Vietnam War: Operation Dewey Canyon

By Marc Bernstein | Vietnam  | 4 comments  |  Print This Post  |  Email This Post

But not everyone saw Dewey Canyon in such a favorable light. The incursion into Laos was reported in the New York Times in early March 1969, with a story that noted, “Operation Dewey Canyon seems to indicate that allied commanders operating along borders may dip across lines to secure their flanks.”

Thrown onto the defensive by reporters at a Vietnam news conference, Secretary of Defense Melvin R. Laird said of Dewey Canyon, “I would not confirm that they were there now but I would certainly say that there have been operations in which it has been necessary in order to protect American fighting forces that—that border being a very indefinite border—it may have been transgressed by American forces in carrying out this responsibility.”

Ambassador Sullivan apologized to the Laotian prime minister for the incident. Responding to questions during 1973 Congressional hearings, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Thomas H. Moorer testified, “This was the first and only time where United States ground combat forces went into Laos.”

And, in an early 1971 forum sponsored by the group Vietnam Veterans Against the War, Gordon Stewart, who had been a forward artillery observer with Company H, 2/9 in Laos, spoke about his experience: “The whole company had set up a base camp on a hill. For the next three days it was pretty much hell. We ran through a lot of contact and lost a lot of men….The men became quite embittered during this operation. It became easy to kill Vietnamese. You were just animalistic….When moving through Laos, taking our dead and wounded, we took a lot of casualties.”

Stewart’s statments seem to contradict both official casualty figures and contemporaneous news reports, which indicated that contact with the enemy while inside Laos had been comparatively light. But in the final analysis, it can be said that the actions taken by the 9th Marines during Operation Dewey Canyon, while con­troversial, were acceptable. Viewed through the prism of a very controversial war, Dewey Canyon yielded considerably more positives than negatives.

Marc D. Bernstein is the author of Hurricane at Biak: MacArthur Against the Japanese, May-August 1944, and numerous articles on military and naval history. For additional reading, see: U.S. Marines in Vietnam: High Mobility and Standdown, 1969, by Charles R. Smith; and Semper Fi Vietnam, by Edward F. Murphy.

This article was written by Marc Bernstein and originally published in the August 2007 issue of Vietnam Magazine. For more great articles, subscribe to Vietnam magazine today!

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Tags: Historical Conflicts, Vietnam War

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