Advisory· Vietnam War
USMC Marine Advisory Unit (MAU)
The Marine advisory effort in Vietnam was the long, low-profile work of United States Marine officers and noncommissioned officers attached as advisors to the Vietnamese Marine Corps and to the broader American assistance command.
Spanning the years before large American ground units arrived, these advisors trained, mentored, and accompanied their Vietnamese counterparts, helping to build a fighting force from the ground up and sharing the dangers of operations in the field. It was a small commitment in numbers but an important one, embedding Marines within the Vietnamese military and giving the Corps a continuous presence in the country throughout the advisory and combat-assistance era. The advisory unit represented the patient, institutional side of the American involvement, the building of allied capacity, that ran alongside and beneath the more visible deployments. It carried the Marine relationship with the Vietnamese Marines through the formative period that preceded full-scale American intervention.
Record no. 663