On September 23, 1968, in the coastal province of Binh Thuan, a single American battalion was quietly doing the kind of work that was supposed to win the war and almost never got any credit. This was Operation McLain. McLain was a security and pacification operation run by the 3rd Battalion, 506th Infantry of the 101st Airborne, working alongside the South Vietnamese 44th Regiment around the town of Phan Thiet. It ran for over a year. The whole point was not big dramatic battles, it was rebuilding rural security after the Tet Offensive had wrecked it, when the government had pulled back into the towns and left the countryside to the Viet Cong. The interesting thing about McLain is that it was a preview of Vietnamization, the whole strategy of handing the war back to the South Vietnamese. The Americans deliberately worked in the background, training a local reconnaissance squad, running combined patrols, and pushing the South Vietnamese to go on the offensive instead of sitting still. When a new, competent South Vietnamese colonel named Nguyen Ba Thinh took over the 44th Regiment and got aggressive, it actually started working. In July his troops, backed by American companies and gunships, drove the Viet Cong out of a bunker complex in a two day fight. By the time McLain wrapped at the end of January 1969, the tally was over a thousand enemy dead against sixty nine Americans killed. It was not a glamorous operation and you have never heard of it, but it was arguably closer to the actual formula for success in that war than any of the big sweeps. Get the locals to fight for their own villages, and stay long enough for it to stick.