by John Kerry
While we passed the lunch hour in this unique fashion, a radio call ordered us to return immediately to An Thoi. We transformed from pleasure craft back to gunboat and headed out at high speed.
• • •
WHEN I CLIMBED up to the CosDiv 11 operations office, one of the officers came up to me and said, “Have you heard the latest? Two boats are being sent to Cat Lo and you’re one of them.” I couldn’t believe it. I ran up to the operations office and asked Bill Locke. Sure enough, Captain Hoffmann, the squadron commander, had ordered an increase in the Cat Lo patrol force for a few weeks. My boat had to go because Bill couldn’t divert any of the boats on assignment and we were “junior” to boot.
It was an early lesson in the power of a seniority system, good training for twenty-eight years to come in the U.S. Senate. Our boat was the last into An Thoi and therefore the first out. Someone had to go. We knew our mail was sure to be thoroughly lost in the shuffle and, having just weathered the monsoon trip down, we also knew the trip back into the wind and sea would be even worse. It promised to be a struggle.
The OINC of the Swift accompanying us was being transferred because he’d seen too much of Sealords. Each time he departed for raids, he would pull one of his fellow officers aside and point out where his very personal belongings were located in the event that he didn’t return alive. Often, he would sit in the wardroom, staring at a wall while chain-smoking, his hands shaking. He couldn’t have been a nicer guy. His only problem was too much thinking combined with too much imagination.
Hemingway warned that the combination of thinking and imagination in combat areas is not conducive to tranquillity:
Danger only exists at the moment of danger. To live properly in war, the individual eliminates all such things as potential danger. Then a thing is only bad when it is bad. It is neither bad before nor after. Cowardice, as distinguished from panic, is almost always simply a lack of ability to suspend the functioning of the imagination. Learning to suspend your imagination and live completely in the very second of the present minute with no before and no after is the greatest gift a soldier can acquire.
I thought Hemingway’s warning was an important one. I wanted to keep thinking and not shut down entirely. It was important to have balance, to be a good soldier and a good observer, to stay sane and alive.
From what I’d seen so far, the U.S. position was ill-fated. The Vietnamese themselves seemed pretty adept at playing everybody off each other. It was a war of slow attrition for a long-term gain that always remained in doubt. Sometimes it even seemed we cared more about winning than our South Vietnamese allies. We seemed to see the war differently, which makes sense when you consider how long the Vietnamese had coped with other countries fighting in their land.
The start of the trip from An Thoi to the tip of the Cà Mau Peninsula was pretty smooth, but once we rounded the cape and met the northeast monsoon seas head-on, things became tough. Swift boats were designed for the calm waters of the Gulf of Mexico, not the South China Sea. With a short bow, we’d crest a wave and, before the bow could pop up, it would run into the next one head-on, with each wave smashing against the pilothouse, breaking over the guntub and cascading back along the boat. The guntub was fitted with only a canvas cover. Seawater would seep through, spraying inside, dripping on whoever was steering the boat. Ultimately everything was soaked. We did everything we could to tighten the hatches but nothing worked. The humidity was 100 percent and the windows dripped with water.
The Swift boat traveling with us had started the journey with a nonfunctioning radar. No sooner did we round the point into the South China Sea than a huge wave swept over the bow, knocking out our radar too. It was such a black night that it remained impossible to judge the size of the oncoming waves. The key was to find the right speed, to try as best as possible to stay above the wave, but the waves often came at different intervals and heights. When there was a moment of hesitation on the crest of a wave, an extra push upward, we knew that the boat was going to slam down with a resounding crash, sending our spines through our skulls, inspiring a cacophony of four-letter words from the men hanging on to the decks below. The helmsman’s seat had a seat belt, keeping him from levitating every time the boat hit a wave. If you were standing, the force of the crash could drive you to your knees. The only way to be half comfortable was to try to lie absolutely flat and arch slightly at the moment of contact.
The compass lights eventually shorted out. Both the forward and the aft watertight compartments filled to the brim, and our small pumps were unable to keep up with the water coming in, necessitating an emergency rendezvous with one of the Coast Guard cutters to borrow their more powerful pumps. The searchlight shorted out along with the rest of the electrical system. Each time something went wrong or the boat hit a wave with exceptional impact, groans of “only twenty more days” rose from the depths of the cabin. Clothes and books and codes were strewn over the deck, mixed with food that had spilled out of the storage locker.
We kept well offshore as we hammered steadily north to Vung Tau, home base for CosDiv 13. As we approached the bay off Vung Tau, because the waters were shallow for miles, we remained glued to the fathometer to ensure we didn’t run aground. Hours later, our two boats reached the protected waters shielded by the peninsula. We were finally able to dry out while watching large cargo ships steaming toward the mouth of the Saigon River.
The trip to Cat Lo seemed to take forever. In reality, it took thirty-five hours. When Zaladonis, the engineman, stuck his head through the pilothouse door and yelled, “Hey, goddamn, I’m gettin’ hungry,” we knew that the trip was almost over. Spirits picked up immediately.
As we slid by Vung Tau, we began to run low on fuel. We turned in to and limped up the Dinh River, which led to Cat Lo, where CosDiv 13, food and sleep were waiting. Regulations required that all boats docked during the night be fully fueled in the event of attack. Dying for sleep, we spent another hour refueling and then, finally, checked in at the division headquarters. The men were assigned bunks in the enlisted barracks. I was led to the officers’ quarters, where the operations officer gave me a rack for the night. I fell on it and woke up the next day, thirteen hours later.
• • •
CAT LO WAS a small Swift base on solid ground, near the Vietnamese tourist city of Vung Tau. Unlike An Thoi, it came under VC mortar attack from time to time. Whenever there was an attack, boat crews sped out of the confined spaces of the Swift base for the relative security of the bay.
Toward the end of 1968, infiltration through the barrier of the Coastal Surveillance Force (activated for Operation Market Time) had been so curtailed that for the Swifts the biggest battle to fight while on patrol was against boredom. For those boats stationed along the delta coastline there was, however, natural and immediate entertainment at hand—a quick dash up one of the Viet Cong–infested rivers with guns ablaze, all in the name of excitement. Among a small group of officers, these excursions into the rivers became a regular game, an unconventional way to make the war bend to one’s own pace.
In Cat Lo, I thought back to the relative comfort and safety of the floating barracks, which reminded me of our colleagues in CosDiv 11. I remembered a conversation I’d enjoyed with another OINC named Mike Bernique. Mike had lived in France and studied at the Sorbonne, and he was gutsy: He had little reservation about challenging the rivers. In fact, if he had had a chance, he would have beached his boat and chased after Ho Chi Minh himself. He and I kicked the war around frequently, my skepticism a foil to his certainty. He would say, “Don’t you see how if we were to leave here the whole of Southeast Asia would fall?” And I’d say, “No, I don’t, and even if that did happen, how does that threaten us?” We debated in particular about our allies. I pointed out how difficult it was to discern “that South Vietnamese leaders want to win as much as we want them to.”
His retort was always something along the lines of “But it’s not the South Vietnamese that we’re really tryi
ng to help anyway, it’s ourselves. We have to beat back communist advances. This is where we have to make a stand.”
Then a group of us would ask him why we had to make the stand in South Vietnam, and how we were really helping ourselves, and what it meant for us to be in South Vietnam. It was a circular argument. The discussion was never acrimonious. It was always taken with a grain of salt, good humor and respect. I think everyone was looking for answers.
Mike’s fervor had a good deal to do with the Swifts’ participation in river warfare. Without authorization, he’d race into the Cua Lon River leading out of the delta. Many rivers were fortified with multiple bunkers along the banks, some hidden in the thick jungle foliage. Looking at the map, Mike figured if he went up the Bo De on one side of the tip of the peninsula, he could connect with another river that would empty into the Gulf of Thailand on the other side. Indeed, he made the river run without incident, probably since the VC never thought Swifts would be daring enough to try. Obviously, his trip alerted them to the reality. The Viet Cong were ready for future runs.
While Mike and I had some differences on the geopolitics of our enterprise, we found common ground on river strategy. Boarding and searching boats, looking for VC, weapons and ammo, made sense to us, but just running up a river, guns blazing, taking on targets of opportunity, which frequently were simply thatched huts, seemed to be serving ourselves up to a potential ambush as a flotilla of floating targets. Given the noise of our twin engines, everyone within miles could hear us coming, giving them plenty of time to prepare to shoot at us from bunkers. If it was upstream, the Viet Cong knew that we had no choice but to come back at least partly the same way. They were patient and disciplined. They’d be waiting.
In the early summer of 1968, the command of the Coastal Surveillance Force changed hands. Policy was quick to change with it. Captain Hoffmann, a veteran of World War II, did not intend to be caretaker of a passive organization. It was wartime, and war is when you take the initiative. Military reputations are made in doing so. He wanted the Navy—Swift boats in particular—to play a larger role in the war. If Viet Cong were operating in the vicinity of his jurisdiction, he wanted to go after them. He would back up anybody who showed resourcefulness in the pursuit of Viet Cong. I admire those instincts. They are legitimate—providing they are strategized and resourced properly, neither of which I thought was happening.
For the first few months, the tempo of operations changed only slightly. Then, in the middle of October, the quick dashes into the rivers for excitement transitioned from clandestine game to public policy. Lieutenant Mike Brown, operating from CosDiv 11, made a run through the Cua Lon River in the southernmost tip of the Mekong Delta. Entering the Cua Lon on the Gulf of Thailand side of the Cà Mau Peninsula, he transited the length of the river through Viet Cong country, turned in to the Bo De River and exited into the South China Sea, but not without incident. Near the exit, the boat was taken under fire and Lieutenant Brown and several of his men were lightly wounded.
At first, an attempt was made to keep the excursion a secret, but word inevitably leaked out. When it reached the commanding officer in Cam Ranh Bay, Lieutenant Brown was recommended for the Silver Star. The concept of river penetrations had obviously found a welcome ear in Captain Hoffmann.
Ten days later, Mike Bernique made a dash up a small river that designated the Vietnam-Cambodia border at the north end of the Gulf of Thailand, near the Vietnamese town of Ha Tien. With the help of Army troops who were riding in his Swift, he overran a Viet Cong tax station that had been extorting funds from the local citizens. He succeeded in killing several of the Viet Cong and capturing their weapons.
Unfortunately, because the action had taken place so near to the Cambodian border and because several of the dead had fallen on the other side of the international dividing line (which at the time was still observed), the incident was not so easily swept away. The next day, Mike was flown to Saigon, where the Naval Forces Vietnam Command argued whether he should be court-martialed or decorated. Lieutenant Bernique was recommended for the Silver Star. The small river he had successfully transited became known as “Bernique’s Creek.”
• • •
BEFORE TOO LONG, my crew on PCF-44 was seeing action on the Soi Rap River, south of the Long Tau River, not far from Saigon. It was not a Sealords raid but a patrol that got us there. We were glad to be on a river at last, mixing with the population, seeing the delta for ourselves. An unearned feeling of invincibility accompanied us up the Long Tau shipping channel, probably because we hadn’t been shot at yet, and men who haven’t been shot at are inclined to be cocky.
Patrolling up our first river, we were too busy loading machine guns and laying M-16 rifles out on the deck to think much about the surroundings. We just knew that the riverbanks of mangrove could light up at any moment with tracers from heavy-caliber machine guns. We’d learned enough to know if we were ambushed, our reaction had to be instantaneous. The only way to ensure that was to know without question where everything was situated on the boat. We felt a healthy respect for what might happen even as we felt confident we knew how to respond.
The Soi Rap River stretched through the bleak mudflats of the Rung Sat Special Zone (RSSZ), also known as the Forest of Assassins, an area that had been specifically structured for extra defense because of its proximity to Saigon and to the cargo ships carrying war supplies. Thoroughly defoliated by thousands of tons of Agent Orange, the banks of the river looked like an atomic wasteland, bleak and brown, like Verdun and the trenches of World War I. The American command decided the easiest way to eliminate the dangers of the jungles near the river was to eliminate the jungles themselves. With the jungles stripped of their greenery, the chances of ambushers using the undergrowth for cover while they poured rockets on the freighters would be minimized. At least, so they calculated.
No sooner did we assume our patrol station in the Soi Rap River, a few miles downstream from a military headquarters at Nha Be, than some would-be assassins used the cover of the Rung Sat mud to fire rockets at a freighter, hitting it twice. The thousands of tons of herbicides evidently didn’t faze the guerrillas. Headquarters at Nha Be ordered several PBRs—shallow-draft river patrol boats—to move into the area. We were asked to move from our position to cover them while they searched in several small estuaries of the Long Tau. We jammed the engines forward to full speed and raced up the river with anticipation that we would fight the whole war in those few moments. The high was short-lived. Nothing suspicious could be found anywhere in the vicinity of the reported attack zone. We relaxed.
When we finished looking around the banks of the river for some traces of the attackers, we returned to our patrol area. It occurred to me that while we were gone, if anyone wanted to cross the river with contraband goods, it would have been the easiest thing in the world. All they had to do was wait on a bank of the river until we disappeared around a corner, then slip their sampans from the mangrove cover and glide quickly across to the other side, a maneuver that consumed five minutes at most. During this time, we would be continuing merrily down the stream. Even at idle speed our engines could be heard for a considerable distance, warning anyone about to cross that it was not the wisest moment.
Events piled up on top of one another with magnetic tenacity. Not long after we returned to the patrol area, an air strike began a few hundred yards away from us. There was no warning—nothing. We had been sitting quietly eating peanut butter and jelly sandwiches when the scream of a jet a couple hundred feet above us sent everyone scrambling for cover. The initial reaction was to duck and then look. Then—kaboom—a billowing cloud of flame and black smoke exploded into the sky. More screams of jets as they dive-bombed down in graceful, silent arcs, silent until right above you when the black speck that was an airplane—any plane—became a bomber and it loosed its load and then drove almost straight upward into the sky, gaining altitude as quickly as possible and rolling out from a nearly vertical position as it reac
hed the maximum point of its climb. From where we were, we could see the black eggs being lobbed from the belly of the jet. Just after the pilot pulled upward, he would let go of his load and the momentum and angle of climb would lob the napalm or high explosive onto a target somewhere a few hundred yards ahead. By the time the bombs hit, the plane was usually well into its climb away from the scene.
I called our boss at the tactical operation center and asked him politely if an air strike had been scheduled in my area. He answered, “Yes, there is one. Disregard it.” And so, with jets diving a few hundred yards away, we disregarded it.
I never found out whether my life had been saved from something I didn’t know about or whether it had almost been taken by something I did. There was reason to want to know what was going on. Not too many months before I’d arrived, one of the Swift boats had been shot right out of the water by an Air Force jet mistakenly identifying the Swift as a North Vietnamese PT boat. The jet fired one rocket into the boat and only the skipper and one crewman survived. The skipper had been physically challenged ever since. We had the best pilots in the world, but still we could feel nervous when a jet made a low pass for identification purposes or just for pleasure.
