by Tom Clancy
During a break one day, Zinni was standing out on the second-story balcony over the headquarters main entrance watching the traffic on the one-way street. A young man on a motor scooter was coming down the wrong way. The Vietnamese Marine sentry shouted for him to stop; but he just laughed and sped on. The sentry then aimed his rifle and shot him dead.
The incident shocked young Zinni, but gave him a quick insight into the Vietnamese Marines: They did not fool around.
THE ADVISERS
The Marine Advisory Unit traced its beginnings back to a U.S. Marine colonel named Victor J. Croizat. A fluent French speaker and World War Two veteran, Croizat had experience with the French forces in Algeria and in the Indochina War; served an initial tour in MACV as it formed after the Indochina War; and was directly involved in the forming of the Vietnamese Marines. He modeled the advisory effort to support the Vietnamese Marines after the French approach: Instead of American advisory “teams,” as was the usual American practice with Vietnamese units, there would be only two U.S. Marine advisers per infantry battalion, and specialty advisers for artillery, communications, medical, motor transport, and senior staff positions. The advisers completely immersed themselves in the units. They and the Vietnamese troops were essential parts of the same team; the Americans couldn’t isolate themselves. They wore Vietnamese Marine uniforms, ate their food, spoke their language, and shared their hardships. This forced total integration and dependence, and built mutual trust.
In 1967, there were thirty-five advisers total in the Marine Advisory Unit. The number would grow in later years as the VNMC grew toward division size.
Between two and three hundred U.S. Marines served in the Marine Advisory Unit during the war. Since they were generally among the top U.S. Marine officers, they were respected and valued by the Vietnamese (and called “covan,” a term of respect). Overall, the personal relationships between Americans and Vietnamese were superb, though now and again an adviser would suffer severe “culture shock” or experience a serious problem adjusting to the Vietnamese way of doing things and have to be moved from the unit.
The role of the adviser was not specifically defined. Zinni never received a briefing or written description of the duties he was to perform. He was expected to immerse himself in the job and figure out what he had to do.
This did not surprise him. It is the U.S. Marine way: You are given what you need and then the job is your responsibility; the assumption is that you can do it. Such an approach to life suited Zinni.
Though he didn’t receive much initial guidance, the specific military responsibilities of the advisers quickly became obvious to him: They coordinated all operational activities with U.S. units and with the support provided by U.S. units, such as airlift, logistics, and fire support. They controlled and directed all artillery, naval gunfire, and air support. Beyond this, each adviser contributed whatever else he could add, based on his own experience and the desires of the Vietnamese commanders.
VIETNAM IS a vastly diverse land. It has steep mountains, broad coastal plains, thick mangrove swamps, tangled jungles, and a vast flooded delta. Because the Vietnamese Marines moved all over the country, they had to adapt to a great variety of terrain, enemy, and operational characteristics that shaped the unique nature of the local conflict. The advisers saw it all.
Because they moved from unit to unit or could be called back to their headquarters at any time, they saw more of Vietnam than any other group of U.S. military personnel. (They were given blanket travel orders that authorized them to travel anywhere in Vietnam at any time.) As the junior adviser, Zinni moved from unit to unit all over the country wherever a hole had to be plugged, scrounging rides from all sorts of military and nonmilitary means of transportation.
Each area presented a unique set of challenges for conducting military operations and for surviving from day to day. As an example, unlike with U.S. units, the Vietnamese Marines had to come up with their own food. Where they couldn’t buy it, they had to catch it. Food was plentiful in the delta region, where fat white grubs could be cut out of the mangrove trees and large iguana-like lizards were easy delicacies to come by. In the jungle, food was more difficult to acquire unless you knew what to look for and were patient enough to forage or hunt for such delights as monkeys, snakes, bamboo shoots, or breadfruit. In the northern mountains, food could be scarce, especially in the dry season, and bitter greens, dried fish, and a little rice could be all you ate in a day.
There were two seasons in Vietnam: wet, and dry. Each was extreme. During monsoon season everything was drenched by afternoon deluges and the constant damp made it hard to dry out. In the dry season, the heat was intense and unrelenting, even at night. The killer heat made field operations difficult. For Americans like Zinni, it took a while to acclimatize and learn how to survive.
South Vietnam was divided for the war into four Corps Tactical Zones (CTZS), the Rung Sat Special Zone (RSSZ), and the Capital Military District (CMD).
During his tour of duty in 1967, Zinni experienced what amounted to five very different wars. He served with the Vietnamese Marines in the mangrove swamps and river complexes of the RSSZ; the water world of endless rice paddies, canals, and rivers of the Mekong Delta (IV CTZ); the dense, steamy jungles near the Cambodian border (III CTZ); the broad coastal plain and high mountains of the central region (II CTZ); and the complex of villages and colonial plantations that surrounded Saigon (CMD).
In his second tour of duty in 1970, he completed the circuit by serving in the northernmost zone (I CTZ—better known as I Corps).9
The enemy in each of these regions could range from first-rate North Vietnamese Army (NVA) regulars to competent mainline, or full-time, Vietcong units, to guerrilla forces of varying fighting skill. They cleverly adapted their style of fighting to the environment and local conditions to add to the uniqueness of operating in each area. The style of VNMC operations differed greatly, depending on the type units assigned to the region and their own adaptations to the area.
Zinni learned very quickly that this was a war without consistency. There was no way to reliably characterize it. In the First World War or the Korean War, there had been battle lines and fronts—one side here, the other side there. In Castro’s revolution, the war had been won by guerrillas and insurgents, embedded in the people; they could be anywhere. In Vietnam, many different kinds of wars were fought.
Tony Zinni’s travels allowed him to experience most of them. The experience affected him deeply.
He has thoughts on the subject:
Back in the United States, those who considered themselves knowledgeable about the war tended to call it an insurgency, with all the usual props and trappings: clandestine rather than overt operations, political actions to win hearts and minds, acts of terror and intimidation, guerrillas—workers or farmers by day, fighters by night—no fixed battle lines, skirmishes and raids rather than pitched battles.
In Vietnam, there were times when we ran into guerrilla-type actions. But there were also times when we’d find ourselves in pitched battles with regular North Vietnamese forces. In fact, in the northern parts of South Vietnam, that was more often the case than not. In the south, the reverse was more usually the case. There we were more likely to encounter guerrilla action; but even there we ran up against different kinds of war. At times, we would be dealing with farmer by day, guerrilla by night, a very different kind of situation than dealing with mainline VC units, who were full-time guerrillas. But these were very different, again, from NVA soldiers, as was the nature of the combat with them.
And then to add to the complications, each environment had its own special requirements. If you were in the Mekong Delta in the Rung Sat Special Zone, you had a much different style of fighting than you might encounter patrolling in the jungle or in the large unit engagements we had in the north, along the coast, or on the open plains. And combat was different again up in the mountains.
The geography, the nature of the enemy, the style of
fighting, and even the nature of some of the units all added their own particular character to what we might encounter. All tended to create different types of wars, if you will, or a different type of the same war.
Because I experienced so many different aspects of the war, I came back with a real understanding that this war was multifaceted; everything was all over the place. There was no clear and simple way to look at it. But most Americans who served in Vietnam had perhaps a year tour and saw only one geographical area. For them it was like the blind man and the elephant. The war they saw was real, but partial.
I remember talking to Marine friends who might have been up north in I Corps, where most Marines fought. They all thought their vision of the war was the true war. Yet I had to think, “Jeez, you saw only a small part of it.” I’d have the same experience talking with an army officer who’d served in the Mekong Delta or the Parrot’s Beak. Each man’s definition of the war would turn out to be completely different.
So my experience was almost unique. I didn’t see every possible way the war was fought, but I saw most of it.
What all this teaches is not how to deal with every possible situation. Fighting in delta swamps teaches you how to fight in delta swamps. Fighting in triple-canopy rain forest teaches you how to fight in triple-canopy rain forests. Fighting in mountains teaches you how to fight in mountains. Fighting in flat, coastal country where there are lots of rice paddies and villages teaches you how to do that. And you learn a lot simply shooting and getting shot at a lot, and working closely with others on a combat team. But there isn’t a great deal of carryover from any of that one to the other. The biggest lesson, in fact, is learning how to be open to surprising new experiences and then turning that openness into resourceful and creative ways of dealing with the challenges you face.
I was to rediscover these truths later in life when I began to be engaged in peacekeeping, humanitarian operations. After I’d gone through my first, I thought I’d learned everything there was to know about them. “These lessons apply everywhere,” I told myself.
But on the second one, it hit me that few of these lessons actually apply anywhere else. The previous experience helped, sure; it put me in the right frame of mind; but it didn’t tell me how to solve particular problems.
You have to be open to each new and very different reality. It’s wrong to use models and to think stereotypically about problems and issues.
Tony Zinni had come a long, long way from Philadelphia. He was to travel much farther.
THE FOREST OF DEATH
After Zinni completed his orientations in Saigon, Colonel Nels Andersen, the commanding officer of the advisory unit, decided that he should not wait for a hole to open up in one of the units, but immediately go out into the field to learn the ropes with experienced advisers. It was to be Zinni’s first taste of combat.
He was ordered to report to the Vietnamese Marines 4th Battalion, then conducting riverine operations in the Rung Sat Special Zone.
Rung Sat was a four-hundred-square-mile, strategically vital area southeast of Saigon—massive mangrove swamps and labyrinthine tangles of waterways. The shipping channels out of the South China Sea up to Saigon came through the Rung Sat Zone; and the Vietcong tried to interdict the shipping. They would pick people off the decks with snipers, shoot rockets or recoilless rifles at the ships, or mine the waterways—often attaching mines to ropes stretched from bank to bank. They kept it slack to let acceptable traffic pass and pulled the mines up when they spotted a target they wanted to strike.
Operating in the Rung Sat was tremendously difficult, with its tangled swamps and water levels at high tide so elevated that everything, including the villages, was under water. No place down there was dry all the time.
ADVISERS HAD “blanket” travel orders authorizing them to use any means of military transportation to get anywhere in South Vietnam if they weren’t moving with a unit. Usually this involved going to a nearby air base, such as Tan Son Nhut near Saigon, where you scrounged a ride to the region closest to your unit’s position. This could take days and involve a series of plane, helicopter, boat, and/or motor vehicle rides.
Even this basic knowledge didn’t much help Zinni. He had no idea how to get to the Rung Sat; he’d simply been told to go there, but was so green he had no idea about the best way to go.
He eventually found himself on a Vietnamese civilian bus overloaded with men, women, kids, grandmas, chickens, and bundles of possessions. The men, women, and kids all found this lone American in a Vietnamese Marine uniform, with all his combat gear, a puzzling curiosity. Americans in Vietnam didn’t travel on civilian buses.
He ended up at the gate of a small U.S./Vietnamese naval base at a place called Nha Be, not far from his destination. When he asked how to get to the 4th Battalion in the Rung Sat, he was led to the operations center, where he met the U.S. Navy operations officer.
“How did you get here?” the Navy officer asked, staring hard at Zinni, as though he had dropped out of the sky.
“I took the bus from Saigon.”
“You took the bus from Saigon?” he snapped. “You want to get yourself killed? You’ve got to be totally nuts! That’s offering yourself to the VC on a platter!” He then proceeded to chew the young lieutenant out for putting himself into such a risk.
Zinni tried to explain that he hadn’t realized taking the bus was dangerous, and besides it had been a pleasant ride and he’d met some nice people.
The Navy officer shook his head in amazed disbelief; and then cracked a tolerant smile. “Fools and children . . .”
“A resupply helo makes daily runs out to the 4th Battalion,” he said. “I’ll get you on tomorrow’s run. You’re welcome to spend the night here with the other officers in their hooch.”
The rest of the day Zinni met with other officers and NCOs learning about operations in the Rung Sat. They provided him with a wealth of knowledge about the local region, riverine operations, and the enemy.
Nha Be was home to U.S. and Vietnamese river patrol boat, helicopter, minesweeper, and River Assault Group (RAG) units (South Vietnamese units with U.S. advisers; the U.S. equivalent in the Mekong Delta was known as the Mobile Riverine Force). The RAGs used specially configured landing craft that were modified to move troops, control operations, and provide fire support on the complex of waterways in the southern regions of Vietnam. “Mother Ships”—really, barges—provided floating bases for these units. The Vietnamese Marines operated as the assault troops with the RAGs and had their own small boat units for these kinds of missions—high-speed fiberglass boats, called Dong Nai boats, with powerful outboard engines.
These operations were sometimes supplemented by air strikes using Vietnamese AD Skyraider aircraft. The ancient, prop-driven American planes were godsends to the guys on the ground. They carried huge loads of ordnance, remained on station for long periods, and flew slowly over targets to pinpoint their locations. Jets were sexier, but they couldn’t provide anything like the long-term satisfaction.
Spotter planes were also often used to cover waterborne movements and observe the areas in front and to the flanks of the Marine movements. The natural tendency was to run these parallel to the route, but the VC watched out for this. It tipped them off to which waterway the Marines were on and to their direction of movement. The best technique was to vary the route of the planes and to run them back and forth across the waterway.
The resupply helo the next morning touched down at a small village called Tan Hiep in the middle of the mangrove swamps and river mazes that made up the Rung Sat. The village’s thatched houses were perched on high stilts, with rickety ladders leading up to the doorways. Debris on the ground indicated it was low tide. Zinni couldn’t imagine what high tide would bring.
The two battalion advisers, Captains Joe Hoar and Bob Hamilton, greeted him as he scrambled off the helo. Soon they were explaining that Colonel Andersen had radioed instructions to “snap Zinni in” for a few weeks; but their sk
eptical looks told him they were wondering what a junior lieutenant was doing here.
They took Zinni to meet the battalion commander, Major Tri, and some of his officers, including the battalion operations officer, Lieutenant Hoa Dang Nguyen. Hoa was a slender young officer, about Zinni’s height (5 feet 9 inches), and a Military Academy grad. He spoke English well—as did many of the Marine officers—was very friendly, open, and outgoing . . . and very Westernized. He and Zinni hit it off instantly, and later became close friends.
Tri was just as Westernized as Hoa, but also very polished and smooth (having graduated from American military schools), and obviously intelligent. He was considered by his community to be one of their most brilliant and innovative commanders, with a more intellectual approach to less operations than some of the more instinctive, seat-of-the-pants types who’d gotten most of their experience in the field. By 1967, he had considerable combat experience and was highly decorated, including a couple of American Silver Stars. Tri was expected someday to be the commandant of the Marines.
Bob Hamilton then showed Zinni to the stilted house where he would sleep. It belonged to a hamlet chief, and the battalion doctor was also quartered there. Though Zinni could not believe this was not an imposition, the head of the house seemed genuinely happy to host him.
After he settled in, Hamilton gave him a rundown of their operations in the Rung Sat:
The mission of the Marines, he explained, was to root out the VC and keep the water routes open. The terrain was miserable, with slimy mud-flats at low tide and extremely high tides that flooded virtually the entire region. Because the tangled mangroves were almost impossible to move through, travel was difficult and slow, with snakes, huge saltwater crocodiles,10 and swarms of mosquitoes adding to the dangers and misery.
The tactics used by the Vietnamese Marines involved patrolling the rivers and streams, launching surprise operations from the RAG boats against suspected VC bases, interdicting and inspecting waterborne traffic, and laying in ambushes on the waterways at night. Zinni was to start going on these missions the next day.
