CHAPTER III

The System Matures

Early in 1965 a growing number of Viet Cong attacks on U.S. personnel in South Vietnam prompted President Johnson to order all American dependents out of that country. On 22 February General Westmoreland asked for American combat ground forces to defend allied bases against Viet Cong attacks, and on 25 February Secretary of State Dean Rusk approved. On 8 March the first of these forces, a battalion landing team of the 9th Marine Expeditionary Brigade, debarked on the beaches at Da Nang. U.S. officials announced that the new troops would make several key bases more secure, thereby freeing the South Vietnamese forces to press the war more vigorously. But the Viet Cong continued their terrorist campaign. On 30 March they detonated a powerful bomb outside the hotel housing the U.S. Embassy in Saigon. The explosion killed twenty-one people, including two Americans, and wounded two hundred others, including fifty-two Americans.

After a lull in the fighting while the Viet Cong waited out the dry season, which favored the superior mobility of the ARVN forces, the countryside erupted in May. A Viet Cong regiment attacked Song Be, the capital of Phuoc Long province in northern III Corps Zone. Soon a more serious blow came when the rebels ambushed an ARVN battalion and destroyed the column sent to its aid. In June the enemy again dealt the ARVN forces a heavy blow at Dong Xoai, ninety-six kilometers northeast of Saigon. June also brought the collapse of the current South Vietnamese governing coalition, and the new rulers, Generals Nguyen Van Thieu and Nguyen Cao Ky, seemed to have little chance of ending the recent years of political instability. In July the fighting shifted to the Central Highlands of II Corps Zone, where the South Vietnamese suffered a series of defeats.

This military and political deterioration in 1965 produced a rapid increase in U.S. aid to South Vietnam. Within a few months of their arrival in March, the first U.S. combat units in South Vietnam began search-and-destroy operations against the Viet Cong near U.S. bases. By the end of the year evidence of increased North Vietnamese infiltration of the South helped General Westmoreland to obtain substantial reinforcements of U.S. combat troops. A U.S. troop buildup continued steadily until March 1968 as the United States ex-