Hearts and Minds
Viet Nam
Lt. Col. Peter Dewey may have been killed because he spoke French. His team of seven men from the Office of Strategic Services arrived in Viet Nam on August 31, 1946, two days before Japan formally surrendered to end WWII. His job was to search for missing American pilots and to report on the post-war situation in Cochin China, as Viet Nam was then called.
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The job of freeing Allied prisoners from Japanese captivity in Viet Nam was split between the French in the north and the British in the south. On the day Japan surrendered, Ho Chi Minh declared the independence of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam in Hanoi. The French called on the British for help, and the British sent north 1,400 French soldiers just released from Japanese captivity.
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Dewey was convinced that the British and French were wrong to try and resume ruling as colonial powers and he was blunt in saying so. The British ordered him out of the country, and in his last report, he sent this prophetic message: “Cochinchina (South Vietnam) is burning; the French and British are finished here, and we ought to clear out of Southeast Asia.”
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As darkness fell on Sept. 26, he headed for the airport. At the city’s outskirts, his jeep ran into a Viet Minh roadblock. As a neutral, Dewey assumed he would be allowed to proceed and called out his identity in French (which was much more likely to be understood then than English). But a machine-gun opened fired and Dewey was hit in the head. He thus became the first of almost 59,000 Americans killed during the next three decades of war in Viet Nam.
The United States did not become seriously involved until the early 1960s. By then, Avalon Hill had begun publishing a wide array of wargames including Waterloo, 1914, D-Day, and Stalingrad. Other publishers jumped in with offerings of their own, most using hexagonal grid maps and almost all of them focused on historical battles and wars, from the Napoleonic era through WWII. The first game on war in Viet Nam did not appear until 1965, 20 years after Dewey’s death.
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Game designer Phil Orbanes was still a high-school student when he designed and published Viet Nam. It was a remarkably prescient game about the complex nature of that war. Combat strength matters, but so do “hearts and minds” – popular support on both sides, within Viet Nam and around the world. Terror attacks by the Viet Cong can be met with psychological warfare from the Government.
Within each province, players have a wide range of combat options. The government forces can attack or defend using conventional or airborne troops. They can opt for a cautious advance or dug-in defense. And they also can mount “search and kill” operations and ambushes. The insurgent players has other options, including human wave or sneak attacks and hidden or trap defenses as well as more conventional tactics. Combat resolution is not by odds, but by the interaction of attacker and defender tactics cards.
The Viet Nam war was still in its early stages and already controversial. Because of that, Orbanes could not find a publisher and instead set up his own company. In Orbanes' own words, here is the amazing story behind the game.
Wisdom from the mouth of babes
How a high-school game designer modelled the Viet Nam War in 1965
The Viet Nam game was created a few months prior to my high school graduation, in the early spring of 1965.
By then I’d become a fan of Avalon Hill games and had a running correspondence with Avalon Hill vice-president Tom Shaw, who had just launched The General magazine. I had been inventing games since I was eight, so I naturally turned to wargames that I could submit to Shaw. I sent him two titles: The Battle of the North Atlantic and Supremacy. Shaw turned down the first, explaining that naval games hadn’t sold well enough, and the second (as it turned out) because he and a team were working on Blitzkrieg. Supremacy would have rivaled it. I then remember asking Shaw if Avalon Hill planned to introduce a game based on the current war in Viet Nam. In essence he replied, “too controversial and there are no front lines.”
Something instinctive stirred inside of me. If the world’s top wargame company wasn’t going to publish a game about the war making headlines every day, why not do so myself?
Since this war had no front lines, the standard hexagonal grid system was a handicap. I tossed it aside and developed a game system based on the provinces of South Viet Nam and their key bases. Realizing that the scope of the war went beyond troops on the ground, I added a means of conducting psychological warfare and defense. I also realized that world opinion would contribute to the war’s eventual outcome. I developed a track that visually recorded victory points by each side. In one of my more prophetic decisions, I made it tougher and tougher for the Government Forces player to gain the final few spaces needed to win.
Years later, in college, I was interviewed and asked how I, “an uninformed high school student” could know this would prove so accurate. Answer: having played many wargames, and having studied prior insurgency wars, I innocently extracted it.
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I started Gamescience Corporation to market Viet Nam. It went through three editions (the two shown above, plus a tube version). I had no financial means, yet somehow got it published and earned enough help fund my college years. I eventually published Supremacy under the title Confrontation and also published Lou Zocchi’s Battle of Britain game. I was a college junior by then and attended a trade show. As fate would have it, a New York model kit company (Renwal Products) wanted to get into the hobby game business. I sold out and began my career in the games industry following graduation in 1969.
Phil Orbanes
May 2020
The first game about tactical combat in Viet Nam came out years later, in 1971. Grunt, subtitled “Company Commander in Viet-Nam”, appeared in Strategy & Tactics magazine #26, and may have been the first commercial wargame played out at the squad level.
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Grunt tried to simulate the frustrating task facing American forces as they patrolled for elusive Viet Cong and North Vietnamese Army troops. Its rules covered aspects such as airstrikes, helicopter medical evacuation, “body count” victory points, ambushes and booby traps. It included a wide variety of scenarios in various types of terrain.
The map was in black and white, and the counters black on yellow for the US and yellow on black for the Communist forces. The cover featured the Huey Hu-1B helicopters that became the symbol of airmobile warfare in Viet Nam. These “slicks”, or unarmed transport helicopters, carried troops to and from battle zones, escorted by helicopter gunships.
Year of the Rat was actually published in the same year as the events it portrayed. It appeared in Strategy & Tactics #35 and modelled the 1972 North Vietnamese spring offensive, which began on March 30. The map covers all of South Viet Nam and its surrounding areas, and counters are mostly at the divisional level. The production values were one step up, with the map using light blue, brown and dark grey-green to highlight various provinces and border zones.
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The game set-up and rules do a good job of modelling the forces in play at the time. As a result of President Richard Nixon’s Vietnamization policy, there were very few American ground troops left in Viet Nam by this time. The game has just 3 US units on the map, and they are largely restricted to defending bases. The North Vietnamese Army (NVA) is powerful, and the Army of the Republic of Viet Nam (ARVN) units widely scattered at the start. Only American airpower gives them a chance at survival – and that mostly pins units in place rather than destroying them.
Battle for Hue came out a year later, and takes the combat back to the tactical level and back to the Tet Offensive of 1968. It portrays the vicious fight for the medieval city of Hue in northern South Viet Nam, involving U.S. Marines and ARVN units on one side and both NVA and Viet Cong for the communists. Moats and walls may be old-fashioned, but still added to the mayhem of close-quarters fighting. The rules specify that the government player cannot shoot at the ironically named Palace of Peace in the center of town, requiring that it be cleared through hand-to-hand combat. The all-or-nothing combat system tends to add to the body counts on both sides.
Many more games eventually would look back on the Viet Nam decades and reflect on its successes or failures. But the last two to be published during the war years were Search and Destroy and Marine!
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The first was a heavily re-worked Grunt, again focusing on tactical combat in the region. It was published as Americans and allies clambered onto helicopters from the embassy roof in 1975.
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Published in Jagdpanther magazine, Marine! focuses on squad-level combat across a series of scenarios. The map is a plain dark brown hex grid on light brown paper, and the counters are yellow-on-green for the Americans and green-on-yellow for the VC/NVA player.
The game includes rules for airstrikes, naval bombardment, amphibious landing, off-board artillery, on-board rockets, mortars and machine guns, anti-aircraft units, helicopter transports and gunships, tanks, half-tracks, and a range of infantry units from Special Forces and Marines to Vietnamese security teams and civilians. One of the scenarios is a raid to rescue prisoners of war (represented by civilian counters).
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A major feature of the Viet Nam war was the extent of anti-war protest in the United States. The first game about this aspect of the war had its roots in a series of protests at Columbia University in 1968. These were triggered after a member of the Students for a Democratic Society discovered documents in the Low Library suggesting that the university was working on weapons research with the Department of Defense. This touched off a year-long anti-war campaign on campus. It ended in April 1968 with the suspension of six student activists.
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A year later, the Columbia Daily Spectator, the university’s student paper, published a memorial of the protests in the form of a game. The designer was Jim Dunnigan, then a 25-year-old student at the university.
Dunnigan was already making a name for himself as a wargame designer. He had designed the WWI naval game Jutland and WWI ground game 1914 for Avalon Hill and was working on others, but took some time to develop this one for the student newspaper. Up Against the Wall, Motherfucker! was published in the March 11, 1969 edition of the Connection, a supplement to the Daily Spectator.
Despite its outrageous name and tongue-in-cheek rules, Dunnigan designed it as a serious simulation of social conflict.
One player runs the Administration, while the other represents the Radicals. The two sides struggle for influence across a range of 11 social subgroups, from the Trustees and Tenured Faculty to various student categories and the surrounding Harlem Community.
Each group has a track leading from the Low Library at the center of the board toward other buildings or destinations.
The Administration player tries to move each group towards the middle; the Radicals in the opposite direction.
The tracks have varying numbers of spaces and a victory point value on each space that is generally lowest in the middle and higher towards each end.
Each turn, players get a number of influence points that they can place on one or more tracks. The Radicals get RADs for “Ratio of Activism Determinants” while the Administration gets LAWs for “Level of Administrative Will”.
On turn 1, the Radicals get 10 RADS, a number that decreases as the game goes on. The Administration gets only 5 LAWs on the first turn, growing to 16 by Turn 12. The rules say players can use anything they want to represent these points, but suggest marijuana seeds for RADs and Seconal capsules for LAWs.
On each turn, the Radicals play first, followed by the Administration. Players on their turn distribute their RADs or LAWs as they wish among the influence group tracks. If this results in any tracks containing both RADs and LAWs, the player whose turn it is “attacks” his opponent.
The battle on each track is resolved on the University Conflict Outcome Matrix, which works like a wargame’s standard combat results table.
Depending on the roll of a die and the ratio of attackers to defenders, either the attacker or defender may have all their pieces on that track eliminated. In some cases the weaker player loses everything and the other player removes the same number. After resolving the conflict, the surviving player may move that track’s marker one space toward the winning side.
There is a deck of 24 Contingency Cards that provide an advantage or inflict a penalty on one of the players. Each player draws a card at the start of his turn, and may play it or keep it until choosing to use it (or not). At the beginning of each turn, each player also has the option of going for broke by yelling “Up Against the Wall, Motherfucker!” In this case, all of both sides’ pieces on the board decide the odds, and a single roll is made to determine the results. In most cases, one side or the other will be left with nothing on the board (and the markers on all 11 tracks may move accordingly).
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After 12 turns, players look at where the influence marker stands for each group. They collect victory points for each group on their side of the neutral boundary, with the value depending on the group and on how far toward their end the track’s marker lies. The player with the highest total number of victory points wins.
Dunnigan took a second crack at an anti-war protest game a year later. Chicago! Chicago! was included in Strategy & Tactics # 21. This was a game about the clashes between protesters and police surrounding the 1968 Democratic presidential nominating convention in Chicago. As Dunnigan put it in his designer’s notes: “Probably the most significant ‘battle’ fought by Americans in 1968 took place in the streets of Chicago between 25 and 29 August. This was conflict, politics waged with more than verbal violence as Clauswitz would put it….”
“The ‘Battle of Chicago’ could not have happened had not both sides been what they were. Had the Chicago police been more restrained and the Chicago city government less intent on ‘law and order’, the ‘victory’ of the demonstrators would have been far less decisive than it was. Like Hannibal at Cannae and Hindenberg at Tannenberg, the losers contributed greatly to their own defeat.”
This point was reinforced by some “inflammatory rhetoric” included in the rules. Most notable is a quote from Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley: “The policeman isn’t there to create disorder. He’s there to preserve disorder.”
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Dunnigan noted that while no one died, the media coverage and especially the televised “Police Riot” of August 28, had a profound impact on American and world history. The Democratic nominating convention was split between those who wanted to continue the Viet Nam war and those who wanted America to get out.
The result of the demonstrations deeply embarrassed the Democratic Party as a whole and may have cost it the election.
“Many of the world’s most decisive ‘conflicts’ have been ‘fought’ without weapons. Just because ‘shoot ‘em up’ type battles are more visible does not mean that they are more important,” Dunnigan concluded. “If we can obtain a greater understanding of the less obvious conflicts which shape our lives, we may be able to avoid the more violent ones.”
Elsewhere in the world, many people of the Cold War era found themselves up against forces far more powerful than city police and unable to avoid violence. In the ever-troubled Middle East, for instance, even ordinary farmers faced real life or death decisions.
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