Declassified per Executive Order 13526, Section 3.3
NND Project Number: NND 63316. By: NWD Date: 2011
TOP SECRET – Sensitive
…any of the above locations have good areas for training of Vietnamese forces, if this were to be a mission of the U.S. forces.
In the available papers, no one at this time talked about using American units to directly fight the Viet Cong. Rather it was mainly in terms of relieving Vietnamese units to undertake offensive action. We can only guess what people were really thinking. As the training-the-Vietnamese rationale seems essentially a device for getting Diem to accept the units, the non-combatant role for U.S. troops may have been (and probably was in the minds of at least some of the planners) mainly a device for calming those members of the Administration who were reluctant to involve American units in fighting the Viet Cong. Certainly in hindsight, it seems most unrealistic to suppose that American combat units could have been stationed in a center of Viet Cong activity (a number of papers postulate the insurgents were attempting to establish a "liberated area" in the high plateau, which was the principal locale discussed) without themselves becoming involved in the fighting.
Lansdale concluded his memo by reminding Gilpatric that Diem was sending Thuan ("Secretary of Security, Defense, Interior, etc.") to Washington to deliver his letter on Vietnam's "definitive military needs." Lansdale recommended that Gilpatric take up the question of whether Diem would accept U.S. troops with Thuan. "With concrete information, you will then have a firm position for further decisions."
But apparently someone did not want to wait for Thuan. For on May 27, Nolting reported that he had brought up the question of what Diem meant in his conversation with Johnson directly with Diem, and that Diem did not then want U.S. combat units "for this or any other reason." 10/
Nevertheless, on June 9, Diem signed the letter to Kennedy that, as quoted above, asked for:
…selected elements of the American Armed Forces to establish training centers for the Vietnamese Armed Forces, …
a move which Diem stated:
…would serve the dual purpose of providing an expression of the United States' determination to halt the tide of communist aggression and of preparing our forces in the minimum of time. 11/
This certainly sounded very much like the recommendation of the Task Force draft, or McGarr's later expanded version of that proposal; particularly since Diem explicitly stated that he had McGarr's advice in
