John Southard, Defend and Befriend: The U.S. Marine Corps and Combined Action Platoons in Vietnam . Lexington: Univ. Press of Kentucky, 2014. Pp. xvi, 207. ISBN 978-0-8131-4526-6.

When it comes to evaluating American strategy during the Vietnam War, the lure of asking “What if?” is overwhelming. What if, for example, the US Military Assistance Command, Vietnam (MACV) had pursued a strategy less focused on defeating enemy main force units and instead stressed dismantling insurgent forces entrenched inside South Vietnam? The question is especially intriguing in light of claims that the US Marines had in fact been pursuing a promising alternative strategy, only to be undermined by MACV’s conservative commander, Gen. William C. Westmoreland. Eschewing the general’s obsession with battle and body counts, the Marines were implementing a combined action program that involved maintaining a presence in South Vietnamese villages and developing bonds with local militias, while uprooting a stubborn insurgency. Replicated across Vietnam, these measures might have led to victory, at least according to proponents of counterfactual history. 1 In Defend and Befriend , John Southard (Georgia State Univ.) examines combined action platoons (CAPs), small Marine-led units that operated in the villages of South Vietnam’s northernmost provinces from 1965 to 1970. He offers an interpretation deeply at odds with the (in some quarters) popular image of US forces engaging in little more than “remorseless killing.” 2 He believes the Marines assigned to work closely with the Vietnamese were far better able to understand and adapt to their surroundings—in fact, “Marines and [medical] corpsmen actually grew fond of their villages and the people” (xiii). Southard’s story details the growth of young Marines’ cultural awareness within the limits of what could be achieved in a civil war that long preceded American intervention. Although his father served as a Marine in Vietnam, the author observes strict impartiality in questioning the counterfactual theory of an alternative strategy that might have won the war. Southard begins and ends by placing the CAP program in the context of senior military commanders’ plans to ensure and sustain a stable, independent, noncommunist South Vietnam. Unfortunately, his characterization of US military strategy is often facile and unsupported by relevant research. He relies too heavily on a select few secondary works that perpetuate the standard tropes of attrition and a search-and-destroy mentality—“American generals initiated an annihilation strategy” (5). He seems unacquainted with essential primary sources 3 that could have informed a more nuanced view of MACV planners’ comprehensive strategy for countering both political and military threats in South Vietnam, while yet defending against attacks by the North. Southard is right, however, to emphasize the nearly intractable problems Marine commanders faced in trying to connect local villagers with their central government in Saigon. Arriving in the spring of 1965, the III Marine Amphibious Force (MAF) had established enclaves, first to secure air bases, before addressing population security. Southard debunks the common notion that the Marines benefited from lessons learned in small wars before World War II. In fact, senior Marine leaders “deemed counterinsurgency unrealistic,” and even President John F. Kennedy’s “bid to spread the importance of counterinsurgency across all services fell mostly on deaf ears in the Corps” (15). Instead of systematically confronting the National Liberation Front (NLF) threat, US forces resorted to inconsistent, ad hoc efforts to protect the population from a committed insurgency. Southard highlights the obstacles confronting Marine commanders in the early