Rescued from SERVRON 8, Boehm was operating out of Cat Low, a fortified junk base on the dark, marshy flats along the Mekong Delta in an area known as Rung Sat, or the Forest of Assassins. From that isolated outpost Boehm functioned as an “advisor” to the Vietnamese UDT/SEALs known as Lien Doc Nguoi Nhai (LDNN), along with Commander Jerry Ashcroft, who “advised” a Vietnamese junk force he called Biet Hai. Together, they fought the vicious 514th VC Battalion, taking war for the first time into the Viet Cong’s home territory.
From what the Saigon Chief of Station told me, this Ashcroft was a badass, no-holds-barred, get-the-job-done night fighter who turned a ragtag bunch of river pirates, most of whom were former VC, into a formidable band of cutthroats whose exploits were catching the attention of both foe and friend in the Rung Sat and Mekong Delta.
Boehm accomplished the same miracle with his Nguoi Nhai. They were well-trained in UDT/SEAL tactics, motivated, and kick-ass confident. The first of their kind. Together with Ashcroft’s Biet Hai, they struck at the enemy along the waterways from Saigon to the South China Sea and for a hundred miles up the Mekong River. No longer did the NLF move its supplies and troops freely by day or night without fear of being hit. With each successful operation, Boehm’s Frogs and Ashcroft’s “junkies” grew bolder and ventured deeper and deeper into the forest.
Ashcroft showed up with Boehm at the Majestic’s open-air veranda to have dinner with me. Both wore faded dungarees, bush hats, and strapped-on .45 sidearms. Saigon was relatively safe for U.S. service members, so far, but it did no harm to be prepared. I carried a 9mm pistol tucked underneath my shirt.
Jerry Ashcroft and I shook hands. In his thirties, he stood square and stocky with what I soon discovered to be a perpetual grin on his face. As always, Boehm sounded like he was chewing on a mouthful of gravel. You never knew whether he was about to embrace you or kill you.
“You sonofabitch,” he greeted with obvious pleasure as he wrung my hand in a grip like stone.
Amused, Ashcroft shook his head and quipped, “You should see how he behaves when he doesn’t like you.”
We sat down at a table to order with our backs to the front of the building and a view of the street in front. Another little precaution.
“Commander, thanks,” Boehm said with gratitude. ‘You saved my worthless ass again, sir. I was about to die at SERVRON 8 before I got orders that the CIA—you, commander—had requested me to train Frogmen. I don’t know how much longer I could have tolerated all that ‘yessir, nosir, three bags full, sir’ bullshit.”
We ate and afterwards had drinks and smokes and talked about the war.
“What we’re about to have here,” Boehm said, “is a classic cluster fuck. It always happens when politicians start running wars. They have no fucking concept of what limited warfare means. Vietnam is becoming a war led by administrators and managers who shackle professional fighters with stupid and unworkable rules of engagement.”
Boehm was a man hard to shackle.
When he relieved Navy Lieutenant Pete Willits, previous advisor to the LDNN, Willets met him carrying a briefcase containing automobile brochures and contracts. His nickname was Out to Lunch Willets.
“I work for Cars International on the side,” he pitched with an oily used-car-salesman smile. “I can get you a good deal on any kind of car you can name. Buy it here, you beat the taxes, and it’ll be waiting for you when you get home.”
Boehm returned Willets’s smile with a withering glare. “I’m not here to buy cars. I’m here to kick ass. Your ass will be the first one I kick if you try to sell me a car again.”
Boehm’s superior at Military Assistance Advisory Group (MAAG) was Navy Captain J. B. Drachnik, who plastered signs all over his Saigon office proclaiming PROGRESS IS OUR MOST IMPORTANT PRODUCT. Like General Electric or GMC. In Vietnam, administrators and managers took precedence over combat leaders.
“Had I uttered ‘kill’ or ‘maim,’” Boehm remarked with disgust, “both of ’em would probably have filled their skivvies and fainted.”
Willets had made little progress training LDNN while he had them. The Bos’n got one hell of a headache trying to re-train the forty-two Vietnamese assigned to him for “Frog work.” Half the unit still couldn’t swim well enough to begin basic underwater work. As for tactics, they couldn’t have sneaked up on a sawmill going full blast. Boehm caught one Viet dragging a heavy box using detonating primo cord that might have detonated with a sharp blow. Another mistakenly pulled a grenade pin. The spoon pinged free.
“Incoming! Throw that sumbitch!”
That was one time when the Nguoi Nhai turned frog, hopping in all directions. Shrapnel caught a couple of them in the ass.
Boehm started with basics at the Nha Trang training base. Firing range. Demolitions. Physical conditioning. Swimming exercises. Small unit tactics. Leadership. Team building. He drove them relentlessly as he labored to turn them into SEaAirLand guerrillas.
“You will be ass-kicking, tiger-baiting, shark-riding, VC-throat-cutting, badass motherfucking killers. No more holding hands.”
“Numbah One SEAL!” they responded with more enthusiasm than ability.
Jerry Ashcroft, whose junk force was already kicking VC ass at Cat Low in the Delta, stopped by to observe Boehm’s training. He expected Boehm and his Nguoi Nhai would be moving in with him shortly.
“You were serious about making SEALs out of them, Boy-san,” he said.
“As serious as a fart in church.”
“You about ready to take them out and fight them?”
“There’s about to be a new bad dog on the block.”
Kicking ass was going to be their most important product.
“Welcome to Shit City,” Ashcroft greeted him when Boehm transferred his Nguoi Nhai from Nha Trang to Task Force Base 33 at Cat Low. “With your SEAL types and my thieves and killers, we are going to control every river, creek, and mud hole in the Rung Sat.”
The next day after having dinner with Boehm and Ashcroft in Saigon, I commandeered a Caribou and pilot to fly me to the TF-33 landing strip at Cat Low.
The base lay on a spit of land twelve miles from Vung Tau near the broad mouth of the yellow-brown Mekong. The compound was a typical fortress of the war—a triangle enclosed in concertina, razor wire, and fighting bunkers. One side of the triangle extended piers into the river to which were tethered the fleet of armed junks used to interdict VC shipping and movements. Swift Boats had not yet arrived. Vietnamese and their families lived in grass, mud, and tin hootches in the middle of the compound.
Boehm and Ashcroft had just gotten back in from a prisoner snatch mission upriver when I arrived. The target was a farmer’s hootch near the junction of two canals. Recent intel said a cadre of VC officers would be meeting there. The Vietnamese CNO in Saigon provided them with a guide named Phan, a broad-faced, restless little man with serious eyes. He was from that region and knew the land and the location of the target.
“Keep an eye on him,” Boehm advised Khe, his LDNN commander. Caution dictated you were always suspicious of strangers.
The mission had got under way with the captain of Ashcroft’s lead boat throttling back and turning into a narrow canal that broke free of the river. A rising sliver of moonrise separated tree line from sky. Presently, the three blacked-out watercraft nosed into the dark bank and cut engines. For five minutes the raiders held still on a listening watch to pick up anything that might not be jungle or river sound.
“Khe, let’s do it,” Boehm whispered. His face was blackened and he wore jungle-filthy fatigues and boots from previous missions. He never washed them. He simply hung them out to dry, then re-wet them before each new mission so they smelled like the jungle.
Unloading eighteen heavily armed men over the sides of the junks in near-total darkness was a feat in itself. Ashcroft and a security detachment of Biet Hai remained with the boats as a rear guard. Other Biet Hai went along with the raiders to establish rally-point security along the way.<
br />
A well-used pathway ran alongside the canal. The trail ended at the farmer’s hootch. The grass and palm frond hut remained in darkness and appeared unoccupied. Some geese in a pen nearby muttered sleepily. Boehm set up his men in jungle surrounding the target to watch and wait.
By midnight he was ready to give up on the intel he received, search the empty hut, and go home. Until suddenly a shadow materialized and glided across the front clearing to enter the little dwelling. Moments later, a candle flickered inside, its yellow glow edging a blanket covering the doorway.
Four more armed men arrived one at a time at quarter-hour intervals, like thieves and conspirators, and slipped inside the little building. Apparently, they felt so secure they didn’t bother posting a guard.
Boehm passed Khe the signal. Khe set the plan into motion. He and two other Nguoi Nhai circled wide and dashed for the right side of the hootch, running low and quietly in their sneakers. Chanh and three others approached from the left. Boehm crept across the clearing straight toward the door with the assault party.
The VC proved more cagey than expected. One of them must have detected a stealthy footfall or the sigh of a fern as a body brushed against it. Dim candlelight flooded in an elongated rectangle across the clearing as someone pushed the blanket away from the doorway and stepped out cautiously with his AK unslung. One of the others inside rattled off an interrogatory phrase, to which the man at the door did not respond.
Instead, alerted by some movement, he pivoted in the direction of Khe’s element, bringing his rifle up to bear. Candlelight silhouetted him.
Boehm sprang into a crouch, tipping the muzzle of his carbine upward. Before he could fire, a tracer from Khe’s group streaked into the man. It took him low, above the groin, spinning him to the left in a complete circle. Another tracer caught him in the shoulder and spun him the opposite direction.
Boehm stitched him across the rib cage with a burst. Pink mist of pulverized bone, blood, and flesh clouded light pouring from the doorway. The guy vibrated on his feet, like a puppet manipulated by a puppeteer suffering a heart attack. He was dead by the time he hit the ground, but the body continued twitching.
A second man bolted from out of the hut, only to be felled by a hail of bullets. Boehm’s Nguoi Nhai vaulted over his collapsed corpse and exploded into the hootch with a sound-and-light show. Vermillion tracers punched through the hut’s grass walls and either arced across the black sky or spanged into the surrounding bamboo or banana trees where they smoldered in dry foliage.
Boehm glanced at the dead man in the doorway as he charged into the hootch.
Shooting ceased. The candle inside remained burning on a low table. One mortally-wounded VC writhed on the floor and screamed in agony. Another remained surprisingly unscathed. He groveled on his knees in front of his captors’ guns. He looked about forty or so. Flickering candlelight tattooed fear across his features in large script.
A third VC sprawled dead across an ankle-high table from which teacups and self-rolled cigarette butts spilled onto the dirt floor. Blood oozed from the dead man’s open mouth.
Boehm shouted, “Khe, give me a count.”
“All count for, Boss-son. No one is hurt.”
Boehm pointed at the prisoner. “Grab that cocksucker and let’s get out of here.”
Khe and Chanh bound the uninjured prisoner’s hands behind his back with tape while Boehm searched the dead man and the wounded one, who was rapidly bleeding to death, and ransacked the hootch for documents and other intelligence. He shoved captured papers into his map case, then swept the scene with a final look.
“Di di mau!”
A spattering of rifle fire sounded from the direction of a nearby village. Apparently a VC reaction force shooting at shadows. Boehm dropped to one knee in the trees and snatched his radio mike. Khe knelt next to him, his eyes sweeping toward the sound of firing.
“Boss-san, what do with wounded VC?”
“Kill him if he can’t keep up.”
“Already do that, Boss-san.”
Boehm nodded without comment and raised Ashcroft on the radio. “River Rat, this is Frogfoot … River Rat, we are hot. Leaving position and headed yours. Keep an eye peeled. ETA your position ten minutes.”
They flew down the trail single file in the dark toward the boats. The surviving prisoner was tossed into one of the junks like a sack of rice. Raiders scrambled aboard not five minutes ahead of a swarm of pursuing pissed-off VC.
The three junks poured on the coal in leaving the canal to ride the middle of the Mekong out of effective small-arms range, bound for Cat Low. The men laughed and jabbered like a scene from a winning team’s locker room.
“Those hoods of yours fight pretty good, like there’s no tomorrow,” Boehm complimented Ashcroft.
Ashcroft laughed. “There would have been no tomorrow if they were captured,” he said.
Ashcroft, now back at TF-33, showed me what he meant by his remark. He asked some of his men to show me the tattoos on their chests: Sat Cong. The same slogan was now tattooed across the guide Phan’s pecs. It was an effective way of ensuring loyalty. The VC automatically executed any man they captured bearing the tattoo.
Sat Cong. Kill communists.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
ON THE MORNING OF July 31, 1964, I was up early for a walk on China Beach, a luxury I indulged whenever I was in-country and had the opportunity. I wore khaki shorts, sneakers, and a green military pullover with the sleeves cut out. The red sun inched up from the depths of the South China Sea. Higher, the sky remained that dark blue-purple it was before the sun leached the night out of it. A cool breeze brought the sounds of gulls waking to squabble over scraps.
I kicked off my sneakers to wade in the gentle nibbling of surf at the sand. There were not actually seven seas. There was one vast ocean of interconnectivity. A man could sail around the world on many different azimuths without ever having to touch terra firma. The seas of the world helped keep people apart on their various land masses until the appearance of modern transportation and, at least to some extent, kept their constant petty bickering and wars separated.
Why did God have to put land so near the oceans?
I watched four Nasty boats rapidly materialize from out of the sunrise’s red belly and barrel toward the finger piers below the black hulk of Monkey Mountain. I replaced my sneakers and long-legged it toward the pier to meet them and get in on the debriefing.
Operations had changed dramatically at China Beach after South Vietnam’s president Diem and U.S. president Kennedy were assassinated eight months ago. Part of it came from the CIA’s relinquishing operational control to the military, which led to the escalation of raids against North Vietnam by the new and faster Swift and Nasty boats I helped acquire and ship over. Crews were still made up of South Vietnamese naval personnel with a few West German and Norwegian mercenaries thrown in. No Americans officially accompanied the raids. Approval for all ops came directly from Admiral U.S. Grant Sharp Jr., CINCPAC in Honolulu, who received his orders directly from the White House.
For the past few months since Lyndon Johnson took over and ramped up activity in Vietnam, OP-34A, a military modification of CIA’s previous OP-34, had clashed repeatedly with NVA naval forces based some 120 miles north of Da Nang at Quang Khe and on the two islands of Hon Me and Hon Ngu. The base at Quang Khe was a post for small boats smuggling high-priority arms and infiltrators across the DMZ, as well as for eighty-three-foot Chinese-built Swatow motor gunboats.
Attempts by OP-34 to sabotage Quang Khe and put the Swatows out of commission had failed. On a black night in early March, a Nasty boat inserted a Vietnamese swimmer team of dynamite saboteurs. In order to reach the target, the swimmers had to swim to a sandbar, creep across it, proceed up a river, dogleg left, swim in the dark to find the patrol boats, and attach limpet mines to their hulls. The mission failed; the team vanished.
Earlier in the week before I arrived, SOG slipped a covert long-term agent int
o North Vietnam. He got out a last message before NVA security swept him up.
In spite of failures by its predecessor, OP-34A experienced a number of successes. An NVA patrol boat had been seized, NVA storage facilities sabotaged and destroyed, a lighthouse shelled, a bridge knocked out—all of which caused a constant pain in Uncle Ho’s ass.
The four Nasty boats now approached secure docking at China Beach where I waited for them, along with the command staff. They were dispatched early last night with saboteurs to plant explosives on the islands of Hon Me and Hon Ngu to destroy a gun emplacement and a communications station. Just as the armada’s commander prepared to release his saboteurs, he received intel that the enemy had been alerted. Rather than risk losing dynamiters, he decided to hit the targets with machine guns and 57mm recoilless rifles.
A recoilless rifle fired a flat-trajectory shell with high muzzle velocity that might easily be mistaken on the receiving end as rounds fired from an offshore destroyer’s five-inch guns. That and the fact that the U.S. destroyer Maddox happened at the time to be off the North Vietnamese coast in the Gulf of Tonkin on a secret electronics surveillance mission led me to believe it was on that night and with that mission that the Vietnam War actually began. It would be no stretch for the North Viets to believe the Maddox had fired on them with five-inch guns in support of the raid on the islands of Hon Me and Hon Ngu.
August was about to become the most critical month of President Lyndon Johnson’s first year in office.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
THE NORTH VIETNAMESE MAY have indeed taken U.S. destroyers in the Gulf of Tonkin as the source of fire they received against Hon Me and Hon Ngu. Two days after the raids, on the afternoon of August 2, Vietnam time, USS Maddox was approaching Hon Me Island inside the twelve-mile limit claimed by North Vietnam when she radioed being under attack.
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