Luring the Enemy

I grew up while the War in Vietnam was continuously going on (at least as far as direct American combat was concerned) from when I was eight years old until I was sixteen. The picture that I had of war then was one based on the conventional model of gaining geographical territory and pushing the enemy back into a smaller and less defensible position. I believed that in Vietnam, our armed forces were doing just this: gradually pushing the enemy back into North Vietnam. And I think that the people across the U.S. believed pretty much the same thing. We just had to be patient, and supporting the troops meant supporting the war. This is why the Tet Offensive in early 1968 had such a stunning effect on people’s attitudes about the war: the enemy was in our midst (in South Vietnam, that is) everywhere, especially in “territory” that was supposedly liberated from them. It wasn’t until after the war that I became more aware of its reality and our strategies. For example, I saw a map of South Vietnam that showed, according to our military’s own assessment of which side controlled the territory there as of late 1967, after U.S. forces had been fighting for more than two years. It showed almost the entire territory controlled by the Viet Cong/North Vietnamese, while only cities and their immediate surrounding were under South Vietnamese authority. But the most interesting thing I learned was how American foot soldiers would be transported deep into known enemy-held land by helicopter, deliberately to expose them to the enemy, draw their fire, and reveal their locations for air assaults. It’s no wonder that surviving Vietnam veterans had such problems with flashbacks and coping with civilian life after the war. The movie Platoon showed this (in my opinion) horrible and cynical tactic that the military leadership used to deliberately put our fine young soldiers in harm’s way. Apparently, our strategy was to win the war by killing all of the enemy. What other purpose would this have served?

But the strategy of drawing the enemy’s fire is not limited to warfare. I believe that there are situations in our civilian lives where this occurs as well. For example, there may be an executive in a corporation who fears that there are some ambitious underlings who may be try someday to replace or jump over him in the company’s hierarchy. It may well be in his interest to send a “dummy” policy change down the authority chain, just to track which employees take it up with fanatical, ambitious zeal. And once those overaggressive subordinates are identified, they can be dealt with one by one. I saw a perverted version of this tactic in the movie The Killing Fields (about the Cambodian holocaust of the 1970s) when a Khmer Rouge reeducation camp leader suddenly announced to the assembly that the nation was in need of trained doctors and professionals. A couple of people in the crowd decided that their time had come for “advancement” and rose up to identify themselves. They were guided away to applause. Later, they were ignominiously executed as enemies of the people (which was the whole idea behind the announcement in the first place). The game of chess is another example of “drawing fire”, when one player appears to leave one of his pieces exposed, but actually is luring the other player to move a piece in order to clear the way for a major attack.

Drawing the enemy’s fire is an example of misdirection. The enemy forces in Vietnam, when they acted according to the U.S. strategy, mistook the American ground actions as the main thrust, thus revealing their positions. The same type of thing applies in the corporate, Cambodian, and chess examples. Subterfuge and intrigue often run rampant in large organizations and situations where power is the big prize. It’s tough to go through life with the feeling that we are just pawns in someone else’s power struggle. But if we can identify what’s going on, then we can least be empowered not to fall into traps such as “luring the enemy”.