by Larry Berman
It was a proud day for the entire family in 1968 when Elmo was commissioned an ensign from the ROTC program at the University of North Carolina. His first orders sent him to the USS Ricketts, a guided-missile destroyer in the Atlantic, commanded by his father’s good friend Captain Thomas Mullane. After several months on the Ricketts, Elmo knew he was in the wrong place. He wanted to command a riverboat in Vietnam. He yearned for the challenge of testing himself in war and the responsibility that came with it. He could not consider himself to be a worthy son if he did not do everything possible to see wartime duty. By now he had no interest in making the navy a career, but he did want to serve his country. “I am basically not made for ‘the system.’ I could write an essay on why I believe I cannot stay in but I would rather tell these to you in person,” Elmo wrote to his father.
The Bureau of Naval Personnel received Elmo’s request for reassignment to command a Swift Boat in Vietnam. This would mean that father and son would be serving in a war zone, as Bud and his father had done during World War II. In this case, however, Bud was commander of in-country naval forces, posing additional hazards for both men. Indeed, one of Captain Mullane’s first questions to Elmo was whether he thought going to Vietnam would make his father’s job more difficult? “I said there wasn’t anything that man couldn’t handle. He agreed.”106 Elmo’s major concern about going to Vietnam was the hardship it would place on his mother. “I know there is no reason I can give her that will alleviate her fear of what might happen. I have told her that I am not going there to prove anything. I am going because of certain principles I believe in. A man has got to uphold what he believes in.”
Elmo anticipated that his father might try to quash the request.
I think your first action is going to try and stop my orders. What would happen though if every father was able to stop his son from going to Vietnam? Look at all the poor bastards in the army who get thrown into the front line and have no choice. I am not going over there with the idea that it is going to be a John Wayne adventure. The truth is I am afraid of what could happen. I realize that I am getting myself involved in something I really cannot truly picture. But how many of the boys my age in Vietnam have the luxury of making sure their reasons are perfectly formulated and accurate? One of the many major reasons I feel I cannot stay in the Navy is because since there is an Admiral Zumwalt I will not come up the routine naval path. I will not be able to do what I want because I am the son of Adm. Zumwalt. What I want to do now is go to the swift boat in Vietnam. My orders are sending me there. Are you? I know they’re going to check with you and please keep your cotton-picking hands off my assignment—I want to come.
On March 20, 1968, Bud wrote directly to Captain Thomas Mullane, enclosing a copy of Elmo’s letter. “I am grateful to you for consulting on my son, Elmo III. I am attaching a letter from Elmo which will, I think, make you feel proud—as it did his mother and me. It also shows a certain suspicion that his old man might interfere. I cannot say that I am happy to see him coming because I know more than anyone, the risks he will run. But I would fail this boy as a father if I did not let him follow his own destiny. And I could not continue to send other fine young men to their deaths or permanent suffering if I had to live with this knowledge that I had used my position to save my own son from taking similar risks. I will look forward to having him in country. God bless you for giving me a chance to face up to this in my split roles as parent and COMNAVFORV.”107
Elmo was soon detached from the Ricketts for Swift Boat and SERE (survival, evasion, resistance, and escape) training, undergoing grueling water torture and other tests in preparation for his assignment. By September 1969, Bud informed the clan that “Elmo arrived in Vietnam in August and has been in command of a Swift Boat engaged in coastal and riverine operations. From all reports, he is doing well and I am proud of the aggressive and positive manner in which he commands his boat.”
Elmo was initially sent to I Corps but requested a transfer to IV Corps, where Swift Boats were more frequently engaged in stopping infiltration from Cambodia. In a letter to Paul Nitze, Bud observed that “Elmo III is probably our most aggressive Swift skipper. He is undoubtedly trying to live down the name and continues to take more chances than are sensible. He also has lots of advice for me each time I see him and I find that it really helps to have a trusted gent at the lower level.”108 In letters home to Mouza, Elmo explained how seriously he took the responsibility of serving as a Swift Boat officer in charge. “You make the decisions that may cost you and your crew their life,” wrote Elmo. “I have been patrolling for the last month in the operation Sea Tiger on the Cua Dai River. It has been a long hot hard, dirty, dangerous, frightening, lonely, and life shaking experience. My crew is outstanding. They are capable and aggressive—I probably have the most aggressive crew in Da Nang.”109
That aggressiveness paid off one evening when his boat was on a river that ran along the South Vietnam–Cambodian border. Elmo had told his father that the canal was being used by the Vietcong to smuggle equipment. Bud told Elmo he was mistaken, because his intelligence indicated otherwise. The next night, Elmo went up the canal into Cambodia, in violation of the rules of engagement, to prove his old man wrong. His Swift Boat sank a convoy of twenty sampans and killed several VC in the ensuing firefight. As he and the crew pulled AK-47s, mortars, rockets, and ammunition off the sunken sampans, Elmo kept saying, “I’ll take these back and show my damned old man that they aren’t using this canal.”
In a letter to his mother, Elmo described the catch: “My boat caught a company of NVA trying to cross the river one night. We captured 11,000 rounds of machine gun ammunition, 20 B-40 rockets, 15 recoilless rifle rounds, 8 AK-47 rifles, 5 sampans, 25 lbs of explosives, 10 hand grenades, documents, food and uniforms. We also killed several of the NVA. This was the first time a boat had caught a sampan on this section of the river for over 7 months. It gave our boat quite a reputation.”
Like Bernique and others, Elmo had violated the rules of engagement. “I was not the least bit angry with him,” wrote Bud. “If the truth be known, I was proud of him, but I didn’t show my pride as much as I wanted to because my job was to enforce the rules of engagement.”110 Fleet command awarded Elmo the Bronze Star for bravery. Bud thought that this was one of the few times being his son hurt Elmo. “In my judgment, his actions warranted the Silver Star, but I think the brass felt a Silver Star would be perceived as favoritism.” Elmo and his crew received the Vietnamese Cross of Gallantry “for the enemy weapons and kills we got up by Cambodia.”111 In a letter to his father, Bud wrote, “All indications are that he’s still giving Charlie hell!”112
One of Bob Powers’s responsibilities as flag lieutenant was to listen in and take notes on Bud’s telephone calls. Powers vividly remembers Elmo’s calls from the delta, almost always offering advice on how to fight the war more aggressively. The son of an admiral himself, Powers understood the formidable challenge Elmo faced in being accepted by his Swift Boat crew and living up to his father’s image and name. Volunteering for Vietnam gave Elmo the chance to define himself as a man and son. Behind his back, the crew often called him “the little admiral” and “brass brat III.”113 The only favoritism Bud ever showed Elmo was to read casualty reports from the bottom up, because the list was always alphabetical. He was commander to all, but father to one.
This lack of favoritism especially impressed the Vietnamese. Kiem Do, deputy chief of staff for operations in the South Vietnamese navy, remembered Elmo as “that young and daring PCF captain who rode his boat on the infamous Cua Lon River as he would do with his bike around the block.” Do was “contemptuous of our high ranking Generals who used their power and connections to shield their children from combat positions. Here was a three star American admiral, whose role was only to help us and he sent his own son in that deadly area of Dam Doi.”114
The endorsement of aggressive tactics was not without problems, most notably when some task force commanders took it
upon themselves to expand the rules of engagement for SEALORDS in a way that jeopardized both men and boats. Zumwalt wanted his commanders to take the fight to the enemy in previously unpenetrated enclaves, but some commanders endorsed intense aggressiveness, directing boats to destroy everything, regardless of whether hostile fire had been received, including homes, livestock, and watercraft.
Several Swift Boat drivers complained about these tactics. At first, Bud did nothing, but soon the number of complaints flooded his command. Zumwalt hauled all the Swift Boat officers to Saigon for meetings and sent a message to all operational commands saying that no one was to again change the rules of engagement on their own in the field. Only the commander of naval forces had this authority. The naval message from Bud to his operational commands, dated January 17, 1969, noted that the “tempo of naval operations has quickened and we have become more aggressive and expansive in our endeavors to defeat the enemy.” Commanders could not lose sight that certain types of aggressive tactics risked losing the support of local Vietnamese as well as the U.S. populace. Recent actions threatened to undermine this support. “Some examples include firing into known friendly areas, taking targets under fire without assurance that they are the enemy, improper conduct of searches or inspections, and excessive boat speeds near indigenous craft. These examples are counterproductive to our efforts to achieve support and confidence. The danger of firing into our friends is particularly important and all hands must exert the upmost caution in taking targets under fire . . . we must insure the innocent are not harmed.”116
After the meeting, Bud said, “I think Roy Hoffmann paid more attention . . . and things worked much better.” Zumwalt respected Hoffmann because “he was in the forefront of those who were willing to see the Swifts exposed in the inland waters and waterways—something that was considered heresy by many of the more junior people and by some of his predecessors. He was convinced that they could survive. And I became convinced, after talking with him, that they could survive, and we did it.”117
Meanwhile, as these tactics changed and the navy moved from major rivers and coastal patrols into the narrow canals and smaller rivers, sailors who had not been shot at very often suddenly found themselves in the thick of the action, along with soldiers.118 The navy began taking a significant number of casualties in Vietnam, which meant that the average young naval person had a high probability of getting killed or wounded in a year’s tour. Snipers preyed on sailors from their hiding spots along the riverbanks, perhaps ten to fifteen feet from their targets. The heavy density of jungle growth and the narrowness of rivers and canals gave the enemy protection.
Something had to be done about the foliage in the narrow canals. The army had been using Agent Orange for several years to destroy the jungles north and west of Saigon. Agent Orange offered a chance of improving observation, destroying the enemy’s food supply, and clearing vegetation around fire bases, landing zones, and lines of communication. Defoliation also offered the promise of moving snipers back a thousand yards. Bud asked all the right questions. “The data we were given was that it had been tested and that there was not a health hazard,” said Bud.119 The Pentagon provided assurances that the ingredients in Agent Orange, 2,4,5-T and 2,4-D, were “nontoxic and not dangerous to man or animal life.”120 The chemical companies producing Agent Orange also provided the Pentagon with their own studies showing no harmful effects to humans or animals. Based on these assurances, Bud gave the order to strip the jungle terrain bare.
War is about surviving chaos and Bud did what he was trained to do in order to save the lives of his men. Agent Orange made it more difficult for the enemy to kill his sailors. Over 19 million gallons of Agent Orange and related defoliants were sprayed over approximately five million acres in South Vietnam, almost one eighth of the South’s total area. Operation Sea Float was an extension of the original SEALORDS concept. Like the Vietnamese, those on Swift Boats were especially vulnerable. Sailors washed, walked, and waded in these waters. They ate fish from it. “Trees were stripped of leaves, thick jungle growth reduced to twigs, the ground barren of grass,” wrote Elmo about seeing the result of Agent Orange spraying for the first time.121 Ron Kirkwood recalled the first time he saw a defoliated area: “There wasn’t a tree or plant standing except for only a few tree stumps jutting out of the terrain. It was as if someone had dropped a bomb and killed everything. Life was devoid of the area [sic]. There was nothing but red dirt and mud. It appeared to look as if a flame thrower had cleared an area about three miles in all directions.”122
It took months of Agent Orange spraying and navy SEALs in the Rung Sat Special Zone (RSSZ) to get the VC forces eradicated. Known as the Forest of Assassins, the Rung Sat, a 405-square-mile maze of rivers, canals, waterways, and mangrove swamps on the upper Saigon River, was central to Bud’s strategic plan for getting the “Navy’s piece of the action” in an area that surrounded the main shipping channel into Saigon. The Rung Sat was extremely marshy, with vegetation covering most of the area, enabling small groups of VC to harass and slip quickly into concealment. The enemy controlled this area, and its attacks on merchant ships operating in the channel had increased rapidly since the Tet Offensive. Sapper groups of no more than five men armed with long-range rocket-propelled grenade launchers operated with virtual impunity.
The objective was to guarantee safe passage for mercantile vessels on the vital Long Tau shipping channel to Saigon. Bud specifically recruited Jerry Wages to serve as his senior naval advisor and commander of the Rung Sat Special Zone task group. The two men had met years earlier in the Baltic when Bud was on the Dewey. When Bud was in Hawaii with Howard Kerr on their way to Vietnam, he personally called Wages to join the team. Jerry agreed that he would do so, but only if Bud gave him a field command, not a staff position in Saigon.123
Commander Wages soon received orders to serve as the senior advisor for the Rung Sat Special Zone and concurrently as commander of the RSSZ River Task Force Group, TG-116.9.124 General Abrams took special interest in the Rung Sat Special Zone and used it as a model for how to keep the pressure on enemy forces. Wages kept extreme pressure on the VC in order to prevent attacks on shipping coming up the Long Tau River to Saigon. In a letter home, Bud noted that “PBRs, helos, and SEALs have been successful in driving most of the VC back from the main shipping channel.”125 And the Long Tau shipping channel was frequently swept by small minesweepers (minesweeping boats, or MSBs).
During Christmas vacation in 1969, Elmo’s fiancée, Kathy Counselman, flew to the Philippines to join the Zumwalts for their holiday break. Elmo and Bud flew from Saigon, joining Mouza, Ann, Mouzetta, and Jim. During this holiday, Bud offered his son a position as his flag lieutenant, that is, a chance to leave his Swift Boat crew and join Bud in Saigon for the daily helo rides into the fields. Bud most likely made the offer out of consideration for Mouza, who knew all too well what kinds of risks her son was taking on the rivers. Elmo indicated that he needed a few days to think about the implications, but no family member sitting in the room thought he would buy into Bud’s plan. Before the trip was over, Elmo sat the entire family down to say that, while he realized what a terrific opportunity it would be to work daily with his father and that it would certainly be safer, he could not leave his crew behind to their fate without him. “Elmo always had to prove himself,” recalled his brother Jim. “We all knew he was going to go back to his crew. Our father knew it too.” Elmo returned to his boat for six more months of intense action and, of course, daily exposure to Agent Orange.
“I have continued to find myself consumed by the challenge here,” Bud wrote to his mentor, Paul Nitze, on February 10, 1970. “The opportunity to make decisions and see the result come to pass is greater here than ever before because we are moving in double time. The first year was spent in rearranging operations (to get the navy into the war along the Cambodian border) and laying the plan. This year we are doing the implementing and facing the rough places.”126 Nowhere were these opportuniti
es clearer than in shifting responsibility to the Vietnamese.127 The Accelerated Turnover to the Vietnamese (ACTOV) plan involved expansion and improvement of the South Vietnamese navy as well as turning over craft and logistics supplies. Navy personnel would remain as advisors for some time into the future, but the goal was “to leave here as rapidly as possible, but to ensure that we leave the Vietnamese navy as an effective fighting force.”128
Captain Paul Arbo was the initial senior naval advisor to Admiral Tran Van Chon, but it soon became apparent that Arbo and Bud were not on the same page. Arbo wanted the Vietnamese better trained before the turnover occurred, ignoring the political window of opportunity that was closing. Arbo’s error was to keep challenging Bud on the timetable for turning over naval assets. He would be reassigned and replaced by Chick Rauch, who became the action officer on Vietnamization and naval assets, the senior naval advisor to the Vietnamese navy, and deputy chief of staff for Vietnamization. Rauch was the one who conceptualized the business of ACTOV. He was also the best available person, aside from Bud, to work with the remarkable Tran Van Chon, head of the South Vietnamese navy.
Chon had been born at the seaside town of Vung Tau, where as a child he dreamed of going to sea. He attended the French Maritime Navigation School in Saigon, starting as an officer on a merchant marine ship at the age of twenty-one. By thirty he was in the first group of students to attend the Vietnam Naval Officer School, and at thirty-seven, he was appointed commander of the South Vietnamese navy. He had been the valedictorian midshipman of the first session at the Vietnamese Naval Academy and the first Vietnamese to enter the U.S. Naval War College. He acquired fluent English and returned to Vietnam, where he worked through a succession of jobs at the Defense Ministry, the general staff of the armed forces, and the Regional and Popular forces command headquarters. At the age of forty-six, he returned to the navy in the position of CNO on November 1, 1966. He was revered by his officers and men.129 “We really became more like brothers,” said Bud. “He was, I think, a magnificent individual and a magnificent leader.”130
