You Can’t Change Human Nature

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Cold War, Cuban Missile Crisis, Fog of War, Gulf of Tonkin, Road to Disaster, Robert McNamara, Vietnam

It surprises me, but I have now written fifty posts about the Vietnam War. See here for the previous post in the series and here to go back to the master post.

While I have started reading Road to Disaster, which came out in 2018, I did not read the book author Brian VanDeMark co-wrote with Robert McNamara, In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam, published in 1995. In between the two, the film The Fog of War was made. While not a film version of McNamara’s book, it did have the background material of McNamara’s own auto-biography as a starting point. It also followed a structure of Lessons of Vietnam, building the narrative around 11 lessons from McNamara’s life. It is a different 11 lessons that those 11 in the book, but there is obviously an intended parallel.

To make things a little more convoluted, there is actually a book version of The Fog of War (now, apparently, out of print) that was written based upon the film shortly after it came out. Writing a biographical book based on a documentary film seems an odd way to go about things. Yet, there we have it. I don’t plan to read it.

The structure of the film is that McNamara is interviewed, allowing him to talk about the things that he has learned over his life and his career. That career took him through academia (teaching at Harvard), the Army Air Corps, to Ford Motor Company. There he was the first non-Ford family member to be company President, a position he held for 5 days. He left Ford when he was asked by newly-elected President John Kennedy to hold a cabinet position and became first Kennedy’s, then Johnson’s, Secretary of Defense. After his cabinet tenure he was appointed President of the World Bank and headed that organization for 13 years.

Perhaps typically for a political interview documentary, part of the intent of the filmmakers seems to be to get McNamara to say things that he didn’t want to say. It was filmed using a device the filmmaker calls an Interrotron. This is essentially a Teleprompter. However, instead of projecting words to be read, the filmmaker projects his own face. The result is a close-up shot of the interviewee from the perspective of the interviewer. McNamara is looking into the projected eyes of the interviewer as he talks and so appears to be making direct and human eye contact with the audience. It has particular impact when McNamara recalls emotional events, such as the death of President Kennedy.

The 11 lessons are a bit at odds with the narrative of Road to Disaster. This shouldn’t be surprising. The idea behind Road to Disaster was that there was a failure of both the intentions and methods of the Kennedy/Johnson crew, a failure that led to unintended consequences. So, for example, McNamara’s lesson about the power of data analysis (#6: Get the data) is countered by VanDeMark’s assertion that reliance on data (e.g. body counts and population under government control) fed McNamara’s inability to appreciate the truth. Similarly, the filmmaker, in some cases, is using McNamara’s “lesson” as a hook to try to get him to admit where he went wrong.

One of the more interesting revelations (to me, I’m sure it has been printed elsewhere) is McNamara’s description of a 1995 trip to Vietnam where he analyzed the war with his counterparts from his time advising Johnson. He said that, on the first day of their meeting, they nearly came to blows (some quarter of a century after the fact!) over differing beliefs in what were the basic, inarguable facts of the time.

The U.S. involvement hinged on the domino theory and the fear from both Kennedy and Johnson that losing Vietnam to the Soviet/Chinese international revolution would have destroyed them politically. The political impact probably was true, particularly in the mid-1960s. The domino theory, at least in the modern consensus, has been disproven by, not least, the fact that South Vietnam was ultimately taken over by the communists without the subsequent collapse of Southeast Asia.

The (formerly North) Vietnamese officials found that whole idea implausible and therefore disingenuous. To them, while the fight against the U.S. dominated their recent history, the fight against China had been ongoing for thousands of years. So while they were receiving assistance from China against the U.S., if indeed China decided to move into Vietnam as a result, Vietnam would have just as vigorously fought the Chinese. Similarly the Soviet Union would have been considered a colonial power just like the French and U.S. were. Given those basic facts, they refused to believe any of the reasons that the U.S. said they were involved in Vietnam and thus refused to believe that the paths to peace offered by the U.S. were genuine. The secret motives of the U.S., they felt, were to replace the French as colonial overlords of South Vietnam, exploiting the country and its people for resources.

From this, McNamara took away that there was a mutually-agreeable solution to avoid war involving democratic elections and self-rule. Of course, we know (also in hindsight) that the North Vietnamese made the determination that they would eventually win the war outright and placed little value in compromise. McNamara specifically challenged the officials on the human cost (in Vietnamese lives) of the war relative to the costs of compromise. He was frustrated by the low value that this communist regime, and historically communist governments in general, place on human life versus political/revolutionary victory. We can also wonder how much of the absoluteness of the current Vietnamese position is based on political propaganda of the time and since. From the Western perspective, it is difficult to believe that the U.S. could have possibly had designs on Vietnamese resources and, more particularly, that Kennedy and Johnson would want to embroil the U.S. in a war to maintain control of them. It also ignores the fact that North and South Vietnam were separate countries; the U.S. wasn’t threatening domination of the North but rather asking the North to cease military assistance to the insurgency in the South. While the image of Vietnamese nationalism sweeping through all the people of the country sounds good, it is unlikely that the “small folk” of North Vietnam would have any interest in which politician ran South Vietnam if their government weren’t feeding them what to think.

This film won multiple awards and was pushed on me by Netflix as a highly recommended view. I’m not sure it quite lives up to all that hype. In particular, some of the pacing was pretty slow filling up time with stock footage and generalized commentary. One the whole, however, the film is worth seeing as the closest McNamara ever came to revealing his heart to the nation that he tried to serve. I’m glad I took the time to watch.

Alexander the Short-lived

Tags

Cold War, Squad Battles, Squad Battles: Tour of Duty, Vietnam, wargames

This is the forty-ninth in a series of posts on the Vietnam War. See here for the previous post in the series and here to go back to the master post.

I reminded myself of what I don’t like about the Campaign Game in Squad Battles: Tour of Duty by playing the first of them, a U.S. Marine campaign. The campaign strings together a series of hypothetical scenarios where you have a few goals in addition to winning each scenario. You also have actions that will earn you “Leader Action Points,” bonus points that come about by using your persona to accomplish actions in the scenario (rallying, leading attacks, and coming under fire are examples). This is intended to discourage you from leaving your marker safely behind the front lines. The other requirement is that you must survive each battle; if you die, the game is over.

Alexander is a company commander stationed in the vicinity of Hue City.

Conceptually, it doesn’t sound so bad. Players always want more depth than their games provide, and this is one way to do it. If the game is played at the strategic level, the players want to fight out the battles in detail. If they have detailed battles, they long to put those individual battles into a greater context. In can be a difficult itch to scratch, however, especially when a game is aiming towards realism and authenticity.

The standard campaign wrapper for detailed battles might be the old Panzer General -style campaigns. You are given a “core” army that moves from battle to battle. Keep your units alive and they gain experience as they go. Unfortunately, this may be particularly unsuited for Vietnam in general and for Squad Battles in particular. As tenuous as Panzer General‘s grip on reality may be, the Second World War did have units advancing from battle to battle as the tide of the war pushed forward. In Vietnam, there were no lines nor would there be an obvious connection between subsequent battles. After a battle, a unit might be airlifted out, or reinforced, or provided with air and artillery support. While there is obvious feedback between the tactical performance and the operational reactions, it wouldn’t necessarily be “progressive” in that you would easily connect a success to a campaign-level reward. Perhaps more importantly, the units in Squad Battles don’t “upgrade” or “gain experience.” If a rifle squad suffers a casualty, it might be pulled offline for the next mission or it might receive a replacement. Any “veteran” status of the squads or the men within them, even if tracked (and in contrast to Panzer General), have no meaning within the game. Similarly, there is no concept of “upgrades.” You wouldn’t supply a veteran squad with better weapons (at least not from the American side) than it’s green equivalent. You don’t get your M113s upgraded to Pattons because your armored company won a few battles.

What that does leave is Squad Battle‘s modeling of the leaders as separate “pieces”. As the player, you are essentially taking on the role force commander and therefore have a representation on the map, the most senior officer in the scenario. Although the player’s ability to control isn’t limited by what the leader counter is doing, the campaign game ties the two together more tightly by making the player mortal; if your leader is killed, you also “die.”

My career was a short one.

Here is my problem: I started my campaign game and won the first scenario, an attack on a generic village. However, in my second scenario my “character” was killed. Having been killed, the only way to attempt to advance further is to restart the campaign over. Now,there may be a way around it by managing your save files, to try something right before you die, but by default the loss wipes out any progress made so far. It appears to be set up to “punish” the player for having gotten himself killed. Certainly there is a realism factor in that when “you” die, you lose everything. That’s fair enough, but it doesn’t necessarily make the game more fun.

In this case, you can even say the loss was my fault and I deserved to be punished. The second scenario is, as you might have surmised from the title in the above screenshot, an ambush. My captain was marching with his middle platoon on the trail and, when the company was hit, decided to charge up the trail by himself to hunker down with the forward-most platoon. While he was racing down the trail alone, he was shot and taken out of play by some hidden VC. I probably shouldn’t have made that run. However, leaders must lead, so you’re bound to come under fire no mater what you do. Even if you cower behind the trees, there are always stray mortar rounds that might subject you to a roll of the dice and a potential early death. Point being, any campaign can be brought to an abrupt end by a bad roll of the dice.

Now, there is a mitigating factor. When you begin your campaign, you get to chose which battle to start with. What that means is, having lost once, you don’t have to actually go back and replay the battles you’ve already won to get to the one you lost. You could start your new campaign at the battle which defeated you. You could also choose to play only the battles you haven’t tried yet. In this way, you can attempt to beat the more challenging structure of the campaign without feeling like any loss forces you to suffer all the way through the campaign you’ve tried so far. Still, there are, in this campaign, five battles in a set order. So if you lose one of the middle battles you can play a foreshortened campaign consisting of the “second half” of those battles. Or even a campaign of one battle, the final one, if that’s all you’ve got left. This might work much better if there were more potential battles (say 15 possible, but you don’t know which five you’ll get). Even better if there was a well-made random battle generator so that each campaign was a unique experience. However, Squad Battles requires that each scenario be hand-crafted so we have what we have.

More recent experience and more information has not soothed the bad opinion I had of the Tour of Duty campaign option. It doesn’t really satisfy that contextual problem in that the campaign is mostly hypothetical and, except for the survival of your officer, there is no feedback to a larger campaign or the war in general. Rather than a campaign game as I was usually understand it, I look at this as more of a higher difficultly level. If you’ve grown bored beating the individual scenarios, this requires that you beat five in a row and accumulate “Leader Action Points” while also keeping yourself alive. Incidentally, this is one of the other universal complaints of players relative to single-player games – playing the AI is too easy and they want more of a challenge. I suppose that, in that regard at least, the campaign game does its job.

You can return to the master post for more Vietnam War articles. The next article in the series is what I thought after watching the documentary The Fog of War.

Riverines!

Tags

1968, Cold War, The Boys of '67, Vietnam

This is the forty-eighth in a series of posts on the Vietnam War. See here for the previous post in the series and here to go back to the master post.

When one reads a book about a war, traditionally one looks forward to a fairly high level view of it. You read about the armies and their maneuvers. Where individual decisions come into play, you might focus on the generals. Perhaps, more rarely, the performance of lower-ranked soldiers, where it might have turned the course of a battle, might be explained. While books written about and from the perspective of the common soldier are probably more popular now, it seems to me that the majority of war non-fiction is about leaders. Of course, one obvious exception is the memoir that focuses on the experience of the individual soldier, whether biographical or fictional.

The author of The Boys of ’67: Charlie Company’s War in Vietnam, Andrew Wiest, begins his preface by noting that one of the inspirations for his book was having read Ron Kovic’s Born on the Fourth of July. The other major inspiration was his personal relationship with a veteran of C Company (of the 4th Battalion, 47th Infantry Regiment, 9th Infantry Division), which prompted him into writing a book about this unit’s original deployment to Vietnam. The book focuses mostly on the experience of the individual rifleman up through their squad leaders rather than the officers and the grand strategy.

Another motivation for this books comes from the unique identity of the 9th Infantry as perhaps the last of its kind.

One upon a time, in Merry Olde England, regiments were raised for King and Country by local lords. The components of an army tended to be geographically based and brothers-in-arms might truly be brothers or, at the very least, neighbors. The American army inherited English traditions and up-to-and-into the First World War, there remained a regional component to American units. Look no further than the regimental designations in the Civil War for a clear example.

The First World War, for the most part, saw the last of geographically-based regular army units. Obviously, National Guard activation remains an exception to this day, but for the regular army, the location of a unit’s base while stationed at home is probably not a good indicator of the origin of the men that make up that unit. The Second World War saw the end of another trend. Up through WWII, the transition from peace to war meant the raising of new military units to fight that war. Contrast that to the post-War era, where the United States had endeavored to maintain sufficient forces to meet whatever challenges it may face. For the individual soldier, the difference is being recruited or drafted and then trained as part of their deployed unit version being assigned into an already-existing unit after training. In this last respect, the 9th Infantry, itself, marked the end of its own era.

The 9th Infantry was deactivated at the end of WWII. Despite being reactivated for the Korean War, it did not have a combat role and was deactivated again in 1962. In early 1966, the U.S. sought to extend their influence in the Mekong Delta. The 9th Infantry would fulfill this mission and three of its battalions would be organized as “Riverine” forces; using watercraft and waterways rather than helicopters to move to and from battlefields. The 4th Battalion of the 47th Infantry Regiment* was one such riverine unit.

As a newly-activated unit, the men of C Company were, by and large, draftees who all received their notices at the same time. The arrived for induction together, trained together, and when their training was complete, they deployed to Vietnam together. A rather horrific voyage carried them from California to Vietnam, incidents from which are related to the reader of the book.

Inevitably, the unit began to suffer attrition. This took the form both of soldiers killed as well as injuries that were serious enough to remove them from duty. As the original cadre was whittled away, C/4/47 became more like any other unit in Vietnam, filling up with replacements having no connection to the originally-deployed unit. While some of the replacements’ stories feature in the book, the narrative, for the most part, focuses on that original core and how a year’s worth of  duty in Vietnam affected them. Inducted in May, the unit deployed to Vietnam in December 1966. Any soldier who remained in their unit until the end returned to the United States around New Years’ Day of 1968.

In this, the the book sheds some light on the failure of “the numbers” to capture the impact of Vietnam on soldiers’ morale. For this unit, the numbers looked good. Combat deaths were 10% or lower over the course of their tour while losses inflicted upon the enemy where considerably higher. Their missions were successful. On the ground, however, it felt different. Missions often felt like, if not quite a failure, perhaps a waste. Men were as apt to fight booby traps or maybe just weather and rough terrain as enemy soldiers. When they did fight the enemy, it was often in the form of an ambush, where they were at an initial disadvantage that had to be overcome. That, in the end, said battle was deemed a victory was small consolation to the American unit that lost many good men in the opening moments of the fight.

While combat deaths were relatively low, by the time the company returned to the United States, most of the original members were gone. In addition to the deaths, there were injuries, many of them severe and permanent. There were also those who just transferred to other units and other locations. The net result of seeing the vast majority of your brothers-in-arms having gone had its psychological effect, independent of how the unit’s performance fit into the strategic picture. It is also important that losses, for the individual, weren’t balanced by gains on the individual level. When men died, either in an ambush or by faceless traps, there would be no counter-punch. While men had a natural instinct to get “payback,” it was unlikely that they would actual be able to again catch and fight the very enemies that had bloodied them in an earlier battle. There were no front lines to overrun or strongholds to capture and hold. In this, the war would seem to just meander on and on with no measure of progress except the loss of your best friends.

As depressing as that assessment sounds, the book does manage to avoid politics. The men themselves, even the draftees, largely entered the Army as patriots ready to fulfill their duty. In May of 1966, even the country at large was mostly supportive of the war. The men were shocked to return** to a country that, in 1968, was wracked by anti-war protests. While the narrative seems free from anti-war bias, the author does not hesitate to identify incompetence, either in overall policy or in the individual commander. It’s one thing to lose a friend to the fortunes of war but it is so much worse when it was you’re own side that caused the loss.

Bottom line, this book is a compelling read. It provides a picture of the Vietnam War, not as it looked to us as a nation or the military, but to the individuals who were called upon by their country to serve and so did their duty as best they could.

Return to the master post or go on for more game playing.

*Fictional character Forrest Gump served in the 2nd Battalion of the 47th, which was not one of the Riverine units.

**This book, unique to those I’ve read so far, spend the final chapter or two discussing the return of the men to the U.S. This includes how Vietnam dominated their lives in the decades after the war and the impact upon them of the internet and the reunions that began to take place in the years before the book was published.

From the Delta to the DMZ

Tags

Cold War, guns in hollywood, Vietnam

This is the forty-sixth in a series of posts on the Vietnam War. See here for the previous post in the series and here to go back to the master post.

Not quite a year ago, Adrian Cronauer passed away at age 72 after a long illness. He was an Air Force veteran, a writer, a lawyer, and had worked various positions in radio. Obituaries, though, had more to say about Robin Williams, who himself had committed suicide roughly five years earlier.

Cronauer had written a comedy for TV based on his experiences as a DJ in Vietnam. After some twists and turns, the film was made with director Barry Levinson at the helm and with Robin Williams staring as Cronauer. The film script was heavily reworked from Cronauer’s original proposal and much of what is portrayed in the move is pure fantasy. At the time, Williams was at the top of the stand-up circuit, at a time when stand-up comedy featured huge in popular entertainment. He was known to TV audiences as Mork from Ork and teenagers across the country had memorized his routines from his stand-up albums. Good Morning, Vietnam, however, showed that Williams could be a star dramatic actor, capable of top box office draw.

I recall at the time that everyone knew the catch-phrase of the film’s title. The film performed well and was critically well received.  For whatever reason, it never seemed like something I wanted to watch. A Robin Williams comedy routine superimposed on a Vietnam War story didn’t seem like it would do it for me. Finally, it was the passing of Mr. Williams and Mr. Cronauer that made me decide to see what it was all about.

First off, a good chunk of the film is Robin Williams doing his routine, but as a radio DJ. It was largely unscripted. Thirty-some years on, it is both a credit to Williams’ ad-lib talents and a nod to the style of 1980s stand-up. It is also a very good-looking film. The movie was filmed entirely in Thailand so, unlike some movies, it is an entirely believable portrayal of Saigon and the surrounding rural areas. There are numerous shots of soldiers doing soldier-things, ostensibly while listening to the radio. There are anachronisms a-plenty (M-16s when everyone should have M-14s and errors in uniforms and military protocol, to name a few), but it does look sharp.

The story-line itself feels a little shallow perhaps because so much of the screen time is dedicated to Robin’s monologues. Of course, the success of the films owes much to those monologues. I suspect the pitch was essentially the Robin Williams routine, but made into a movie. Beyond that we can also see Williams’ ability to play something other than funny. In fact, he may be better playing the darker emotions than he is at being silly. This becomes clear in his later work, but it may begin to be evident here as well.

Cronauer leveraged his fame derived from the film to advocate for Vietnam Veterans and, in particular, prisoners of war. He became Special Assistant to the Director of the Defense Prisoner of War/Missing Personnel Office. He was never the celebrity that Robin William’s portrayal made him out to be. However, in his later years he was approached by many a veteran thanking him profusely for what he did. His voice on the radio made soldiers in Vietnam feel a little closer to home.

Return to the master post or continue forward towards the end of 1966 and the execution of Westmoreland’s plan to take the initiative using his build up of U.S. forces in South Vietnam.

Vengeance Porn versus Chick Flicks

Tags

actor's age, Cold War, Love and Honor, Tom Clancy, Vietnam, Without Remorse

If you came to this article from a Google search and decide to read on, you are bound to have some remorse. This won’t be what you think it is from the title. What it is about is a pair of fictional stories, one a book (and maybe, eventually a movie) and one a movie (but never a book), that are set in America somewhere in the 1969-1970 time frame and featuring Vietnam as a locale and a major plot point. I don’t know what you were hoping for, but you’re not going to find it here, ya filthy animal.

Without Remorse was, quite literally, my beach reading some time back, when it was newish. I remember enjoying it at the time and, recently, when I found myself looking for something on the lighter side, I decided to read it again. I now see it, as described on-line, referred to as “A John Clark Novel.” At the time I had no idea that this was the back story on a recurring character and certainly had no idea that he was to become the lead character in the Rainbow Six novels and actually “Rainbow Six” himself. I actually thought it was supposed to be an “Admiral Greer” backstory.

Not so long ago, I reread Red Storm Rising and I found it did not hold up as well as my memory would have it. This, even though my memories of it were not that flattering. My earliest impressions of Clancy’s writing were tainted by his clunky, overly-technical descriptions. Without Remorse, on the other hand, I remembered as being enjoyable. Based on a revised analysis of just these two data points, I’m going to say I think Clancy’s writing ability may have improved a good bit the more he wrote. Or more to the point, Without Remorse remains a good read.

Knowing why the book was written, however, doesn’t help. When I thought that John Kelly/John Clark was just an interesting passer-through in the Clancy fictional world, I could read the story more at face value. Knowing, as I do now, that this book was written as a setup for all the future books that feature this character, I’m a little less enthusiastic.

It was clear from around the very first appearance of Jack Ryan that he was Tom Clancy’s idealized self. Their biographies and personalities are pretty similar. It’s just that Jack Ryan just does it all a little better. Now, under some circumstances, there is nothing wrong with this. An author must put a bit of himself into his works and it all seemed fine when Ryan was put aboard the USS Dallas in The Hunt for Red October. As the books continued, though, Ryan both saw rapid promotions as well as ramping up of his physical participation in these covert operations. Not only are these two character arcs fairly incompatible but I couldn’t get it out of my head that I’m reading about Clancy as he’d like to see himself, running around and stopping the baddies.

Now bring in John Clark. Obviously, by the fact that I missed his character’s appearances in the other Clancy books I’ve read, I have little opinion about the guy. I have read, however, that Clark is a kind of Jack-Ryan’s-other-half. That is, once again, Clancy has created an idealized version of himself through whom he can act vicariously, although this time much more of an action hero. I had already thought Ryan was a little too physical for a Tom Clancy stand-in, so the idea that he needs a beefed-up version seems even more over-the-top.

Of course, as I’ve said, I didn’t know anything about John Clark at the time I read Without Remorse. Taken independently, it’s the story of a Vietnam veteran who turns vigilante to wreak vengeance upon Baltimore’s drug dealers over the murder of a loved one. In that sense, it combines Rambo, Death Wish, and Point of Impact/Shooter (which actually did a version of the story a year earlier) into a tale of what we all sometimes wish we could do. That is, if we weren’t constrained by the law and other trimmings of civilization. Oh, and if we were trained in covert operations and assassination by the United States Navy.

Critics found the story overly-long. We do get, essentially, three revenge stories for the price of one. Kelly/Clark takes on the drug dealers, who, from what I know about Baltimore drug dealers, probably did have it coming. He also takes vengeance on the commies for having captured and tortured some fine, American pilots. He also gets to stomp on a commie spy. In a more plausible world, one tale of revenge might be enough. I remained enthralled in the stories throughout, though, and I think the juxtaposition of all three is intended to make a statement about morality and legality when it comes to killing. Sometimes it is bad, but sometimes we think it is good. Sometimes we even think one thing but perhaps only because we don’t know the whole truth. Perhaps that’s taking what is essentially a beach novel and pushing it too far. In the end, it did for me what a good beach novel is supposed to do – it kept me up at night turning pages, unable to put it down.

Love and Honor, another movie coming off of Netflix, lacks even the depth of a beach novel. Here we follow the story of an army volunteer, Joiner (I shit you not), whose girl back home has broken-off their relationship.  His friend, who is Wright (get it, he’s right!), councils him that there are other fish in the sea, yet Joiner decides he is to jump ship (excuse the mixed metaphors) and go back to the U.S. to confront the girl under cover of a 1-week leave in Hong Kong. This is all superimposed with the first Moon landing, which is going on at exactly the same time as the thing with the girl.

Wright decides to join Joiner on his odyssey. He is a “player” (to use some modern terminology) – handsome, smooth-talking, and good with the ladies. In fact, he is probably best thought of in such modern terms. While the film takes place in 1969, with some cars and clothes to emphasize the point, much about this simply comes off as present-day. The moral of the story, a “hate the war, respect the soldier” message, seems targeted more at our current foreign entanglements than that of a generation ago. Perhaps it shouldn’t be so surprising, given the popularity of period-not-so-period pieces these days, that some twenty-teens twenty-somethings can just assert that “We’re children of the sixties” and we ask no more of them.

Anyhow, Wright and Joiner go off on the adventure and, seeing how Wright is played by male-lead Liam Hemsworth, we see him make adventures of his own. Will he find love? Will he fall in love? Will love change him? If you know the genre then you know the answers have to be yes, yes, and yes.

Honestly, it’s not the worst movie. Taken purely as a feel-good, teen-romance (albeit with nearly-30 actors playing those teens), it does alright. Try to read much more into it and you’ll likely come away disappointed. Not only does it fail to provide any historical depth, but it fails to convey whether it is even trying. For example, the weaving of the plot in with the moon landings. Is that supposed to help convey some higher meaning? If it is, I failed to see what it was.

I will say one thing that the movie did illuminate for me. Watching the images of twenty-teens actors in what is supposed to be a 1960s anti-war protest invites compare-and-contrast between the protest movements between now and then. One massive difference is the draft. In 1969, it wasn’t just that those college-aged protesters saw injustice in the war. They, at least the boys, were also at risk to be themselves sent to Vietnam. Oddly enough, I read a reassertion of just this point two nights after I watched Love and Honor while reading Road to Disaster and I hit late 1967 and the acceleration of the Vietnam War protests. On this last point, the movie actually seems to be self-aware. During the climatic dramatic moment the leading-gal says to the main antagonist, “I thought you were a traitor. The truth is that you’re only a coward.”

If nothing else, living in a time of an all-volunteer military makes it easier to criticize anti-war protestors who were just out to save their own skins.

More Abstractions

Tags

Cold War, Fire in the Lake, Vietnam, wargames

Playing some more Fire in the Lake, I had some additional thoughts on the abstractions that make this game.

This is the forty-fifth in a series of posts on the Vietnam War. See here for the previous post in the series and here to go back to the master post.

 

U.S. buildup in Vietnam, represented as little square cubes.

The screenshot above shows the second “Coup round.” This is important. The event cards are played in groups called “campaigns” separated by special, non-standard rounds when a Coup card comes up for play. That round has a series of prescribed actions which may result in an end-of game victory or, failing that, involve a sort of restructuring and refurbishing to prepare each of the four factions for the next campaign. When playing either the full war or one of the longer scenarios, after two campaign segments have completed, the players become eligible to play their respective “pivotal events.” (The pivotal events for North Vietnam and the United States are visible in the above screenshots). Before the completion of those first two campaigns, these special, dedicated, extra-powerful events are unplayable under any circumstances. After, they can be triggered by certain other conditions.

To set the stage in the above game, North Vietnam has an event “Easter Offensive” which is triggered when the NVA troops (the red cubes) on the map outnumber the U.S. troops (green cubes). For contrast, the U.S. triggers their card, Operation “Linebacker II”, when the U.S. score approaches the level required for victory (40 triggers the event, 51 wins the game). Historically, these are mid-to-late game events; both cards refer to actions from 1972. Part of this late-game comes from this requirement for the completion of two campaigns before eligibility. However, a campaign (again, per the rules) is meant to represent 1-2 years. Combining that with the events that have already been played in the above game, I would estimate we’re looking at an early-to-mid 1966. Both the Easter Offensive and Operation Linebacker II should still be a long way off.

I’m fairly new to this game, so I have no experience to tell me about what happens typically as a game progresses; whether what we’re looking at is common or rare. What has happened is that as we’ve hit the card-count trigger allowing pivotal events to be played, off the four, only one is even close to be triggered and that’s the NVA’s Easter Offensive. Furthermore, given the situation in the game, the NVA’s offensive is almost impossible to avoid. Up until this point, the NVA have had little interaction with the other players. When given an event, they have exercised it, but have otherwise used their turns mostly to build up troop levels in North Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia.  They were also able to improve the Ho Chi Minh Trail to an extent where they could accumulate something close to their maximum allowable buildup.

The turn shown in the screenshot has me, as the U.S. player, executing my “Commitment Phase.” As I talked about in a previous post, the U.S. player cannot purchase reinforcements in the same way the other players can, using operations in lieu of events. The one chance American has to bring in new units is at the end of the campaign turn during this “Commitment Phase.” The player may either send troops into Vietnam, withdraw them, or just shuffle them around a bit geographically. In any case, the total for all three categories must be limited to no more than 10 units. I’ve now found myself, as I contemplate my options, behind the NVA in troop buildup. At this snapshot, the NVA outnumber me (the trigger for the Easter Offensive) but, if I bring in my maximum commitment of new troops, I will once-again out number them.

At first, it seems lucky that I have enough commitment points to stay ahead of the NVA, even if only just. What you need to remember, though, is that the NVA player can continue to augment his forces each time he gets a turn. The U.S. player is mostly restricted to that commitment phase. What this means is that even if I can avoid the NVA triggering their pivotal event on their first turn, they’re bound to get it a turn or two later.

My initial thought when encountering this is “boy, is this game out of whack.” Something that historically occurs in 1972 becomes an inevitability, possibly as early as 1965. Then I thought a little more and realized it does make sense. At the beginning of 1965 it dawned on the top leadership in the U.S. that they were potentially only months away from actually losing the war in Vietnam. The U.S. was aware of the rapid build up of NVA forces and by the Honolulu Conference (February 1966) Westmoreland had specifically indicated that staying ahead of the NVA build-up was a prerequisite to winning the war. It may not have been apparent until later, but the Pleiku Campaign of 1965 may well have headed off, essentially, the Easter Offensive of 1965. The NVA did believe they had the capability to overwhelm the forces of South Vietnam before the U.S. could commit. Both sides, at that moment, had underestimated the capabilities of the other.

Now, a major NVA offensive early in the war may be possible, but it isn’t inevitable. The numerical strength of the NVA developed because they had used their (non-event) turns mostly to infiltrate troops along the Ho Chi Minh trail. In doing so, they did not come into contact or conflict with the U.S. and the U.S. did not attempt any incursions into Cambodia or Laos. A slightly different draw of cards, or even different choices made with the same set of cards, would see us at this same point in the game but with the U.S. easily outnumbering the NVA.

This lead me to another observation about this game. While activity in the game, building up your own side and taking down the other, comes from use of operations, the advancing of the “story” comes from the playing of events. By this, I don’t simply mean that the context of historical events provides a narrative. While true, that’s also obvious. What I’m saying is the order of the events already played creates the structure that makes one game different from another game. My experience, also, is that while one scores one’s points through operations, gaining the advantage necessary for victory comes from events and the choices made when using them. A particular aspect of this may be seen by contrasting with Twilight Struggle. In Twilight Struggle, high level play often involves forgoing events in favor of operations, which can be directed towards one’s particular strategy. Events, by contrast, are to be used in combination with each other and a greater plan to create a game-changing moves. The advancement of time in Twilight Struggle is often in terms of which of these critical event cards remain in the deck. In Fire in the Lake, the passage of time can be noted through the accumulation of persistent effects, and particularly those produced by event cards. Capabilities, as the long-term effects of cards are called in the rules, more often than not remain for the rest of the game. This contrasts to Twilight Struggle, where that games “underlined events,” as the rules describe them, have a cancelling effect somewhere in the game. On the other hand, a Fire in the Lake capability, once put into play, will frequently remain for the rest of the game. Furthermore, these capabilities can accumulate. As a result, an early-war operation will be very different that that same operation in the late war as all the applicable capabilities come into play.

Now for one last, a pretty much unrelated thought.

As I was eyeballing the game, trying to decide whether or not to spring for it, one set of graphics that caught my eye was a user-made sticker sheet. These stickers could be applied to the games blocks, there by decorating and designating those blocks with official unit graphics. They look very nice and would seem to offer an extra bit of historical chrome on top of the game. The more I think about it, though, the less appropriate I find this.

By placing stickers on the units, one designates the (for example) U.S. cubes, not just as “troops”, but as brigades. As I said, initially this made some sense. A brigade was often the core unit when creating an operation to be assigned to a particular command. In many cases, smaller operations would still be managed by the brigade commander, allocating individual battalions, and larger ones would see multiple brigades acting in concert. However, having a little bit of game play under my belt, I now think this entirely misinterprets the meaning of the pieces in this game.

A better way to think of the blocks, rather than as formations, is in terms of command and control. Think of them as the resources necessary to commit to an operation. Those resources certainly would include the soldiers themselves; the count of brigades, battalions, or divisions. However, the blocks also indicate supplies and supply chain support. They also designate the attention of the command structure, which would never be infinite, even in the most leadership-heavy of militaries. In this last, if you are familiar with the now-ancient computer game The Guns of August, think in terms of that game’s requirement to declare which Corps command structures would be active as a prerequisite to using them in any sort of attack.

To give an example, imagine a turn where you move half the blocks on the map from one province to another and then engage in some operation (maybe a sweep or an assault). Should you think of that as physically relocating half of forces currently in Vietnam? Similarly, should you think of the U.S.’s “Available” box as units sitting stateside waiting to be deployed to Vietnam? I think the answer is no and, maybe sometimes, yes. Certainly relocating forces on the map implies physical movement of combat forces. However, I think it is a mistake to think of the blocks on the board as representing the location of all forces. Instead, think of it as representing all the forces which are active. So a unit represented by its block that is given a few weeks of down time might see its block removed from the map to be placed somewhere else representing a different unit which is receiving active direction from the command structure. In that way, “available” could mean available back in the States or already in Vietnam, but currently not being used or at risk of use.

This distinction becomes particularly obvious when you have to work with the Casualties box. Various actions allow the communist players to send U.S. units to Casualties, those casualties being a major factor in chipping away a America’s ability to fight the war. Does it really mean, though, that the 3rd Brigade of the 7th Cavalry was destroyed in the field? Or does it just mean that casualties in that battle were unacceptably high? It should be pretty obvious that the game means the latter. The pain of seeing a brigade disappear from the map would not contribute to the immersion factor for this game.

Similarly even the colors of the blocks can be misleading, at least occasionally. The green irregulars are identified in the rules as “U.S. Special Forces.” Most of the time, however, that means they are native units managed and directed by U.S. special forces. In fact, in some cases there may be only a subtle difference between those green octagonals and various yellow or orange units. The difference may be based on which player gets to control them rather than the actual makeup of the forces. In other cases, the green irregulars are meant to be U.S. units such as U.S. Army Rangers or Long Range Patrols. As in the previous paragraph, a given unit may even swap back and forth in terms of what it represents, without being actually removed from the map. A similar situation applies to the red and blue irregulars. In many cases, particularly when a red unit it substituted for a blue one, the force represented by the block may not change. Rather, it may indicate simply a change in political control; who has the upper hand, the locals or the officials back in Hanoi. In other words, in may cases, the red guerrillas and blue guerrillas both represent Viet Cong recruited in the South. The difference is who is pulling their strings.

I don’t know how much immersion one really gets while playing a game, particularly after one has learned the rules and plays using more complicated plans and longer-term strategies. I suspect that, like Twilight Struggle, the better you get at playing the game, the more you’ll want to ignore the game’s chrome, it being a distraction to your goal of winning. Fact is, I’m not that good. The events still provoke some thought about what unexpected card draws might mean in terms of alternate paths that the war might have taken. Those stickers, though? They do look good you probably shouldn’t be sticking them on.

Return to the master post or remember an old movie with me.

You Better Take Cover

Tags

Australia, Cold War, Men at Work, modding, Squad Battles, Squad Battles: Vietnam, The Battle of Long Tan, Vietnam

This is the forty-fourth in a series of posts on the Vietnam War. See here for the previous post in the series and here to go back to the master post.

I recently read a statement, but I don’t remember where I read it. It referenced the often-used statement that “the internet never forgets,” generally used as a warning about posting things on social media. However, as explained, the internet does forget. For example, all that wonderful content archived for posterity on Geocities and Wargamer.com’s forum file storage is being lost to the ages, and more disappears each day.

Such attrition becomes apparent when re-installing old games like the Squad Battles series. As I discussed before, at the time it came out it looked (at least in part) like a contender for the Age of Rifle‘s space, a sandbox World War II and beyond. HPS was often criticized of hindering modders in the service of not allowing the customers to turn into their competitors, but even still, Squad Battles was designed to be moddable. Particularly at the time of its release, the ability to expand the default scenario range was seen as a key to the success of a new game. A game like Squad Battles: Vietnam, perhaps because it was one of many variants and settings, would never have the range of scenarios that the true sandbox games had. But it did get some.

Pursuing what looks like an approximately ten-years-old “unofficial” Squad Battles site, I found a listing of scenarios for the various versions of that series, including Squad Battles: Vietnam. I can’t speak to whether the listing of user-made scenarios is definitive, but from what I could tell it does cover a lot of the ground. The problem is that the links where the scenarios were stored all those years ago are no longer functional. In some cases, there does not appear to be any alternate source for them. I’m sure somebody, somewhere, has copies of the files on their own computers, but they do not appear to be internet-accessible. The author of that site seems to have drawn this same conclusion around the time I did (perhaps even my digging through his site made him wonder what I was up to), and he posted, himself, about the problem. One can only hope that as he deletes references to dead links, we don’t lose even the record that such scenarios ever existed at all.

Now, some of the scenarios referenced on his site he posted the downloadable version himself. I actually have a little bit of trouble accessing his files due to some combination of scripting, account credentials, and/or blocks on .zip files. I had actually started thinking, before I saw his post, that the files may no longer be there or just be inaccessible. In any case, I can’t get them. The plus side of this is when I try to get them and can’t, I realize that sometime (perhaps a year ago, perhaps longer) I made a monster download of a whole stack of scenarios including many of the non-Wargamer hosted files linked on the above pages. It always takes me a while to figure out where I’ve hidden away those downloads, but eventually I do and often find what I’m after. I honestly don’t remember where I got them in the first place, try as I might.

I drag you all through this history because, in between the two Steel Panthers scenarios in the previous gaming post, I played another Australian scenario. There is a user-made scenario called ANZAC, Sweep which takes place the morning of August 16th, two days before the Battle of Long Tan. As near as I can tell, this is entirely hypothetical. The scenario uses a nearly-identical Australian order-of-battle as the real Battle of Long Tan, but on a non-historical map against a different enemy disposition. It is true that there were Australian patrols attempting to locate the VC position on August 16th, but I don’t believe that these two companies would have been working in tandem.

The Australian side includes two companies of infantry (off the screen), mechanized support, and off board artillery.

The scenario has the B and D Companies of the 6 RAR, supported by three M-113s and off-board artillery, attempting to locate a VC mortar position. This is essentially the real mission of D Company on the 18th, with B Company and the M-113s being the equivalent of A Company’s historical reinforcement effort. This jiggering of the historical situation has the advantage of being able to be played, despite the lack (at least, in Squad Battles: Vietnam) of a historical map, and without preconceived ideas of the nature of enemy forces.

My initial reaction upon starting the scenario was one of horror. As I said, I had downloaded the scenario from somewhere a year-or-so back and then installed the ANZAC, Sweep before playing. When it started up, I was unable to see any of my units. After some poking and prodding, I realized that the silhouettes my units were still there, but the background (the tan square background of the “counters”) was not. I fiddled with the settings, to no avail, before finally finding a highlighting option that worked. Sort of. The were highlighted in a kind of pink which made them easy enough to spot on the map but also three-times as ugly. So ugly, in fact, that I began digging through the installation on my own hoping to find some way around this mess. Because, clearly, the person who created this scenario had not intended it to look this way.

After a bit of ad hoc patching, my Australians are visible and moving forward across a broad front against the enemy mortar position.

Eventually, I found a solution. I’ve said before, but it bears repeating, the program is remarkable modable. It can be extended to include entirely new nationalities, such as these Australians, absent from the original package. It also happens that the Australians are part of the base package for Squad Battles: Tour of Duty. The solution was as simple as copying the support for Australian counters out of Tour of Duty and pasting it into the right place in Vietnam. The result, having nicely colored units advancing againts an enemy mortar position, is pictured above.

I assume that when this scenario was first posted, somewhere there was an ANZAC mod, upon which the scenario depends. Whether that came out before or after the Tour of Duty release, I won’t begin to speculate. What I will say is the mod almost certainly had more to it than just the background color of counters. For example, still missing from my game are the nationality-specific sounds that accompany actions such as rallying the troops. Honestly, some of these sounds can get a tediously repetitive, so I didn’t feel I was missing out on much. I felt that way up until I actually played an Australian scenario in Tour of Duty. The Australian voice acting is, shall we say, considerably more colorful than that of the Americans. I quite enjoyed it, although one of the commands sounds a little more like a Schwarzenegger line than an Aussie. Did someone mix up Austrian and Australian*?

Finally we have some appropriate artillery support.

As I said above, I question the authenticity of this scenario. It looks to me that it used a hypothetical encounter to approximate the actual Battle of Long Tan, using the “hypothetical” part to free the scenario from trying to simulate that which it couldn’t. Obviously, using the Squad Battle: Vietnam maps, the terrain isn’t going to be right. Likewise, this gets you around the problem we saw in the Steel Panthers version. The Steel Panthers scenario doesn’t last long enough for the M-113s to be a factor at Long Tan but, since this one is hypothetical, we can just assumes that M-113s are already on the battlefield even before contact is made.

Another plus for this scenario, as I happily highlight in the above screenshot, is the availability of artillery support. The scenario starts with the brigade closing in on a, first suspected and then identified, enemy mortar emplacement. Doctrine of the time would likely have given that brigade artillery support which, upon located the enemy position, would have been called in. So often the use of artillery removed from Squad Battles scenarios. Possibly the reason is because it throws off the balance for most any scenario, I don’t know. Including it here makes for a nice change of pace.

There is a twist to the scenario which keeps it all quite interesting. I’ll not dwell on the details except to suggest that this, too, is a proxy for the situation at Long Tan. Let’s just say ANZAC, Sweep makes for a decent Squad Battles scenario by of my metrics. Hopefully we haven’t lost too many similarly-decent scenarios into the fading internet of yesteryear.

Return to the master post or continue forward in a return to Fire in the Lake and the way it abstracts the complexities of the war into its relatively simple game mechanics.

*That’s a joke. It just sounds a little like Arnold. I don’t really believe that an Arnold voice (or an Austrian voice) was used in this game.

We Held the Coastline, They Held the Highland

Tags

Billy Joel, Cold War, Cuban Missile Crisis, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, Road to Disaster, Robert McNamara, Vietnam

This is the forty-third in a series of posts on the Vietnam War. See here for the previous post in the series and here to go back to the master post.

I am now reading Road to Disaster: A New History of America’s Descent Into Vietnam by Brian VanDeMark. This is a newly released book, particularly compared to what I usually read. The book was published in the fall of 2018.

It is occasionally a difficult book to read, even when comparing it to some of the military-sponsored works I’ve referenced previously, but not because of the writing style. It is written well enough that it is a pretty comfortable reading experience. The difficulty comes from the thesis of the book itself and how that translates to a narrative.

The idea is to reexamine the escalation of the Vietnam War in the light of the most modern understanding of psychology. Basically, Kennedy’s, and then Johnson’s, people were supposed to be the best and the brightest and on the peaceful side of the political table to boot. So then how did they drive so deeply into a war effort that became such a spectacular failure? To explore this, historical records of the decision-making process are interspersed with psychological theories about how one might arrive at such a wrong set of decisions, given the pressures of human frailty. The breakup of the narrative can distract, especially when some of the psychology is stretched quite a bit to apply to meager evidence from 55 years ago. Still, as I said, the book reads well enough, especially once you get used to its pacing.

The book begins with the Bay of Pigs invasion and, essentially, the beginning of Jack Kennedy’s presidential term. The argument is that the combination of talent, ego, and inexperience caused a series of missteps resulting in failure at the Bay of Pigs. That failure, the book describes, lead directly to the Cuban Missile Crisis and, in some ways, the successful outcome of that confrontation. But that success built a foundation for failed decision-making processes that would send us down the wrong road in Vietnam. Eventually, not only would South Vietnam to fall to the North but it would do so only after tremendous expenditure of blood and treasure on the part of the United States. The blame for that loss, and the impact on American politics and military, continues to reverberate in American politics to this day.

The author also wrote In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam with Robert McNamara, Kennedy’s Secretary of Defense. That project started as a book about McNamara created through extensive interviews between the two co-authors as well as talks with other major players from the top ranks of late-60s diplomacy. In response to another biography, McNamara decided to release his own memoir and the VanDeMark/McNamara biography was turned into auto-biography. With this background research, in this book VanDeMark can analyze events of the time by comparing the thoughts of the contemporary McNamara with a retrospective McNamara as a way to understand the extent to which the thinking was distorted when decisions were being made.

One area in which this book stumbles is flying high of its politically-biased flag. Perhaps it should only be expected that a book critical of the Vietnam War should be authored by a liberal. Writing from the vantage point provided by one’s own beliefs allows an exploration of that world as one sees it, which may, perhaps, be a necessity. I find parts of this book, however, where the partisan leanings bend so far as to make me wonder what the author might be blinding himself to in his analysis. I’ll discuss an example.

President Johnson’s decision to begin a bombing campaign was made as a result of the Gulf of Tonkin incident, and particularly the second of the two attacks*. Johnson had been pushed towards, and resisted, a bombing campaign throughout 1964. The military leadership advocated a military response to the growing involvement of North Vietnam internally in the South and bombing was proposed as a way to limit U.S. committment. Even after Tonkin, Johnson put off the decision hoping that events would improve his range of options. When the Viet Cong attacked Camp Holloway in February of 1965, Johnson started the bombing campaign that he had essentially authorized the year before. In all of this, Johnson is described as making the wrong decision, but against his own better judgment. Among other factors, that judgment is impaired by political considerations. Johnson hoped showing strength against North Vietnam (a popular decision at the time) would buy him political points, both with conservative Republicans and his own Southern Democrats. The latter, he felt, was ready to turn against him on Vietnam in retaliation for his signing of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Yet Johnson’s realpolitik in foreign policy is contrasted with his Great Society initiatives, which he is seen as pursuing only for the most righteous and selfless of reasons. OK, perhaps the author admits that Johnson is interested in his “legacy,” but the intensely political animal we see escalating in Vietnam is suddenly nowhere to be found when it comes to domestic politics.

Of course, as I said already, its not as if we didn’t expect a bias when we picked up a book titled Road to Disaster. Further, it may be informative to have that bias fully on display at every turn rather than having to second guess what might hide behind a more neutral and dispassionate prose. Moreover, in the case of the Gulf of Tonkin and the “second torpedo boat attack,” I’m pretty sure that the author has his analysis correct. The tenure of the analysis, though; the certainty in the face of conflicting accounts from fifty-five years past, makes me wary of analyses where I don’t already have some background.

Another aspect of this bias is that, when attempting to clarify what constituted the truth among conflicting estimates of the time, the author frequently cites recent statements from the government of Vietnam itself. Obviously, access to the communists’ records can shed some real light on an ambiguous situation. If nothing else, seeing something from “the other side” can be critical to getting a true perspective. However, 50 years on, it would seem to me that America’s own current perspective is going to be more reliable than the communist government of Vietnam, influenced both by the propaganda of the time and its own desire to self-promote in the here and now. Where Vietnamese official data confirms something we already thought we knew, it is probably worth accepting as positive evidence. To simply accept statements as arbitrating the truth is probably naive.

In the final analysis, this book is something of a mixed bag, but a mix that turns out to be a hearty stew (mixed, much like this metaphor). The historical narrative combines the familiar with new insights. The psychology ranges from the pop variety to actual insightful analysis, the latter truly helping to understand why decision-making went so wrong. The telling of the story from the perspective of the diplomats, in particular, represents a nice counter-balance to the stories that the generals have told in those other books that I’ve read.

Return to the master post or go on to another article dealing with the Australian forces in the Vietnam and, albeit indirectly, The Battle of Long Tan.

*VanDeMark has no doubt that the second attack did not take place. I don’t disagree with him, but I don’t find the historic record to be definitive. In my own analysis, I deliberately avoided discounting the testimony of any participant who claims to have evidence in the matter. In Road to Disaster, by way of contrast, the evidence that no attack took place is presented to overwhelmingly back that point. Ironically, this done in a chapter that discusses the role of confirmation bias in blinding people to evidence which contradicts their per-conceived notions of fact.

Can’t You Hear the Thunder?

Tags

ANZAC, Australia, Cold War, Men at Work, New Zealand, Steel Panthers, The Operational Art of War, Vietnam, Vietnam Combat Operations, wargames, WinSPMBT

This is the forty-second in a series of posts on the Vietnam War. See here for the previous post in the series and here to go back to the master post.

For much of 1965 and the early months of 1966, the Royal Australian Regiment (RAR), 1st Battalion, fought as a part of the 173rd Airborne Brigade of the U.S. army, engaging the enemy in the vicinity of Saigon. After a year in Vietnam, the 1st Battalion returned to Australia, being replaced by the 1st Australian Task Force. The 1st ATF was a brigade-sized unit which could operate independently of the 173rd. Under Australia command, the 1st ATF contained both Australian and New Zealand forces.

After the arrival of the 1st ATF and its two infantry battalions, the 5th and 6th of the RAR, they established a base at Nui Dat, in the Phước Tuy Province, south and east of Saigon. The location placed them so as to interfere with Viet Cong supply routes and nearby a suspected VC base area. The force was tasked with securing the area around Nui Dat, protecting the local population and government from VC harassment, as well as supporting the bigger picture in the III Corps tactical zone, the portion of the country outside of Saigon. From their initial deployment, there was intelligence warning of an attack of up-to-four-battalion strength from the nearby VC.

While they pursued the rumors of enemy formations throughout the late spring and early summer, it wouldn’t be until mid-August that significant contact was made. While the evidence of large VC units in the vicinity continued to build, fighting was, at its most expansive, in company-sized engagements. Follow-through never managed to locate the suspected enemy positions. On the night of August 16th, into the morning of the 17th, the base at Nui Dat came under heavy mortar attack, once again indicating a significant enemy presence nearby.

Three Viet Cong formations are detected north and east of Nui Dat. This may be more than the Aussies want to confront on their own.

Naturally, the scenario Vietnam Combat Operations, Volume IV, depicts this encounter and the subsequent operations around Nui Dat. The fight also is shown in detail within a pair of scenarios from Steel Panthers: Main Battle Tank (SPMBT). This gives an opportunity to offer some thoughts on the limits of The Operational Art of War (TOAW) to depict the ground covered by Vietnam Combat Operations.

If you look at the above screenshot, you can see that two VC battalion-sized units are identified in the vicinity of Nui Dat (best identified by the 1st ATF headquarters unit at the center of the shot, shown with an ATF in the center of its graphic). A third, and stronger, enemy unit is located to the east. This additional intelligence may be due to my adventurousness. Feeling pretty confident that the area around Nui Dat was secure ahead of the historical schedule, I pushed west to contest a village, Xuyên Mộc. An ARVN airborne unit holds that strong point and the ahistorical location of that force may be providing additional intelligence.

The point of this detail is that, to my TOAW eye (such as it is), it looks to me that I am facing a superior enemy force. It is speculated that the VC were planning an attack as they knew that the the 5th RAR was operating away from the immediate vicinity of the Australian base. In response to the possibility of being attacked, the Australians sent out company-strength patrols (companies of the 6th RAR) to, once again, attempt to locate the enemy formations. However, the mechanics of TOAW suggest I do differently. Given the knowledge that I am facing strong enemy units, I am not going to move without superiority both in quality and number of units. You may or may not be able to see it in my screenshot, but I immediately returned the 5th RAR to the operational area by helicopter. I brought it, not back to base, but instead into a blocking position to the north of the enemy. At this point I’m trying to calculate how much ARVN support I have nearby and assessing both the practicality and necessity of bringing in U.S. forces to augment my Australians.

Initial contact in the Rubber Plantation. There appear to be a lot more of them than there are of me.

Before I go there, I decided to take advantage of the trio of tactical-level scenarios that are available to me. The first one I tried is Diggers at Work, a Steel Panthers: Main Battle Tank  scenario. I started with this one because the date in the scenario description is four days before the actual battle depicted, an error in the scenario write-up. It quite clearly depicts the fighting on August 18th. It begins, as the screenshot above shows, with a company strength patrol through the rubber plantation near the Australians’ base and their encountering of enemy positions. If you’re counting units, the patrol is divided into 3 platoon-strength forces, and this pictures shows the middle fork of the advance.

As I said, the scenario begins with initial contact between the advancing Australian platoons and small groups of VC. It quickly becomes apparent to the Australian player that he is facing a much larger VC force to his front. At this point I was shy of the victory locations, but felt that I had to be on the defensive against this obviously-superior force. The Australian, also around this time, receives the historical artillery support that allowed the 6th RAR to prevail against vastly superior numbers.

A reinforcing company arrives in M-113s on the enemies left flank, ready to carry the day.

The design of this scenario again brings up the question of how battles are represented in the game engine. The forces appear to be historically sized, although its not clear (either in the historical record nor because I didn’t turn off the “fog of war” settings to examine the VC side) if the full strength of the communist formation is represented in Steel Panthers. Similarly, the size of the battlefield appears reasonable. The duration of the battle, however, is significantly compressed. The infantry transports carrying the reinforcing A Company arrived some 3 hours after the fighting first developed, almost triple the duration of the entire scenario. By contrast, in a little more than half-an-hour into the scenario we, the player, receive our reinforcements. Perhaps one way of interpreting this is that the “downtime” is stripped out of the gameplay. So the first 10 turns should not be seen as 30 minutes of clock time, but rather as the most interesting 30 minutes (out of 3 hours) for each of the 3 platoons that are engaged. In fact, one might consider that while you are fighting with all three of your platoons simultaneously, the reality you are simulating actually has these fights staggered across several hours of time. Lulls between VC attacks are likewise raced over to get to the next burst of action. In this way, reinforcements arriving half way through the scenario might make sense.

This does, of course, cause problems. I’ve mention before that the tactical-level wargames are generally restricted to the 45 minute-to-an-hour timeframe. As explained elsewhere (perhaps in the PanzerBlitz manual?) the limit on scenario duration is to bring the game to an end before the likes of ammunition shortages, fuel limits, and unit exhaustion become dominating factors. The critical elements for an operational-level game, things such as supply, are ignored in a shorter length game. In this battle, however, during the 5-6 hours in which the heavy fighting took place, ammunition resupply was a major factor. The initial patrol was sent out with just three magazines per infantryman, sacrificing fighting ability for endurance. Where the expected encounter was to consist of chasing small groups of enemies through rough terrain, having a lighter load seemed more important than being ready to engage in an extended firefight. At the same time the relief company was on the way to provide relief, command was desperately trying to get ammo resupply to the besieged platoons.

Immediately the feel of this one feels better than in Steel Panthers. The background thundershower noise probably helps a lot.

For contrast, we’ll move on to the Squad Battles: Tour of Duty representation of the same scenario, The Battle at Long Tan. By contrast this does not attempt to portray much beyond the initial contact between the searching companies the the Viet Cong positions. What this means is that the resulting game is much more plausible in terms of actual (or at least potential) fighting keeping it to that first forty-five minutes or so.

Also supporting realism, and contrasting to some of the other Squad Battles scenarios I’ve played, the Australian forces do have artillery support in the form of a single battery on call. It isn’t enough to allow the play to bring in the full impact of artillery support which was so critical in winning this battle but, if we’re sticking to that first 45 minutes, it is likely it was before that would come into play.

The ambiance is helped by the thundershower sounds in the background. The miserable weather was another important factor in this battle, although I can’t say how important it is in the the Squad Battles math, much less the other game engines where there is no indication that we’re caught in a storm.

From a purely gaming standpoint, the scenario isn’t so bad either. The map differs from either the jungle or the rice paddies maps that we are used to playing, so that’s a good thing. The plantation terrain helps to create much more interesting lines of sight. It allows allows the occasional long distant shot, but it also creates nooks and crannies of hidden spots, even very close by. Movement is also much more similar to the open terrain of the rice fields as opposed to the one-hex-per-turn of the jungle. In this one, the Australians have well-maintained roads along which to advance, adding to the their tactical option.

All things considered, I think Squad Battles does this battle best. That said, I imagine most of us would have a hankering for those reinforcements to come in to save the day. Without them, there is no real way to achieve a satisfying victory. One can accumulating the victory points to achieve victory, but you do so knowing that the worst is yet to come.

Here comes the human wave again.

As I indicated, the Steel Panthers scenario package contains two versions of this battle. The second scenario, Made of Stern Stuff, is correctly located in time by its scenario notes. Because of this, it ended up being the last scenario chronologically. In truth, it is simply another representation of the same battle.

I like the map better than the one in Diggers. It is more expansive and more chaotic. In Diggers, if you know what happened in the battle, you can anticipate how the scenario plays out. You know, to start, that the enemy is somewhere near the map’s victory locations. It only makes sense to advance those positions cautiously, ready to fall back on a defensive line when the enemy appears in force. Note that the line of advance is along the rows of the rubber plantation. It means there are long lines of sight which must be broken up by advancing either behind or along the trees.

Contrast that with Stern Stuff. Having just played Squad Battles, I immediately miss the dedicated plantation terrain and the much clearer graphics of that other title. However, this third scenario, using the tools at hand, creates a map that, yes, feels a bit more like a cultivated plantation rather than just wild jungle while still providing an unpredictable terrain for the battle. Lines of sight are less obvious. Also considerably less obvious, particularly at the outset (it is much more obvious by the time I took the screenshot at Turn 7), is where the enemy is. Playing the Australians, you have to begin the scenario attempting to reconnoiter the enemies positions. Once the shooting begins, you remain uncertain. Is the entire enemy to your front. Will they be coming around your flanks? Maybe there is another platoon or two behind you.

More support rolling in.

Steel Panthers also, in general and in this scenario in particular, shows an advantage in depicting fire support. As critical as it was in the Vietnam War, it makes a huge difference in gameplay when it works as it should. In Squad Battles‘ The Battle at Long Tan, the artillery support is from a single battery. Granted, this is very early on in the contact and it makes sense that the Australians had yet to bring the full weight of their air and artillery to bear. However, it emphasizes the weakness of artillery in Squad Battles. With a single gun, it can be difficult to do any noticeable damage with indirect fire. This is combination of the fact that indirect guns are not particularly deadly and that it is very difficult to consistently achieve direct hits without a line-of-sight from the shooter to the target. In Stern Stuff, catching advancing VC in open ground allows them to be ripped apart by concentrated artillery fire. The trick is to have ground units that can keep track of the enemy’s movements so that artillery can be walked onto the moving targets. In this regard, this scenario gets it right, more so than any of the others.

I think this one also reinforces the idea that in a turn-based game, the “clock” can be a soft and fuzzy thing. Trying to interpret this scenario as an 90 minute slice out of the fighting August 18th fails to capture the intent of the scenario designer. Better to interpret it as bursts of 15-20 minute actions with the 30-40 minute lulls between fighting simply ignored. It would feel a lot more authentic if there were a way to acknowledge the down time and perhaps even model its effects. However, we are talking here about user-made scenarios for a long-time engine, so we shouldn’t get too greedy.

Lastly, in this version of the scenario, I get the feeling (more than the others) that it was made based upon a memoir or personal history. The named locations and other details have the feeling of being pulled from a soldier’s personal recollection of the battle. I’ve gotten used to seeing the War in Vietnam purely from the American perspective. This is one battle where there is extensive information from the Australian’s point of view. It is no wonder that it has been well covered.

Return to the master post for more Vietnam War articles or move ahead to a book review.

No Slack

Tags

Cold War, General Hal Moore, no slack, Squad Battles, Squad Battles: Tour of Duty, Vietnam

This is the forty-first in a series of posts on the Vietnam War. See here for the previous post in the series and here to go back to the master post.

In late June of 1966, the 327th Infantry Regiment was ordered to locate forces of a significant size after the defeat of a company of militia (CIDG) near the Special Forces camp at Dong Tre. At the time, they knew that the enemy had at least a company. It was their job to locate the enemy force and determine its strength. Eventually U.S. command would come to know that an NVA regiment had moved into the area.

On June 19th, two companies of the 2nd Battalion of the 327th had located elements of the enemy force near the village of Trung-Loung (2). After minor skirmishing and some pounding by artillery, the Americans established a defensive perimeter and then settled in for the night. The suspected enemy positions continued to be hit with air and artillery. Even as battle lines developed, the Americans remained unsure how sizable of a force they faced.

The next day, the A Company to the east of Trung-Luong and the C Company to the west were ordered to link up. While they had encountered small groups of insurgents during the night and into the morning, there was still no indication that they were facing a force which outnumbered them. As A Company began entering what appeared to be a deserted village, they were hit from all sides by a prepared ambush. On the other side of the village, C Company was also fully engaged while attempting to capture high ground north and west of the village. A third company (B) was helicoptered in for support but found themselves air-assaulting into a defended enemy position. As night fell on the 20th, the Americans’ command of the battlefield via artillery prevented any counter-attacks but they now had three companies on the battlefield, unable to link up.

The next day saw the 1st Cavalry committing two companies of their own, to the north of the village, and Colonel Moore assuming command of the now-mixed-unit operation. By the end of the day the American forces made a concerted attack on the NVA position, simultaneously from multiple directions. While the attackers’ progress was steady, it remained slow, and night again fell with the U.S. in a defensive perimeter. Their key concern was preventing the escape of the NVA forces before they could be engaged and destroyed.

The next morning brought a reversal of initiative. The NVA engaged in multiple assaults against the American positions, quickly closing in so as to prevent the American artillery’s effectiveness. Several hours of attack did not break the American lines and, instead, resulted in substantial casualties on the NVA side, likely eliminating the NVA regiment as an effective fighting force. While the following days would see more American units fed into the battle, no more large-scale engagements would occur.

The Squad Battles: Tour of Duty scenario The Battle at Trung Luong consists of six scenarios taking place over the course of six days. It is a way to get around the limitations of the tactical engine and its time-and-space restrictions. The scenarios, however, are not in any way linked, so a wildly ahistorical result in one scenario would still place you right back in the historical starting position for the next. Let’s not get ahead of ourselves, though. We’ll just start off with the first one.

101st approaches Trung Luong from the west.

In many ways, this was a scenario typical of those that have caused me frustration with the Squad Battles package over the years. The scenario is only 6 turns long. The above screenshot was taken into turn 2, when I first came under machine gun fire. If you do some counting, you’ll see it is barely possible to reach the top-left victory location before the end of turn 6. Even that requires that you move your units perfectly and they don’t get disrupted by incoming fire. It looks like the other two victory locations are impossible to reach, due to intervening obstacles, no matter how you approach them.

In my first attempt at this, I was moving in on the objectives cautiously. Obviously, I don’t know where the enemy is hidden, only that he is up there somewhere. Until roughly the line where my men are in the above screenshot, it is possible to use the terrain to protect my advance. I did just that, attempting to control which units were potentially exposed to fire. The result at the end of turn six was a minor loss as I failed to reach any of the three objectives.

The point of this opening scenario appears to have the player be surprised by the location of the enemy forces. As the company commander, your unit has been ordered to sweep the village to its front. Intelligence leads you to expect enemy forces in the area (represented in-game by the enemy occupied victory squares), but you don’t know their position or their strength. Advancing to take those victory locations will have you discovering the enemy positions “the hard way.”

I felt frustrated by the fact that I had, apparently, not understood the objectives of this one so I replayed the scenario. The problem, as I’ve discussed before, is that I had already had had the “surprise” revealed to me. The second time through, I concentrated more on closing the distance and less on having my squads support each other. As an added bonus, I was granted an extra turn by the games variable-ending feature*. It was that extra turn, not a superior performance, that allowed me to capture one of the three victory locations and improve my score to “draw”. The fact is, if I had been given the extra turn in my first run through, I probably would have captured that one victory location. With one victory point location added to my score, my first run through would have been the better of the two.

I don’t know, but this also may have been part of the “point” of this first scenario. Approaching carefully reduces one’s losses which could net you a better score than charging forward into the unknown. The operating procedure for an American unit, upon realizing they faced significant opposition, would be to pull back and request air and artillery support. Like many Squad Battles scenarios, however, such support is not part of the setup. This may be reasonable, given the scenario length. The player must play up until that point where he realizes he is facing a substantial enemy, Whatever comes next, be it advancing into the village or pulling back to dig in, happens after the scenario is over.

Turn 7 of 6. I don’t think the extra turn made a difference.

The following day finds another company of the 2/327th in position to attack Trung Luong (2) from the east. The setup of the second scenario reinforces my opinion about the purpose of the first; that the whole point was to suffer some losses in the course of “discovering” that the village is occupied. By contrast, scenario 2’s victory hexes are easily reachable within the six-turn limit. Subject, of course, to whatever resistance the enemy will give you. Once again, I pushed a little harder than was prudent and only got a draw, despite capturing two-out-of-three victory hexes. I also lost more than I gave in terms of casualties – not a typical result in terms of historic American actions. While I might complain again about be forced to attack a known enemy position without the massive air and artillery power that accompanied nearly every American operation, I won’t (or is that what I just did?) It was not uncommon for a U.S. sweep-and-clear force to assume that they could easily oust some insurgents from a village only to find out that the enemy had far better numbers and position that anticipated. In Squad Battles, we know every scenario is going to be a fight. In reality, U.S. commanders likely expected many if not most encounters to wind up with the enemy disengaging and escaping.

The small map works for this scenario, which models the insertion of  B Company into an LZ north of the village.

Within another hour or two, as the game clock turns, a third company attempts to come in to reinforce the two already engaged but finds its intended landing zone defended. This again is modeled as a short scenario (although, not quite so short as the first two – this one is a 9-turn affair) focusing only on the action of landing and securing the LZ. A lack of instruction in the form of scenario notes, as I’ve mentioned before, leaves one hanging a bit. I think this kind of scenario could do with “You are ordered to land, secure the LZ, and make ready to receive additional … blah blah blah.” Understanding that that larger clearing is the prepared landing zone helps the player do the right thing. Fortunately, this is somewhat obvious. I think I am looking at a new feature in Tour of Duty where the game engine could restrict a scenario to a small section of the large maps. No more searching around across hundreds of hexes trying to find where your platoon is sitting or picking from many possible landing sites.

I chose a fairly unimaginative plan.

Again, I interpret the point of this one as prepping the player for the larger scenario which is to follow; the coordinated, battalion-sized assault on the village. Even to the extent there are several throw-away scenarios to lead things off, this is probably a much better way to handle it than to try to cram all aspects of the operation, in miniature, into a 1-2 hour scenario. The down side is that you have to limit the early scenarios specifically to prevent ahistorical, decisive victories which would break the narrative. With this third scenario, though, we get some of the best of both words. Focusing on the taking of the LZ, performance in this small scenario doesn’t really impact the larger battles that follows. One assumes that even if the initial landing is for shit, by the next day you’ll have your forces on the ground and ready to do their part in the coming attack.

If I haven’t given it away already, I’ll give it away now. This third scenario is a take and hold. So while the initial movements are offensive – moving into the vicinity of the victory locations and scouting out the enemy position – victory in the scenario will come from successfully defending your position from a counterattack. The combination of attack and defense and, in contrast to the first two, hoping to actually run out the clock, makes this scenario interesting on its own merits as well as serving its purpose in advancing the “story.” For what its worth, this was a minor defeat for me, albeit coming within one or two kills of earning a third draw. I lost two helicopters while they were trying to lift off after the insertion. Those points alone would have moved me from a minor defeat to a minor victory.

These three short, introductory scenarios lead to a fourth where all three companies attack the village, the first two in a very similar setup to their earlier assaults and the newly arrived (historically B) company attacking from the north. I suppose it should go without saying that winning this scenario is considerably easier than any of the first three. It also makes for an interesting solution to one of the problems encountered in this game, how much preparation is appropriate before playing a scenario.

I’ve discussed the issue before. If you simply come into a scenario cold, you are likely under-prepared relative to your historical counterpart. Real commanders would have studied their maps and intelligence reports, pre-plotted fire-support missions, and overflown the battlefield to prepare in every way possible before the actual fight. A player could do the same by studying the board before starting the scenario. I, for one, find that a tedious exercise and would rather get started playing. Going to realism, a commander studying maps will also always have incomplete information; details of the terrain may only be apparent to troops on the ground. Studying every detail of a Squad Battles map allows you see reality – the hex map is the terrain, and vice versa. The alternative, to discover some unique scenario feature by playing and then replaying the scenario with this knowledge, may substitute for this preparation or it may simply ruin the scenario, because you now have prior knowledge of features that were supposed to come as a surprise.

A multi-part scenario provides an alternative. The early scenarios may not be winnable or, in some cases, even interesting. They do provide that “battlefield intelligence” that a commander on Day 3 of this fight would have had, and they do it in a engaging way. When I advanced to take the village in my fourth scenario, I found myself moving through, quite literally, familiar ground. There were particular paths of advance, using roads and other terrain features, that I chose to use because I had actually tried them before in the earlier scenarios. At the same time, I had no idea where the enemy was lurking because it was my first time through this particular scenario. As it turned out, the assault was fairly easy. I managed to win the scenario decisively, taking all of the objectives and, pretty much, taking control of the village.

This points to a significant gap between the course of the scenarios and the historical outcome. In each scenario, a player is incentivized to accomplish their mission before the turns run out. The alternative to pushing for a rapid victory is to disengage and, rather dully, let the clock run out. What this means is that while I’ve pretty much overrun the enemy positions, my historical counterpart ended the day still facing off with that enemy. The price I’ve paid for that aggressiveness is that my casualties, over the piece of the battle I’ve fought, are probably already many times that of the actual fight, including every part of the extended operation.

However the battle, not to mention this series of scenarios, didn’t end there.

Defending against a counter-attack provides the spice of variety.

The 5th scenario in the sequence models an NVA counterattack against the now-defended American positions. We are back to the small scenarios; company-on-company. The variation here is that, as the American, you are completely on the defensive. It is a scenario setup** that places a chunk of the victory locations in no-man’s-land between the two forces. This compels the attacking side to actually act like an attacker. It also gives the defender a high-level decision to make. Do you defend your current line, or do you move forward to physically defend the advanced line? My choice was to start by defending my existing position and then move forward 2/3rds of the way into the scenario to retake whatever victory locations the NVA have grabbed. After I decided this was how I wanted to go, I realized that the scenario design forces this upon you to some extent. The American units are initially fixed until fired-upon so they couldn’t charge forward to meet the enemy even if they wanted to. You probably won’t be surprised if I tell you that, as a defensive scenario, it was fairly easy to get an overwhelming victory.

The final installment of this series takes place five days after the initial one and is something of a coda to the main battle. After taking the village and scattering its defendants, the U.S. forces pursued the retreating insurgents southward. In an attempt to cut them off a helicopter insertion was made to set up a blocking force. This scenario takes on the fight when what turned out to be hot landing zone is contested. Once again, its focus improves the gameplay over similar, but less focused, landing zone battles. The only goal of the American player is to land and take control of the LZ. For the NVA, the Americans need to be run off that LZ and, to what ever extent possible, wiped out. The focus also helps in that the game is short and sweet; easily played in a single sitting.

It turns out that six scenarios in progression is an excellent way to overcome some of the shortcomings of stand-alone scenarios. Even the lack of off-board support can make sense if you assume you’re playing six turns which take place between one artillery barrage and then next. It would be great if there were more like this. Problem is, it must be orders of magnitude harder to develop a suite of scenarios as compared to doing one at a time. I note that, while there are other multi-part scenarios in the stock set, this is the only six-part one. Later I look to some user-made content to see how they tackled this issue.

Return to the master post or advance to the next article which covers The Battle of Long Tan, one of the most significant battles for Australian forces in the Vietnam War.

*Squad Battles will sometimes allow scenarios to last longer than their listed duration. I seem to recall reading (although I’ve not looked it up to verify) that it depends on whether victory points are contested at the stated end of the scenario but it is also heavily dependent on randomness. This is supposed to prevent players from gaming the scoring system by grabbing points on what they know is the last turn while ignoring the consequences of any potential enemy reaction to that move. If you seize a hex in your very last move, you should be prepared to defend that hex on the next turn, even if that next turn is to come after the scenario ends.

**Which you may have seen before. *wink* *wink* I tried not to discuss hidden details of the scenarios where possible, but in ever screenshot and ever description of my experience, I do give away some of the surprises hidden in these scenarios. Hopefully, if you’re planning to play the game, you played first and read afterwards.