Coincidence or not?
Semper Fi
Sometimes it worked that way for the Army too, depending on the quality of both their leadership and ours. When in the early days of the *advisor stage* of the war, one Special Forces A team was directed to instruct their counterparts in the basics of psychological warfare and emphasize that approach. So one team sergeant went hunting saved up a half dozen or so VC bodies of those NOT from the local area, and buried them standing up on one of the more densely travelled trails with just one of their arms sticking out of the ground with an advisory note reading *surrender or die.* Later, as North Vietnamese cadre were added to the local VC forces, the notes would read *Born in the north to die in the south.*
On one occasion, a local minor VC force leader who had repeatedly bribed his way out of South Vietnamese custody was picked up again by the same NCO who was really getting tired of meeting the same fella under the same conditions. And when he was told he'd better be nice because he could run into him again sometime, the NCO emptied a BAR into him from about 5 feet. The psychological effectiveness of that operation seemed to be aptly demonstrated to the ARVN strikers....
Sometimes the *other people* could be more or less reasonable; other times they'd get a fanatic or careerist in charge and the nastiness picked up. And after we started sending in company and battalion- sized line units in 1965, they probably made similar observations about some of our leadership.
-archy-/-