Combat Operations

"Stemming the Tide" chronicles a critical chapter in the Vietnam War, the first eighteen months of combat by the U.S. Army's ground forces. When American ground troops entered the theater in March 1965, Communist forces were on the verge of military victory. Reversing the tide, the Army's brigades and divisions swept out of their bridgeheads into dangerous enemy base areas, blunted the Communist offensive, and shifted to a series of high-tempo operations to keep the enemy off balance until more U.S. fighting units arrived in late 1966. Combat was grueling. The enemy could be anywhere and everywhere, and was often indistinguishable from the rural population. Battles seemed to flow without order or logic over paddies and hilltops, and victory was hard to measure when villages, once taken, were rarely held. Little by little, however, improvements in communications and intelligence, the helicopter's capacity to extend the battlefield, and the enormous firepower available to commanders crystallized into an attrition and area-denial approach to the fighting which brought an increasing measure of security to key towns and installations. If the war was far from over when the period covered by this volume came to a close, commanders nevertheless believed that the ingredients for ultimate victory were present, chief among them the courage and perseverance of the American soldier in a ferocious war and the inventiveness of the U.S. Army in harnessing the latest in technology to project expeditionary force into a distant theater.