Declassified per Executive Order 13526, Section 3.3
NND Project Number: NND 63316. By: NWD Date: 2011
TOP SECRET – Sensitive
At the time of the Task Force reviewm it will be recalled, Defense recommended sending two 1600-man combat units to Vietnam to set up two training centers for the Vietnamese in the highlands. In later drafts of the Task Force report, this proposal was broadened to consider sending American troops for wider purposes, short of direct combat against the Viet Cong. But the proposal was downgraded to a subject for study and was no longer a definite recommendation.
Here is a summary of the items (on the issue of U.S. combat troops) in the record available to this study following Kennedy's decisions on the Task Force Report (May 11).
On May 12 Vice President Johnson discussed the question with Diem, as described in an earlier section. This seems to have resolved the issue (negatively) so far as Johnson was concerned, and possibly as far as President Kennedy was concerned. But if it did, the President's view was not very emphatically passed on to subordinate members of the Administration. For a week later, Lansdale sent a memo to Gilpatric noting that Diem did not want U.S. combat units as such, but that, he might accept these units if they had a mission of training South Vietnamese forces:
Ambassador Nolting [said] that President Diem would welcome as many U.S. military personnel as needed for training and advising Vietnamese forces. [MAAG Chief] General McGarr, who was also present at this discussion [between Johnson and Diem], reported that while President Diem would not want U.S. combat forces for the purpose of fighting Communists in South Vietnam, he would accept deployment of U.S. combat forces as trainers for the Vietnamese forces at any time. 8/
This language leaves it unclear whether McGarr was merely stating his opinion (which supported his own desire to bring in U.S. combat units), or reporting what he understood Diem to have said.
(About the same day of Lansdale's memo--May 18--the JCS had restated its recommendation of May 10 that combat troops should be sent to Vietnam; and McGarr, from Saigon, had recommended sending a 16,000 man force, or if Diem would not accept that, a 10,000 man force with the nominal mission of establishing training centers for the Vietnamese. The similar recommendation made in the Task Force drafts had suggested 3200 men for the force.) 9/
In any event, Lansdale's memo makes it quite clear that he (along with McGarr and the JCS) were primarily interested in getting U.S. combat units into Vietnam, with the training mission a possible device for getting Diem to accept them. After a discussion of JCS and CINCPAC planning and of alternative locations for the troops, Lansdale comments:
