by John Kerry
Then, as we patrolled through the night, we saw the lights of fishing junks moving through a curfew zone. The OINC of the Swift showed me how to tell the Vietnamese where they can and can’t fish. We went alongside a creaky wooden junk that reeked of stale fish. The officer made a lot of threatening noises in his best Vietnamese, learned quickly and often less than adequately at the Coronado Naval Amphibious Base. He motioned the fisherman to go away: “Di di mau.” Go away quickly. The fisherman apparently didn’t move fast enough to pull his nets in. So the officer took out a knife and cut the nets off where they came over the gunwale into the junk. Hundreds of feet of net still dragging behind the junk sank to the bottom of the sea. I watched the fisherman’s face sink with it, clearly seeing his investment go down into the deep. Without nets, his job, his income, his ability to make a living were now all at risk. A small boy who had been watching silently from the bow of the junk pulled up the weight they’d used as an anchor. The junk moved off into the darkness. I know the officer was within his authority to cut the nets, but I thought it was a counterproductive exercise of authority over a defenseless fisherman and a great recruitment tool for the Viet Cong.
The officer, a lieutenant, turned to me and said, “If you think they’ve been in a no-fish zone several times, just shoot a notch in the junk so you’ll recognize it next time you see it. Then, if they keep on doing it, just shoot a hole in the boat below the waterline—that really gets ’em.” I was left wondering what the little boy would think ten years from then and how receptive he would be to America’s policy of winning hearts and minds.
• • •
TWO AND A half weeks after my arrival in Vietnam, the division operations officer asked me, “How would you like to go to An Thoi?” An Thoi was the home of Coastal Division 11 (CosDiv 11), the southernmost Swift boat base. The headquarters was a floating barracks ship off Phu Quoc Island in the Gulf of Thailand, near the border with Cambodia. I realized quickly that it was an assignment, not an invitation. The officer smiled. “You wanted to go a few weeks ago so you came to mind. Besides, there’s no one else. You’re leaving in two hours. We’re giving you PCF-44. You can pick up your charts and orders after you pack.”
An Thoi—the word carried many meanings.
I immediately pictured Vietnamese army generals and colonels flying into a one-strip airport, hoping for a swim in the turquoise water of the bay and stocking up on nuc mam, a fragrant local delicacy, to be traded later for services rendered on the mainland; a nearby prison camp detaining more than fifteen thousand Viet Cong; and our out-of-the-way Navy base, remote from civilization.
Most ominously, to Swift crews, An Thoi had quickly become a synonym for Operation Sealords. It meant being in the rivers more often than not. It meant operating in the heart of VC strongholds. In the early stages of Sealords, An Thoi had taken the brunt of the casualties.
My early curiosity regarding my posting was now being rewarded.
A quick inspection of a map shows the huge Mekong Delta spread out over a vast network of rivers and canals in the southernmost portion of Vietnam. The Mekong is one of the great rivers of the world—originating in China, running south through Laos, Thailand and Cambodia, and finally spilling out into a spiderweb of rivers large and small, all charging toward and ultimately emptying into the South China Sea. There are few roads. Because of its poverty and difficult geography, it became a Viet Cong stronghold against first the French and then us Americans. Unless large numbers of troops were deployed to hold territory, the only way to have a presence in the delta was to patrol and control the waterways.
Operation Sealords was started officially in November 1968. It began unofficially when earlier, two Swift skippers—tired of doing board and search missions—made unauthorized runs through major rivers in the southern part of the Mekong Delta. These unauthorized raids sparked the imagination of the squadron commander, Captain Hoffmann, and suddenly Swift boats went from the South China Sea to Mekong Delta rivers. It quickly grew into a joint operation between U.S. and South Vietnamese forces to disrupt enemy supply lines in and around the delta.
In early December, the pace and intensity of Sealords raids in the delta had picked up significantly. So had the casualties, since the boats were more exposed to danger. They were conducting raids nearly full-time in the rivers of the southern delta. Two boats had now been ordered south to fill in for damaged boats and wounded crews: my newly assigned boat—the 44—and the 57. The OINC of the 57 was Ted Peck, a lieutenant (junior grade) recently shifted to Cam Ranh Bay from CosDiv 12 in Da Nang. Ted had been stationed north of Da Nang with the detachment of Swifts at the small outpost of Chu Lai—the Chu Lai Tigers, as they were called, or called themselves. He was an action-oriented, no B.S. OINC, and sitting at Cam Ranh cramped his style and sense of duty. When no one else volunteered to go to An Thoi, Ted said he would.
So it was that in early December 1968, late in the afternoon, after packing and provisioning, PCF-44 pulled away from the pier with its new crew and with me, its new skipper. It joined PCF-57 as they pointed their bows toward the southernmost tip of Vietnam and ultimately to Phu Quoc Island in the Gulf of Thailand.
• • •
I WAS FILLED with curiosity and anticipation for this new but potentially dangerous assignment. The first thing I wanted to do was get to know my crew and have them get to know me. They’d been through a lot before they inherited me. We were thrown together from different backgrounds, with a hodgepodge of accents that would have confused the hell out of the best translators. We were from Arkansas, Illinois, the Florida panhandle, upstate New York—and yours truly from Massachusetts by way of far too many far-flung places.
Two of the sailors on board were especially raring to find some action. I met them for the first time only minutes before leaving. One was my leading petty officer—the enlisted man who acted as second-in-command. He was an extremely capable radarman second class with only one remaining month on his tour in-country. He had a round face with a toothy smile, accented by large, dark-rimmed glasses and a healthy shock of blond hair. His enthusiasm for everything we were doing was contagious.
He volunteered to go with me because his previous eleven months had bored him stiff. He’d become remarkably proficient in Vietnamese, able to jump into a junk and converse easily with the locals during board and search. But that didn’t satisfy him. It was too passive for his adventurous spirit. His dream was to get into a river and see some action before he went home. “Give me just one good firefight and I’ll be happy,” he used to say. His name was Wasser—James Wasser.
The other new man was Drew Whitlow, a boatswain’s mate third class. He was a shy person, decent to the core. The guys loved to rib him. They had their long-running sitcom sequences—many of which involved good-natured teasing, especially when Drew was perpetually five minutes late for a meeting on a fifty-foot boat that took ten seconds to walk end to end. He was good company.
The gunner’s mate, Stephen M. Gardner, had at one time been a petty officer, but after a clash of one sort or another, he was reduced to seaman. Since then, he enjoyed a seesaw relationship with promotions and demotions. He had a short-timer’s attitude. Where guns were concerned he was capable. He worked hard, and, like Wasser, he waited for the day when he could try those guns on an enemy.
The engineman, Bill Zaladonis, a petty officer third class, was laid-back and quiet. I knew and admired him from our earlier patrol. He was as competent as anybody on the boat. Under-spoken, understated and, on occasion, undernourished, he religiously saw to it that the engines always ran at top performance, that the oil was at the right level and that he got to eat on time. He was super-skilled with an engine. If there was a way to get more out of our nearly 1,000 horsepower, Zal was able to do it. We depended on him to keep the twin 480-horsepower General Motors 12V71 marine diesels running 24/7. Other than that, the war could go right on being fought and it wouldn’t faze him at all. “Man, I don’t give a shit,” he would say.
The final crew member was also a boatswain’s mate, like Whitlow. Stephen Hatch was incredibly competent and calm. He helped round out a terrific crew. Steve delighted in telling me and everyone else on the crew that he had only thirty more days in-country and “it was high ho and off on the fucking freedom bird and back to the States.”
Everyone dreamed about the freedom birds, the big, beautiful Pan Am and Northwest and other charter jets that we could see climbing away from Vietnam heading for home. Hatch and Wasser kept telling me that with them on board the 44, I had nothing to worry about. Had I known more about how capable they all were, I would have heartily agreed. But we were new as a team and yet to be tested. As we continued down the coast of South Vietnam toward the rivers of the delta, miles away from the nearest freedom bird, I hoped they were right.
• • •
THE NEXT MORNING, after taking a teeth-jarring beating in the huge South China monsoon seas, we stopped for fuel at Coastal Division 13 in Cat Lo. Then we were off again, out through the narrow river, past small huts sticking high up out of the mud on the riverbank, past rickety old junks piled to the gunwale with nets and manned by rail-thin Vietnamese fishermen, past the once-upon-a-time carefree resort of Vung Tau and out through the shallows into the deep water six miles off the coast.
From there, navigation was precarious unless one stayed well out to sea, following the line on a chart showing a constant ten fathoms—the deep water. To our right, as we moved southward, was the Mekong Delta, flat for miles, barely providing a radar presentation. Occasionally, tufts of green mangrove could be seen rising on the horizon. Even when we were cruising along several miles out from the shoreline, the water depth could occasionally drop to six inches. In many places it seldom reached more than four feet, except in scattered channels, where the current sliced out in ever-changing patterns. Each time we passed one of the big mouths of the several branches of the Mekong that actually shaped the delta—the Co Chien, the Bassac, the My Tho—the water would roughen. The boat would rock uncomfortably through muddy brown waves. We did a good job of putting the seaworthiness of Swift boats to the test.
Throughout the day, we headed south to the point of land at the very southern tip of Vietnam. At midnight, four miles from the line where we’d cross from the South China Sea into the Gulf of Thailand, we rendezvoused with a landing ship tank (LST). Huge fenders were lowered over the sides of the LST to permit the Swifts to tie up. Nestled comfortably alongside, we refueled. We continued south firmly pinioned to our large friend. I looked up about twenty feet to the deck of the ship and saw a ladder come tumbling down with an invitation to come aboard. We quickly accepted.
The captain interrupted a late-night showing of a movie to welcome Ted and me with coffee and conversation. Something about the exchange was foreboding: he described a recent bloodbath involving his ship and the Swifts. Weeks before, in a predawn raid, within minutes of the Swifts entering the Bo De River, the Viet Cong had taken five boats under fire from both banks and cut them to ribbons. The LST had been criticized for missing its targets while trying to provide cover to the Swifts. It was a miracle that no one was killed. But seventeen men wounded had earned the operation the name “Bo De Massacre.”
As the captain of the LST worked hard to exonerate his ship for its role in the pre-raid bombardment, I sat there thinking about the fighting I was about to confront. I thought about the officer on that raid who lost his leg just six weeks after arriving in-country. For centuries people have wrestled with, philosophized about and debated the psychology of combat. Generation to generation, most of the people hungry for action are the people who haven’t seen what war looks like up close. They want to test the warrior ethos—whether as a testing of self, or the completion of a duty, or an expression of the youthful delusion of invincibility. Probably everyone comes at it somewhat differently, even as they surrender to age-old instincts. In any event, we had an obligation to live up to.
Whatever the rationale, it doesn’t take long to understand how much luck interacts with character to determine the outcome. And it doesn’t take long to realize how senseless the experience can be. And yes, when we arrived in An Thoi, we requested that we be sent on a mission, more evidence that the youthful zest for action is irrepressible. It pulls at you in a tug-of-war between the rational and emotional, between common sense and adventuresome youth.
• • •
BY THE TIME I arrived in An Thoi, a pall had fallen over the division. Only a day or so earlier, an ambush claimed the life of one of the enlisted crewmen. Sealords was new enough that people were still feeling their way through the initial emotions that come with fighting and with death. People still carried themselves with outward bravado, which was the unspoken rule, but underlying everything—meals, jokes, drinking—there was a tension that was inescapable.
It didn’t ease matters that we were living on a floating barracks ship anchored several hundred yards offshore. About thirty officers shared one another’s dreams and aroma in one crowded bunkroom. The room was hot. Occasionally, concussion grenades dropped in the water reverberated against the barracks hull, preventing enterprising VC from swimming up and sabotaging our home.
Compounding the difficulties of sleeping were the Swift boats themselves. They were tied up alongside the barracks, “nested” one alongside another. When the sea got rough, which it sometimes did at three in the morning, the whole nest would thump against the metal barge. If the pounding got bad enough, the officers whose boats were on the outside of the nest were roused from their slumber to move their craft.
The next four days raced by. Another raid was scheduled for the Bo De River, a repeat of the mission that had been thwarted a few days earlier. To a man, my crew expressed a desire to be included. We wanted to see the rivers for ourselves.
Lieutenant Bill Locke, the ops officer for CosDiv 11, was intelligent and capable. To Bill fell the unpleasant task of assigning boats to missions, keeping up with a schedule that was shuttled down to him in messages from the desks in Saigon. It was a tough job sending out men knowing they might not return alive.
Bill listened to our request. He must have quietly thought that we were naive for wanting to get into a river. He told me it wouldn’t be long before I would have rivers up to my neck. I didn’t realize how true those words would be. Instead of the Bo De, we were sent up to the northern tip of Phu Quoc Island, right on the Cambodian border, to patrol the waters separating Vietnam from Cambodia. The international water boundary lay at one end of the patrol area. If a navigational error didn’t get you in trouble, your curiosity and imagination could.
The patrol, however, was uneventful—not surprisingly, since that particular patrol was always uneventful. The most exciting thing that happened was the meeting of Swift boat and hidden rock. One officer hit the same rock several times, thereby ensuring it was named for him. Except for hitting his rock and occasionally finding new ones to hit, the only other occurrence on the R&R patrol was a request to fire a harassment and interdiction mission—H&I, as it was known. The purpose was merely to let the Viet Cong know that we were thinking of them—literally to harass and stop movement along the waterways. If someone else happened to be in the target area—an area cleared for firing because there were no friendly troops of record in the vicinity—then so be it. Any unlucky, innocent passersby or bystanders were also harassed and interdicted. If hurt or killed, they were viewed as collateral damage.
When we returned to An Thoi, we loaded extra ammo on board. Zaladonis applied his considerable skill to tuning the engines in the hope that maybe we’d soon make the run through the Bo De River. While we were waiting for this assignment, one of the boats operating to the south of An Thoi had a serious enough engine problem to necessitate its return to base. Another boat was shifted from the patrol area nearest to it, and we, in turn, were ordered to fill the vacated patrol area, not far from the U Minh forest, where five hundred French paratroopers had been dropped during the Fren
ch-Indochina War, never to be heard from again. The U Minh was a patchwork of rivers, streams and canals; it had never been under the control of any government. It was considered hard-core VC territory. We never ventured into it—at least while I was in Vietnam. We did feel a certain intrigue in being so close to an area of such mystery, but beyond the legend and the excitement, there was nothing else to shout about. Hundreds of junks fished along the shore. We spent the entire day boarding and searching them, a tedious undertaking.
Each junk was crowded with children. Often families greeted us with toothless smiles and unintelligible phrases. Their nets stretched out behind them, and in baskets on the decks were various kinds of fish and shrimp of all sizes. Several times our propellers became tangled in their nets. We had to stop dead in the water, put a man overboard to cut the nets free and then continue on. When this happened, we gave the boss-fisherman as many cans of our C-rations as it took to get him smiling again. I would profusely shower him in my best Vietnamese—“Xin loi, xin loi, quí ông” (Excuse me, mister), a necessary sentence in any foreign soldier’s lexicon—and we would depart for another job of boarding and searching.
Unlike the mainland delta, most of the offshore islands were friendly. When we finished searching every visible junk and sampan in our patrol area, we would drop anchor at one of the smaller islands that kept beckoning to us from a distance. We quickly identified a favorite island. It was a Pacific paradise—the kind you dream about.
We would anchor in a small inlet with several lush beaches, rows of wild palm trees sprouting up along them, forming an idyllic border from one end to the other. No invitation needed to be extended to turn the crew into explorers. Gardner, the gunner’s mate, had the life raft in the water before anyone said a word. He and Wasser, my leading petty officer, paddled off toward the beach like two shipwrecked men who had sighted land after weeks at sea. They took some candy and a first-aid kit to woo anyone they met. Hatch swam after them, while Whitlow and I remained on the boat to cook the shrimp we traded our C-rats for with fishermen during board and search. An hour passed. I was lying in the sun when I heard laughter coming across the water. I looked up to see a Vietnamese fisherman in a large sampan towing Wasser, Gardner and Hatch out to the boat: three U.S. Navy sailors, sitting precariously on the tiny life raft like three Robinson Crusoes, being towed to safety. The fisherman responded to their candy with a gift of coconuts. As they neared the Swift, the raft tipped over at least ten times. The fisherman didn’t know what to think of the crazy Americans. Nor did we watching from the boat.
