in the world. The “Core” nations (which are either developed or developing and are anxious to plug into a global network of commerce and diplomacy and everything else to improve their lot); then there are nations beginning in our own Caribbean and moving through Africa and Europe and into Asia that Barnett calls non-Core nations. These are nations that have no desire at all to hook into a global network because if they did, that they would lose control of their people; these are controlled by dictators and despots who need absolute control of their people, like Castro, Saddam Hussein, and Kim Jong Il of Korea. And they have to keep them backward and in the dark to maintain control. A good part of these non-Core nations is the radical Islamic movement — the Wahabbis in Saudi Arabia are a great example — who keep screaming, “Death to infidels” and keep trying to carry that out.
Professor Barnett argues that the only way to bring the non-Core nations into the Core and into fruitful exchange with the rest of the world is to depose that leadership and look for some alternative that can start to hook them into the world. By that logic, what we are doing in Iraq falls exactly into that pattern. If we do succeed in creating an Iraq — and I’ve been reading emails; I just got one from a battalion commanding officer in the field, a Marine near Fallujah — we’re getting there a lot better than the press shows you. If we can somehow get that started, that immediately puts Syria, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Egypt and all the neighboring countries on alert. It makes it more difficult for them to operate in a closed society. But it’s a long process and very likely a bloody process.
I think the biggest thing that you could take into a career as a newly commissioned officer is the knowledge that you are in a World War IV; the Cold War was WWIII. It is a world war; we are going to be in it for a long time. We are going to have a lot of setbacks as well as gains and I hope the American people will be able to stick it out. I have a feeling they are better prepared to stick it out than they were during Vietnam, because Vietnam was 10,000 miles away and no threat to the U.S. This war is also many miles away, but a bigger threat to the U.S. Our people, I think, understand that and will be more supportive over the years. The only other thing I would say is, from what I’ve been able to tell and from what I’ve seen from visiting Quantico and various places, the caliber of the troops that we have today is maybe the best we’ve ever had in terms of motivation and education and willingness to learn and to sacrifice. You’ve got a tall order to live up to — the honor of leading them. And it is an honor. I think you guys will make us proud.