Worried that the northern provinces might fall to a North Vietnamese invasion, Westmoreland extended his operational control over the region by establishing a MACV forward headquarters at Phu Bai, just south of Hue. Troops in the area were under the command of Marine Lt. Gen. Robert E. Cushman of III Marine Amphibious Force (MAF). Westmoreland, however, ordered Deputy MACV Commander General Abrams to assume control over all forces in the area and conduct the fight for the northern provinces.

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It was General Kerwin who suggested establishing the MACV forward headquarters. ‘It was always a question of accountability,’ he said, recalling discussions of that move. ‘This was a big step. If we were going to coordinate all of these people up there, somebody had to do it, and Abe had the stature to do it. We had Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines and everybody up there, [but] we didn’t seem to be making much headway, if any. The question was, who’s coordinating all of it, who’s running that thing up there? It’s an eyesore, it’s left over, the rest of the place is pretty quiet. We’ve won that battle. So we talked about it and I said, ‘Well, we’ve got to establish a headquarters up there and make sure things get under control.’ Westy said, ‘Abe, how about you?’ Abe said, ‘Sure.’

‘Abe was a real team player. He established a headquarters up there. Meanwhile, it was my job to make him a staff. So I gave him my J3 [joint operations officer] and some staff. Some of them he personally asked for.’

On occasion, General Kerwin became personally involved in the joint operations. ‘One day,’ he recalled, ‘there was a squabble going on up in the north about controlling the TACAIR [tactical air support]. You had the Army with their helicopters. You had the Navy and Marines. It was a hell of a problem with the coordination of the air campaign up there. So we had a meeting. Westy was there, Abe was there, and a couple of people from the embassy, as usual. Abe said, ‘Let’s send Dutch Kerwin up there.’ Abe had read this book [General Lucian Truscott's Command Missions] and saw my name in there and what I had done in the middle of the night [at the Battle of Anzio during World War II], changing artillery plans for the division commanders.’

Abrams apparently had assumed that if Kerwin could straighten out the artillery firing at the Anzio beachhead as a lieutenant colonel, he could make sense out of the air coordination in Vietnam as a two-star general. ‘I called up the Marines and the Army and everybody else and I said I wanted a meeting,’ recalled Kerwin. ‘They assembled this huge crowd in a great big general purpose tent. They must have had 150 or 200 people there. I started out by saying, ‘You can’t meet with this many people.’ At the end of that meeting — which lasted all day and part of the night — we hadn’t gotten anywhere.

‘I came back to the headquarters and told Abe that it would require people who would settle down and stop fighting over prerogatives and things of that type. So I asked him to send three people down — Army, Air Force and Marines — one each, three people. They came down to the headquarters.

‘Finally, after much debate, we came up with a set of rules about who was going to do what. It turned out pretty well, but I must admit that it could have been much better if we’d stopped working on everybody’s prerogatives.’

As U.S. and South Vietnamese troops pushed back the enemy in the north, the MACV staff turned their thinking to future operations, including thinking about the unthinkable — the use of nuclear weapons. Kerwin, who had considerable experience in working with nuclear weapons, assembled a small planning team to consider the potential for employing tactical nuclear weapons against North Vietnam in the event the enemy attempted to repeat the Tet maneuver.

‘The idea was,’ Kerwin recalled, ‘that, suppose we did get authority. What would we do? It was shortly after Tet. We thought this was a good time to see what we could plan at a place called Vinh, on the coast. I got about four guys out of the staff, two of them Air Force — nuclear business was big in the Air Force — one Army, and one Marine.’

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