Iraq is not Vietnam

BAGHDAD-The faded blue-green skin of the Marine CH-46E helicopter settling down on a farm field on the edge of this capital city marked it as a machine from another era, another war-the Vietnam conflict.

A marine many years younger than the helicopter climbed out and headed for a cluster of buddies surrounded by much newer weapons of war: M-1 tanks and Marine light armored vehicles that go 70 miles an hour. And flying above this cluster of marines on the ground were near-new Marine F/A-18 fighter-bombers. The young marine walking away from his 1960s-era helicopter came armed and ready, however, to rebut the jokes from his comrades about landing in such an ancient war machine.

"Sure, it is the oldest pig in the fleet," read the business cards that the CH-46E pilot carries with him. They are printed up by his squadron mates at HMM-364, known as the Purple Foxes, based at Camp Pendleton, Calif. The cards honor what can only be described as an incontinent helicopter, known as it is for frequently leaking oil and hydraulic fluid. "And yes, it leaks a lot," the card adds, "but you ain't walking."

The fact that the squadron feels obliged to justify in writing the deployment of a machine from the Vietnam War to this Iraq fight dramatizes how different the two wars are. To a correspondent who covered both wars, the differences are striking.

Tactics and Terrain

In Vietnam, U.S. military leaders employed the frontal-assault ground tactics of World War II; they dropped more bombs on North and South Vietnam than the Allies had dropped on Germany and Japan during World War II, and they didn't hesitate to destroy bridges, factories, and other infrastructure to weaken the enemy. In fact, the pounding was so heavy, the Vietcong and North Vietnamese fighters learned that the best way to avoid being killed by U.S. bombs was to "hug the belt" of American troops-staying as close to U.S. units as possible without being seen. They thus avoided mass-on-mass encounters, which the U.S. usually could win, and instead employed hit-and-run guerrilla tactics based on speed, surprise, and withdrawal.

The American military in Vietnam conducted very few operations at night, giving the Vietcong and North Vietnamese virtually free rein to fight Americans and terrorize pro-Saigon civilians in the darkness. And the number of U.S. forces in Vietnam grew gradually, over several years, starting with handfuls of advisers and ending up with more than 500,000 troops by 1968.

Contrast that war to this new war against Iraq. The United States invaded Iraq with a full complement of ground troops, armor, artillery, bombers, and helicopter gunships, yet the force totals only about 235,000 troops in or near Iraq. The vast majority of them entered Iraq all at once, in one swift two-day or three-day dash. And this time, U.S. troops did not aim entirely to hold geography-they didn't fight battles over this hill or that hamlet, as the soldiers and marines did in Vietnam. In Iraq, the U.S. military goal is to defeat a regime and its centers of power, and troops have bypassed secondary targets. Coalition forces even avoided some cities entirely. And as they fought their way to Baghdad, the troops spared as many bridges and factories as they could, to enable Iraq to recover from the war quickly.

Just as important, this time U.S. forces owned the night. With night-vision goggles, and laser and Global Positioning System guidance for directing munitions, the Americans did most of their fighting in the dark. Marines moved artillery as often as three times a night, right behind the advancing infantry and armor. It is as if the U.S. military learned from legendary North Vietnamese Gen. Vo Nguyen Giap the value of surprise, maneuver, and withdrawal. Saddam's forces, in contrast, ventured south from Baghdad and planted themselves in relatively exposed areas where their positions and lines of communication were vulnerable to U.S. precision bombing.

Finally, terrain played its role. Vietnam's mushy rice paddies and thick jungles handicapped the heavy American forces, especially armor, and favored the lighter Vietcong and North Vietnamese forces. Only a few hardtop roads laced South Vietnam. Iraq's hard-packed desert sand, on the other hand, favored U.S. tanks and other armor-as did Saddam's six-lane highways, many of them built or rebuilt since the first Persian Gulf War. Captured Iraqi airfields also proved ideal for air-dropping fuel, enabling U.S. ground forces to hopscotch northward rather than waiting for supplies to be trucked to them from Kuwaiti ports.

Measures of Success

One of the problems of the Vietnam War was how to measure success. Was the goal to defeat North Vietnam completely? Well, not really. We never invaded the North. Was it to set up a government in South Vietnam that would be strong enough to stand on its own and fight off the North? Sort of. Or was it just to prevent more "dominoes" in Southeast Asia from falling to Communism? The answers were hard to find, because, back home, the goals were not clear at the outset.

So to record a partial measure of success, Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara required U.S. officers to report the number of enemy soldiers they killed. The numbers were tallied up to produce the notorious weekly body counts. Commanders complained that their men often got wounded making these body counts. And over time, the counts came to be regarded as inflated or just plain false. The Johnson administration also released periodic "hamlet evaluation surveys" to show the success of the United States military, and of civilian aid programs, in sweeping the Vietcong and North Vietnamese out of the South Vietnamese countryside, in an effort called "pacification." These reports, too, were often exaggerated.

In Iraq, the U.S. government is conducting no regular body counts of enemy killed. (Neither did we count dead enemy fighters in Afghanistan, or Kosovo, or the first Gulf War.) The Iraqi regime has not reported its military casualties in this war, nor did it in 1991. Even the numbers of American casualties are hard to come by for reporters in the field. Most reporters, even embedded ones, have not been near battlefield casualties, and the rules for embedding place many restrictions on interviewing troops wounded in battle. The Pentagon releases the names of those Americans killed as the families are notified, but there is no place on the Pentagon's Web site that tallies the numbers. The best sources for finding the total number of U.S. troops killed and wounded are media Web sites.

The bodies are in Iraq, but no one is counting them.