VN: Were the villagers classified as pro-VC?

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Bolté: I think most of the villagers in Quang Tin province were just indifferent to the politics of the war around them. They merely wanted to be left alone. The VC would enter their villages at night to steal their food and proselyte them. Once you left the flatlands and headed west toward the mountains, there were very few villages there. The isolated district town I spoke of earlier had been cut off for four years was finally accessible when we ran an operation to open the road. As I said earlier, the adviser there was a Special Forces captain. We had worked well together when I was the senior adviser until, sadly, he was killed when the town was attacked one night. The other remote outpost district southwest of Tam Ky would get assaulted periodically. It was one of these political situations in which we didn’t want to concede another district.

VN: What are your feelings when you reflect on Vietnam today?

Bolté: I don’t think we fought the war well; it just was not managed properly, and most of our people did not understand it. I think what we did in the Korean War was much better. That is, the Korean army was put under direct command of U.S. officers, and they were ordered what to do. If we had done this with the South Vietnamese, showed them how to organize and run an army, it might have made a big difference. I’m sure people would have hollered and screamed for a couple of years, but in the long run, it would have been done correctly. I really believe that someday history will show that Vietnam was a noble gesture on the part of the United States. We did not have any territorial ambitions. We went to south Vietnam to help the government fight Communism, although we didn’t help them as well as we should have.

Al Hemingway is a former senior editor of Vietnam Magazine. For further reading, see: Vietnam At War: The History 1946-1975, by Philip B. Davidson; The United States in the Vietnam War, by Don Lawson; and The American Experience in Vietnam, by Clark Dougan and Stephan Weiss.

This article was originally published in the February 1994 issue of Vietnam Magazine. For more great articles be sure to subscribe to Vietnam Magazine today.

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