Virtually everyone in the audience raised their hands enthusiastically. Then Greene, a decidedly hawkish member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, asked a second question: "How many think we should stay out of Vietnam?" Six officers raised their hands ... hesitantly. Warner was among them.
"There are a few cowards in every bunch," quipped the commandant.
But those six officers weren’t cowards. They were soldiers and Marines who had recently returned stateside from tours of duty as advisers to South Vietnamese Army (ARVN) combat units. They knew from firsthand experience what the senior leadership of the American armed forces did not: That the ARVN officer corps, like the government it served, was riven by nepotism, corruption, and indifferent to the plight of the peasantry it was supposed to protect. Moreover, the ARVN was fighting a decidedly unconventional, "people’s war" against small units of guerrillas with tactics and doctrine developed by the U.S. Army for conventional conflicts between regular armies. Not surprisingly, it was losing.
And finally, the advisers had come to understand, much to their dismay, that the top generals and admirals in Saigon and Washington clung tenaciously to this conventional way of war, despite paying lip service to the counterinsurgency training and doctrine that the war in Vietnam seemed to require. This, coupled with the fecklessness of the ARVN, did not bode well for American prospects in Southeast Asia.
In Vietnam, U.S. ground forces would be facing off against a superbly organized and highly motivated insurgency that enjoyed widespread support among South Vietnam’s 14 million peasants. The communist-led National Liberation Front in the South was largely an indigenous movement, but it was supplied with weapons and well-trained military and political warfare specialists from the People’s Army of Vietnam‐the formal name for the North Vietnamese regular army.
The more Warner and the best of his fellow advisers learned about the political and social forces that fueled the civil war in South, the more skeptical they became about the efficacy of using conventionally trained American combat forces to defeat the insurgency in the South. Part of the problem was cultural. The commanding generals in the early ’60s in Vietnam‐men such as John O’Daniel, Samuel T. Williams, Paul Harkins, and finally, William Westmoreland, had come of age as junior officers in World War II. To a man, they were deeply imbued with "victory disease" that blinded them to the extraordinary political and organizational strengths of their Vietnamese adversaries. Under no circumstances could they imagine how a largely guerrilla army with no air force or tanks could possibly defeat the ARVN, let alone the most technologically advanced army on the face of the planet.