Vietnam 2015-12 (Vol.28, No.04)

IA DRANG: Helicopter Rescues at LZ Albany

DR. ZHIVAGO’S LOVER Julie Christie shines in 1965 blockbuster

WHAT MAKES A

WAR HERO? by Karl Marlantes

‘Apocalypse’ boats blast Viet Cong

DECEMBER 2015

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CONTENTS

38 Soldiers at Katum, South Vietnam, gather around a reminder of home in December 1967 to clean their weapons rather than open presents.

FEAT URE S

24

What Makes a War Hero

A Vietnam veteran and noted author reflects on the unique characteristics of true heroism. By Karl Marlantes

28

Shootout at LZ Albany

After a surprise attack at the Battle of Ia Drang, 7th Cavalry forces fought hard on the ground and in the air to escape destruction. By Dan Reed

38

Home for the Holidays

Troops did what they could to make the war zone look like home during the holidays.

6

Editor’s Notebook When the War Really Began

8

Feedback

Readers’ comments via letters, email and Facebook

12

Today

News and contemporary issues related to the war and Vietnam

18

Voices

Speedy Navy patrol boats went gunning for the Viet Cong on South Vietnam’s rivers and canals. By David Sears

20

Homefront

22

Arsenal

52

58

Media Digest

46

Water Warriors

Torn Nation

Conservatives in the Nixon years tapped patriotic sentiment—and big-name stars—to help them counteract antiwar protesters. By Sandra Scanlon

COVER: ASSOCIATED PRESS/HENRI HUET; COVER TOP: PICTORIAL PRESS LTD/ALAMY ABOVE: BETTMANN/CORBIS

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D E PA R T M E N T S

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Peter Prichard, an Army intelligence analyst who became a prominent journalist November-December 1965

On the cover Medic James Callahan treats a wounded soldier with mouth-tomouth resuscitation near Saigon in June 1967.

AH-1 Huey Cobra Gunship Nixon’s Nuclear Specter;

American Reckoning

64

Offerings

Left at the Wall

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VIETNAM

®

Vol. 28, No. 4

DECEMBER 2015

EDITOR

Chuck Springston

Vietnam Online

Visit us at historynet.com/vietnam

Story of the POW/MIA Flag The flag has become an American icon, representing the nation’s concern for military service personnel missing and unaccounted for in overseas wars.

Unveiling Newseum Exhibit

Kevin Johnson Art Director Debra Newbold Managing Editor Jerry Morelock Senior Editor Sarah Richardson Senior Editor Elizabeth Howard Copy Editor Lori Flemming Photo Editor Jon Guttman Research Director David T. Zabecki Editor Emeritus

ADVISORY BOARD

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rom the Delta to the DMZ, young Americans answered the call to duty and proudly served- many with “Old Slabsides,” better known as the “.45.” In military nomenclature, Uncle Sam called it the “M1911A1 Service Pistol.” It was the most powerful military sidearm ever issued in the world. And with it in Vietnam, American servicemen drove more nails LQWKHFRIÀQRI&RPPXQLVPZKLFKZRXOGOHDG to its eventual fall. But Vietnam would be the .45’s last war DV $PHULFD·V RIÀFLDO PLOLWDU\ VLGHDUP 6RRQ afterwards, so America could comply with NATO ammo logistics, it was retired and replaced by the less-powerful 9mm. So now, the “.45 era” and our Veterans who fought with it are passing into military history. As America honors the 50th Anniversary of the Vietnam War, The American Historical Foundation is proud to salute those who served in the Armed Forces during the Vietnam War, E\ DSSURSULDWHO\ LVVXLQJ WKLV ÀULQJ PXVHXP TXDOLW\ /LPLWHG (GLWLRQ RQ WKH FODVVLF &ROW  military pistol. Each Vietnam Tribute .45 is a ZRUNLQJ &ROW® Government Model® pistol and ÀUHV$&3DPPR

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EDITOR’S NOTEBOOK

By Chuck Springston

The Year the War Really Began

The year 1965 saw many firsts in the Vietnam War. Congress had passed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution on Aug. 7, 1964, giving the president authority to increase U.S. military involvement in Vietnam, and seven months later U.S. forces were moving into the country in big numbers. Throughout 2015 Vietnam magazine has commemorated the 50th anniversary of events that launched the ground war: • The first U.S. ground combat troops landing in Vietnam (March 8), when two battalions from the 3rd Marine Division arrive at Da Nang. • Marines battling the Viet Cong guerrilla force for the first time (April 22). No Americans are killed. • The first Army combat unit arriving (May 3), as the 173rd Airborne Brigade puts troops in positions near Saigon. • The 173rd Airborne beginning the first major U.S. offensive with three days of search-and-destroy patrols around Saigon (June 27). There are no significant encounters with the enemy. • The 1st Cavalry Division (Airmobile) arriving in Vietnam (August 11) with its initial units and becoming the first full Army division deployed there. But especially noteworthy, 1965 saw the first major confrontations between large units of the U.S. military—battalion size or bigger—and similarly sized groups of Communist fighters. Three battalions from the 1st and 3rd Marine divisions fought a Viet Cong regiment in Operation Starlite, August 18-24. The Marines lost about 50 men in a victory that left the VC with more than 600 dead. The Army’s first major battle took place during Operation Hump, November 5-9, when a single U.S. battalion from the 173rd Airborne outfought a VC regiment, at a cost of nearly 50 Americans and about 400 VC. The biggest, most deadly and most consequential duel in 1965 6

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Troops of the 7th Cavalry, flown in by Major Bruce Crandall, advance at Ia Drang on Nov. 14, 1965.

would come a week later: the Battle of Ia Drang in South Vietnam’s Central Highlands. Two battalions of the 1st Air Cav Division’s 7th Cavalry Regiment and one battalion from the division’s 5th Cavalry Regiment sparred with battalions from two regiments of the North Vietnamese Army—the first time the U.S. military went up against the Communists’ professional military force. In this issue we revisit that November 14-18 fight, which spread across two sites in the Ia Drang Valley: landing zones X-Ray and Albany. A column of soldiers on the march from X-Ray to Albany was surprised by overwhelming numbers of NVA troops and faced the prospect of destruction until the 229th Assault Helicopter Battalion flew to the scene, a gripping story that Dan Reed tells in “Shootout at LZ Albany,” pg. 28. When the fighting was over, 79 Americans were dead at X-Ray and 155 at Albany, along with more than 1,000 NVA soldiers. Adding in the toll from related skirmishes just before Ia Drang, the tally of American dead increases to 305. The total for the year was 1,365. Some in the press (pg. 32) wondered if Americans at home would accept the rising number of war dead. They did. For a while. ★ U.S. ARMY

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FEEDBACK

My Guys in the A Shau Photo In “A Valley Soaked in Rain and Blood,” (October 2015), the men in the picture on pgs. 28 and 29 are my guys. Their names are, from left to right, Sgt. Carson Peters (standing), Keith Buckland, Fred Reader, Kevin Goodwin and Thomas Hackle. My captain, Kenneth Date, was riding in the helicopter (on its side in the photo) when it crashed. We were all members of the 4th Platoon, mortars, Company B, 2nd Battalion, 7th Cavalry. I was the forward observer for the platoon. — Patrick J. Connolly Aquebogue, N.Y.

Vietnam War Historian Named to Magazine’s Advisory Board We would like to welcome to our advisory board Erik Villard, a historian writing about U.S. Army combat operations in Vietnam. Villard is finishing a book that deals with the course of the war from October 1967 8

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to September 1968. His next book will cover September 1968 to December 1972. Villard, who has a doctorate in history from the University of Washington, works for the U.S. Army Center for Military History

Same Bridge, Same Day “Fight for the Y-Bridge” (August 2015) states that the armored personnel carriers on the Saigon bridge belonged to the 2nd Battalion, 47th Infantry, scout platoon. While I don’t want to discredit any unit for stating this, I just want to say that I was with the 5th Battalion, 60th Infantry, B Company, 1st Platoon, and we were on the same bridge, maybe not that day. I do not think, as the story states, that the details in Old Reliable are incorrect. I have the same photo, and it’s hard to tell who the APCs belong to. — David A. Griffin Oakley, Ill.

at Fort McNair in Washington, D.C. He is the founder and president of a Facebook group, VietnamWarHistoryOrg, devoted to the history of the conflict in Southeast Asia from 1945 to 1975. Villard also is chairman of the Digital History Committee for the Society of Military History.

Ranger Pride Upon receiving my June 2015 issue, I was pleasantly surprised to find your article depicting one of my favorite ships, the USS Ranger. I must confess that I’ve never seen Top Gun and never knew that old CV-61 was in a Star Trek film; however, I’m fully aware of its distinguished service record. It was A-7s from the Ranger that participated in the mining of Haiphong Harbor, an unconventional yet highly necessary action that greatly contributed to ending the conflict. Ashamed it’s got to be scrapped. It was one hell of a ship! — George S. Georgiou Clearwater, Fla.

Navy’s Only Aces The Phantom II pictured on pg. 6 of the October 2015 issue is the same plane that then-Lt. Randy Cunningham and Lt. j.g. Willy Driscoll flew on May 10, 1972, when they shot down three MiGs to become the Navy’s only aces. It is “Showtime 100” of VF-96. — William Thompson Three Rivers, Mich.

Lt. Randy Cunningham, left, and Lt. j.g. Willy Driscoll.

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Ties to Tolson, the Gentleman General I am not a subscriber to Vietnam and don’t usually read articles about Vietnam. But the 1st Cav story “A Valley Soaked in Rain and Blood” caught my attention, especially the picture of Maj. Gen. John Tolson on pg. 32. I was assigned to the 11th General Support Company, 1st Cav, in October 1966. I became Tolson’s personal crew chief and served him until I left in October 1967. He was a soft-spoken gentleman from the South. I only saw him get angry once. We flew to a CH-54 company, and he noticed a 54 hung up in barbed wire. It had been sitting on a small hill, and the pilot forgot to put the brake on. It rolled down the hill. I heard him yell, “Why wasn’t I informed of this?” When the general first took over, we flew to Hue to confer with the Marine Corps commander. On the way back the general was doing the flying, and someone fired from the ground. The round went

Maj. Gen. John Tolson led the 1st Cav, April 1967-July 1969.

10

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Posted on Facebook

A contingent of the Royal Australian Air Force arrives in Saigon on Aug. 10, 1964, to work with the South Vietnamese and U.S. air forces to transport soldiers and supplies.

“Met many of them at Bien Hoa, 1964-65. We did not have many things, and the Australians would always ask if they could bring things to us on their flights to and from Vietnam. When I was leaving Bien Hoa in late 1965, three of the Australians presented me with a nice going-away present in appreciation for my help. Will always have them in my mind.” — Arthur Correira

through the general’s door glass and out the overhead glass; pieces flew all over the inside of the ship. He calmed us down and asked everyone in turn if we were all right. He was considerate too. I always carried fruit on the ship and when I peeled an orange, the general would say, “I can tell Sergeant Van Kirk is eating again.” I would always offer him some, but he would say, “No, you go ahead and eat it.” The general asked me if I would stay on when my time was about up, and I told him I was on my second tour then. Later, I was sent to Fort Eustis, Virginia, for tech

inspections on all types of helicopters and right back to Vietnam for my third tour, 1969-70. I met the general again in 1973 or ’74 at Fort Lewis, Washington. He was a lieutenant general and the head of the Continental

Army Command. He knew me as soon as he saw me, despite the lapse of all those years. I still have the autographed picture he gave me when I left the division. — Dale Van Kirk Olympia, Wash.

CORRECTION

Send letters and reunion notices:

An incorrect unit designation accompanied the interview with Mike Sierra in the Voices department (October 2015). During his first tour in Vietnam, Sierra was a member of the 327th Infantry Regiment.

Vietnam Editor, 19300 Promenade Drive, Leesburg, VA 20176; or to [email protected] Become a fan at facebook.com/VietnamMag

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Communist Party Leader Promotes Ties With U.S. President Bill Clinton formally normalized diplomatic relations with Vietnam in 1995, more than five years after President George H.W. Bush began the effort. It would be almost two more decades, however, before the first meeting of the two countries’ leaders, which occurred in July 2013 when President Barack Obama met Truong Tan Sang, president of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam, in Washington. This July, another—more unusual—historic meeting took place. On July 7 Nguyen Phu Trong, general secretary of Vietnam’s Communist Party, met Obama at the White House to discuss trade ties and the Trans Pacific Partnership, a trade deal Obama believes will lay the

foundation for shared economic growth. Obama seldom meets with a national representative who is not a head of state, but Trong holds considerable power, even though he is not an official member of the Vietnamese government. During his four-day visit, Trong spoke at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington and met with business executives. In his talk at CSIS, Trong noted that Thomas Jefferson tried to get rice seed from Vietnam to grow on his farm at Shadwell, Virginia, and Nguyen Tat Thanh, who would later be known as Ho Chi Minh, visited Boston, admired the spirit of the American Revolution and wrote 14 letters to President Harry S. Truman requesting “full cooperation

President Barack Obama talks with Vietnamese leader Nguyen Phu Trong on July 7 at the White House.

with the United States.” Trong also addressed the war fought 50 years ago. “As we advocate to put behind the past, we should work handin-hand to heal the wounds of war,” he said. “I believe that together we can build a bright vision for our future relations, so that our two peoples and our children will always be good friends and partners.” Obama said he would like to make a reciprocal visit to Vietnam, but the date has not been determined. Activists for human rights and democracy in Vietnam protested outside the White House during Trong’s visit.

Political Prisoners’ Records Online The Vietnam Center and Archive at Texas Tech announced on August 13 the completion of a digitization project involving documents related to the Families of Vietnamese Political Prisoners Association. That association was founded in 1977 by Khuc Minh Tho to work for the release and resettlement of prisoners, like her husband, who were being held in re-education camps in Vietnam. The Vietnam Center digitized the applications of postwar South Vietnamese who wanted to leave the country under the Orderly Departure Program, created by the United Nations. The program oversaw the immigration of more than 500,000 to the United States between 1979 and 1994, when the program ended.

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Many refugees set sail in the 1970s, leaving relatives behind.

TOP AND OPPOSITE TOP LEFT: ASSOCIATED PRESS; BOTTOM: VIETNAM CENTER AND ARCHIVE, TEXAS TECH UNIVERSITY, VA001687; OPPOSITE TOP RIGHT: ANDRII KONDIUK/ALAMY; OPPOSITE BOTTOM LEFT: GAYLE GIBBONS MADEIRA

FAREWELL • Frank E. Petersen Jr., a Vietnam veteran who was the Marine Corps’ first African-American pilot and general, died Aug. 25, at home in Stevensville, Maryland. He was 83. Petersen joined the Navy in 1950, entered an aviation cadet program and flew combat missions in Korea in 1953. In 1968, he went to Vietnam, where he commanded fighter squadron VMF-214 and flew more than 280 combat missions. He received the Purple Heart for wounds suffered when he ejected after his plane was struck by anti-aircraft fire over the Demilitarized Zone, according to the Washington Post. Petersen became a brigadier general in 1979 and retired as a lieutenant general in 1988.

• William Conrad Gibbons, who wrote a comprehensive four-volume history titled The U.S. and the Vietnam War, died July 4 in Monroe, Virginia, at age 88. In 1978 the Senate Foreign Relations Committee asked Gibbons, a foreign policy researcher at the Library of Congress’ Congressional Research Service, to write a history of the war. Gibbons was a World War II Army veteran and former history professor. He was working on a fifth volume about the Vietnam War at the time of his death, according to the Washington Post. His research was a source for many subsequent works on the war.

PTSD a Lingering Issue Some 2.7 million service members were sent to Vietnam during the war, and a recent study has concluded that more than 270,000 of them have experienced posttraumatic stress disorder. The study, conducted from May 2012 to July 2013, is a follow-up to the landmark PTSD research from 1988 to 1990, which interviewed nearly 2,000 veterans. The recent study reached 78.8 percent of that same group. Among the conclusions: More than 15 percent of Vietnam veterans have experienced some form of PTSD in their lifetimes, and a significant percentage of them are still grappling with the disorder and deteriorating. Charles Marmar of the New York University Langone Medical Center, who headed the study, told MedicalResearch.com, “While the vast majority are resilient, there are…over 270,000 Vietnam veterans who still have some form of post-traumatic stress disorder, and one-third of these veterans have depression.” Marmar also said another project is hunting for biological markers to identify sufferers, because there is no diagnostic test yet to confirm PTSD or depression.

New Films Go to War Four new film projects focus on the 50-year anniversary of the nation’s full commitment to the war in Vietnam. The National Geographic Channel announced in July that it ordered a pilot script from noted filmmaker Barry Levinson for a potential miniseries recounting the last days at the U.S. Embassy in Saigon. Vietnam Army veteran Brian Delate’s script, Dante’s Obsession, co-written with Eric Pederson, won first prize in a screenplay competition held by the Foundation for Military Veterans in Production. The storyline revolves around a young American lieutenant fighting in the Viet Cong tunnels near Saigon and his romance with a VC spy. The MVP Foundation helps veterans gain entry to the film business.

An episode on the video website “Old Guys and Their Airplanes” will show Navy Captain Charles Plumb, a former prisoner of war, returning to the “Hanoi Hilton,” were he was held for 2,013 days. Plumb also meets with the former prison commander and Vietnamese fighter pilots. The program is scheduled to air on Veterans Day. A documentary on the USS Kirk created for the National History Day contest by 13-year-old Abigail Wiest in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, was a winner at the state level, reported the Hattiesburg American. Wiest interviewed veterans of South Vietnam’s military, including an air force colonel who used his helicopter to help evacuate Saigon residents after the city fell in 1975 and fly them to the Kirk. You can see her film at the International Journal of Naval History website.

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· IN THE NEWS · IN-COUNTRY · IN BRIEF

China Says Island-Making is Over; Tensions With Neighbors Persist

Following more than a year of conflict with Vietnam over territorial claims in the South China Sea, China said it has stopped its reclamation project on islands widely suspected to be future sites for military activity. But a blog post on the website of National Interest, a foreign policy magazine, contends that China may be turning to the second phase of the project: preparing aircraft landing strips on those islands. Since 2013, China has reclaimed 2,900 acres of land in the South China Sea, and a Reuters report on Pentagon

Vietnam Takes on Uber The Vietnam Transport Ministry wants to launch a state-sponsored app to compete with Uber for ride-booking services, but the software would be available only to transport companies, not to individual drivers. Like the Vietnamese transport companies—a mix of private businesses and joint ventures with the government—Uber cannot contract with individual drivers for use of its app. It must contract with transport companies. If the Vietnamese app is approved, it would likely be in several cities this year. San Francisco– based Uber, which has been expanding in Asia, entered Ho Chi Minh City in July 2014, reported TechInAsia.com.

findings said China accounts for 95 percent of the reclaimed land in that area. Neighboring countries dispute the validity of China’s claims, and a complaint filed by the Philippines in 2013 is being heard by an international arbitration court in The Hague, Netherlands, according to AsiaOne.com. A few weeks after China’s statement about the stopped reclamation projects, the country’s Xinhua New Agency announced the completion of a stateowned billion-dollar offshore project: the first deep-water, high-temperature,

This photo shows what is believed to be a Chinese island-building project.

high-pressure exploration well, about 100 nautical miles from the Vietnam coastline. The drilling, which began in 2014, precipitated the worst break in diplomatic relations between China and Vietnam since a border war in 1979. Under pressure, China removed the rig last summer but returned it to the site this past June for more drilling, according to FreeMalaysiaToday.com.

Nuclear Plant Ahead State-owned Vietnam Electricity and Russia’s nuclear power plant builder, Rosatom, a state corporation, signed a deal in Hanoi on July 30 for construction of Vietnam’s first nuclear power plant, which will be on the coast at Phuoc Dinh in Ninh Thuan province. Russia has loaned $8 billion to Vietnam to fund the project. Vietnam intends to obtain 10 percent of its power from nuclear power plants, and the goal is to build 13 operational nuclear power plants by 2030, according to RT.com.

TOP: EPA EUROPEAN PRESS PHOTO AGENCY B.V./ALAMY; BOTTOM: THNKSTOCK

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IN BRIEF • Vietnam veterans were

Duery Felton was honored for his work as curator of items placed at the Wall.

Vets Shine in Arts, Sciences, Public Service Walter Anderson, the former chairman, CEO and editor in chief of Parade magazine, received this year’s Vietnam Veterans of America Excellence in the Arts Award. Anderson served in the Marine Corps, 1961-66, including a Vietnam tour in 1965, and attained the rank of sergeant. The VVA recognized him for his contributions as a writer and playwright. One of his works, Almost Home, has a Vietnam War theme. Anderson was also honored for his efforts as an advocate for literacy programs. Dr. Timothy Miller, a plastic and reconstructive surgeon, received the VVA’s Excellence in the Sciences Award. Miller served with the Army Special Forces in Vietnam, 1965-66. He is the chief surgeon of Operation Mend, which helps military personnel who suffered disfiguring facial wounds in Iraq and Afghanistan. Since 2007, Miller and his team have performed 230 such surgeries. Duery Felton, former curator of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Collection, received the VVA’s Lifetime Achievement Award for Public Service. Felton, an Army veteran, was recognized for his work with artifacts in the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Collection, first as a volunteer and then as an employee of the National Park Service, which oversees maintenance of the memorial. The collection contains some 400,000 objects “left at the Wall” (see pg. 64). Kelly Grant Jr., the 82-year-old chairman of Mel-O-Cream Donuts in Springfield, Illinois, received the President’s Award for Supporting the Troops in Vietnam. After one of Mel-OCream’s employees was sent to Vietnam, the soldier wrote to see if the company would ship doughnuts to him. So Grant had a few boxes sent to Vietnam. Mel-OCream wound up shipping some 4,000 individually wrapped doughnuts to the troops over four years. The VVA also presented Supporting the Troops awards to three former Donut Dollies: Linda Cranor, Jeanne Christie and Jan Woods.

honored at a ceremony in the U.S. Capitol on July 8 to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Vietnam War service medal established by President Lyndon B. Johnson on July 8, 1965. About 500 Vietnam vets attended the ceremony held in the Capitol’s Emancipation Hall and organized by the office of House Speaker John Boehner. Congressional leaders from both chambers and both parties thanked the veterans for their service and sacrifices, which Boehner called an inspiration to other Americans.

• A memorial to war dogs will be dedicated in Columbia, South Carolina, on Veterans Day. The project, in the works for more than a decade, is the sixth monument dedicated to dogs that assisted troops in Vietnam and elsewhere in Southeast Asia. The website of the Vietnam Dog Handler Association has a list of 30 war dog monuments across the country, including two at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, honoring Civil War dogs. To see the list and get more information on the South Carolina event, go to www.vdha.us/memorials.

• A dozen Montagnards who had fled to Cambodia were voluntarily repatriated to Vietnam by the U.N. Refugee Agency on July 17, according to the Phnom Penh Post. Days later, an additional 11 Montagnard asylum seekers arrived. They were among the roughly 200 who have left Vietnam in recent months, claiming religious and political persecution. Some have returned to Vietnam on their own; others await processing for resettlement in Cambodia. The U.N. staff handling the return of the 12 obtained a promise that the Vietnamese government would not punish the people who fled or discriminate against them. Many Montagnards, a French name for Vietnam’s hill-dwelling tribes, are Christians, and they often helped U.S. forces during the Vietnam War. TOP LEFT: PHOTO BY JENNIFER E. BERRY; TOP RIGHT: PJR STUDIO/ALAMY; MIDDLE: EVERETT COLLECTION HISTORICAL/ALAMY; BOTTOM: ASSOCIATED PRESS

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VOICES: PETER PRICHARD

he two letters arrived the same day in spring 1967. One was from the Peace Corps, offering to send Peter Prichard to Micronesia as an English teacher, the other from the Selective Service System, instructing him to report to an induction center. Prichard called the Peace Corps, mentioned the two letters and accepted the agency’s offer. The Peace Corps said, Sorry, the Defense Department takes precedence. After his tour in Vietnam, Prichard took a job in 1970 as assistant to the editor of Greenwich Time in Connecticut. He was one of the founding editors of USA Today in 1982 and its top editor from 1988 to 1994.

T

Born Dec. 18, 1944, Auburn, California Residence Essex, Connecticut Education Bachelor’s degree in English, Dartmouth College

Is there anything we could have done differently that would have “won the war”?

I don’t think we ever could have won it. It’s kind of like Iraq is today. You have it one day, and if you don’t solve the underlying issues, you lose the territory the next day. You could have blown them back to the Stone Age, but they still would have had guerrilla units. Training the Vietnamese probably was the best idea, but they had their own political problems. They had a lot of corruption. They didn’t really have the populace behind them. Have we learned the lessons of the Vietnam War?

I would say we’re still learning. In Iraq, there are very complex issues that are very difficult to solve. We’re not going to win the war against terrorism by killing people with drones. I don’t think it’s a bad idea to go after these guys, but it’s like the Vietnam War in the sense that it’s a war for hearts and minds. It’s got to be done through education and by changing their point of view about the West, and that’s a big project.

In Vietnam January 1968 to May 1969, intelligence analyst,

Military Assistance Command, Vietnam; Bronze Star Medal for service; left the Army as a specialist 5 Today Chairman, the Newseum, a museum in Washington,

D.C., devoted to journalism and First Amendment topics Did your experience in the military affect your attitudes as a journalist? I had a lot more respect for the military than some

of my colleagues did. What I saw was phenomenal: dedication to the mission, tremendous teamwork, esprit de corps, the best technology in the world to fight a war. What is the legacy of the Vietnam War? It was the beginning of

the end of the idea that America is the champion of freedom and democracy that can be applied anywhere in the world. For a long time people said, We’re never going to commit troops anywhere because of Vietnam. The military said, We don’t want to go anywhere unless the mission is clear. The military also said, We don’t want to give the press that kind of access again. There also was the loss of faith in institutions.

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VIETNA M

Which books about the war do you like? I think the best book from a policy perspective is Graham Greene’s The Quiet American. I like Dispatches [by Michael Herr]. Tim O’Brien’s Going After Cacciato and The Things They Carried are both good. Laura Palmer’s Shrapnel in the Heart is very good. What is your favorite music from the era? I love Motown. We all collected it over there. You could buy these big Akai Japanese reel-to-reel tape recorders, and people made mixtapes. And there were Vietnamese tribute bands that did Motown music. It was great. Is there anything you wore during that period that you would be embarrassed to wear now? I had pretty long hair and a

mustache after the war. That was the ’60s. Everybody looked like a hippie. ★ During the Vietnam War’s 50th anniversary, Vietnam is interviewing people whose lives are intertwined with the war and asking for their reflections on that era in American history. You can read more of this interview at www.historynet.com/Vietnam.

ILLUSTRATION: DAN WILLIAMS

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Sit up, lie down — and anywhere in between!

HOMEFRONT 1965

A BLACKOUT affects 30 million people over 80,000 square miles in northeast U.S. and Canada on Nov. 9, lasting up to 13 hours.

CHARLIE BROWN’S FIRST CHRISTMAS special airs on Dec. 9. Linus explains the real meaning of Christmas to Charlie Brown’s gang: Sally, Lucy, Peppermint Patty, Schroeder, Pig-Pen, Violet, Shermy, Marcie, Frieda...and Snoopy.

HEE HEE Pillsbury Doughboy “Poppin’ Fresh,” introduced earlier in the year, pops out of a can of dinner rolls for his first holiday season and shows off a new line of products sold in the refrigerated section of stores.

600+ MPH

FREEDOM FLIGHTS from Cuba to the U.S. begin on Dec. 1, under an agreement between the two countries to help reunite families who had been split since travel was suspended during the missile crisis of 1962.

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Craig Breedlove sets a landspeed record on Nov. 15 in Spirit of America Sonic 1 at Bonneville Salt Flats, Utah.

BATTLEFRONT 1965 NOV 4

Dickey Chappell, a 46-year-old photo journalist for the National Observer, becomes the first-ever American female war correspondent killed in action, when a Viet Cong booby trap explodes near Chu Lai, killing Chappell and four Marines.

MOVIE MAGIC Omar Sharif, Julie Christie, Alec Guinness and Geraldine Chaplin play unforgettable characters in this epic film set in Russia during World War I and the Bolshevik Revolution. The movie opened Dec. 22.

How much evil must we do in order to do good? We have certain ideals, certain responsibilities. Recognize that at times you will have to engage in evil, but minimize it. — Former Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara in an interview from the 2003 documentary The Fog of War; in reference to Norman Morrison pouring kerosene over his body and burning himself to death on Nov. 2, 1965, in a war protest outside the Pentagon

NOV 14–18

The Battle of Ia Drang in South Vietnam’s Central Highlands, the first large-scale clash of the U.S. Army and North Vietnamese Army regulars, pits the 1st Cavalry Division (Airmobile) against units of two NVA regiments. Both sides claim victory. More than 300 Americans are killed and 540 wounded in the battle and skirmishes leading up to it. Estimates of NVA dead range from 1,064 to over 1,700.

DEC 2

The Navy’s aircraft carrier Enterprise becomes the first nuclear-powered warship to conduct combat operations, when it launches more than 100 air sorties against VC positions near Bien Hoa.

DEC 22

Air Force F-100F Super Sabres carrying radar-seeking missiles knock out North Vietnamese radar at the Yen Bai rail yards northwest of Hanoi, while F-105F Thunderchiefs destroy a nearby surface-to-air missile site, the first success of the Air Force’s Wild Weasel program in its fight against SAMs.

DEC 24

In an ultimately unsuccessful effort to encourage negotiations, President Lyndon B. Johnson orders a pause in the bombing of North Vietnam. This “Christmas Pause” remained in effect for 37 days. Airstrikes resumed Jan. 31, 1966.

DEC 31 LINCOLN LOGS is a popular toy that pays homage to the humble origins of America’s 16th president.

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: EVERETT COLLECTION HISTORICAL/ALAMY; AF ARCHIVE/ALAMY; HERITAGE AUCTIONS, DALLAS; CHRIS WILLSON/ALAMY; HERITAGE IMAGE PARTNERSHIP LTD/ALAMY; ASSOCIATED PRESS; HERITAGE IMAGE PARTNERSHIP LTD/ALAMY

U.S. troop strength in-country reaches 184,000 (up from 23,300 on Jan. 1, 1965). American deaths in 1965 total 1,365; most occurred after the major troop buildup began midyear.

ARSENAL

By Carl O. Schuster

OUNCE OF PREVENTION

Light armor protected the engine compartment and hydraulic systems. The two pilots sat in armored seats.

QUICK CHANGE

Most of the design and preproduction work had already been completed on the Bell D209, which used many Bell UH-1 components.

LAST-MINUTE TWEAKS

ARMAMENT

Pre-production and production-model AH-1s that left the factory beginning in early 1967 had a more powerful engine, an expanded nose turret, larger “miniwings” with four underwing pylons and fixed landing skids instead of the 209’s retractable ones.

The helicopter had two GAU-2B 7.62mm miniguns or one GAU-2B minigun and one M-29 40mm automatic grenade launcher in the nose turret and two to four M200 19-tube, 2.75-inch rocket launcher pods.

AH-1 Huey Cobra Gunship (Snake)

A

single Bell AH-1G Huey Cobra en route to Muc Hoa on Sept. 4, 1967, noticed a sampan carrying four armed Viet Cong on the waterway below. The 1st Aviation Brigade commander gave the order to attack. He achieved the Cobra’s first combat kill in Vietnam, sinking the sampan and killing its crew with rocket and minigun fire. The day of the specifically designed attack helicopter had arrived. The first six Cobras had landed at Bien Hoa Air Base near Saigon just five days earlier. Three were hand-built, pre-production models. A Pentagon review board for Army aviation needs had recommended the creation of air cavalry units. Early experience in Vietnam had shown the importance of attack helicopters that could escort helicopters carrying troops and supplies and support air-assault unit landings. Hastily adapted Bell UH-1C Iroquois gunships had firepower but lacked the engine power, agility and speed for the full range of missions envisioned for attack helicopters. The Lockheed AH-64 Cheyenne won the initial 1964 contract competition, but the Cheyenne project had a long development period and the war’s escalating requirements drove the Army to

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seek an interim design that could be deployed rapidly. Bell Helicopter Co.’s D209 design, presented as a modified UH-1, was selected in August 1965, and the first prototype flew on Sept. 23, 1965. Flight tests and an Army evaluation led to modifications in the initial design. Four pre-production models were finished by late October 1966. The Cobras, sometimes called “Snakes,” quickly proved their value in early combat missions, starting in October 1967, but the AH-1s truly cemented their reputation in the heavy fighting during the Viet Cong’s Tet Offensive in early 1968. More than 338 Cobras were in Vietnam by 1969. The copters received cockpit air conditioning after 1970 and infrared countermeasure equipment in 1971. Army AH-1Gs served with Marine Corps units until the Marines’ twin-engine AH-1Js entered Vietnam in February 1971. Some 1,126 Cobras were built, and more than 300 were lost during the war. The Cobras were retired from Army service in 1999, but their capacity to assimilate new avionics, engines, technologies and weapons has ensured their continued service with the Marines and America’s allies to this day. +

CREW 2 FUSELAGE LENGTH 44 ft. 7 in. ROTOR DIAMETER 44 ft. ENGINE Avco Lycoming T-53-L13 gas turbine, 1,400 shp MAX. SPEED/ CRUISE SPEED 171 mph/ 125 mph MAX. RANGE 257 miles

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Recipient of the Navy Cross and author of an acclaimed novel about the Vietnam War, Karl Marlantes gives his take on a controversial topic

WHAT MAKES

AWAR

HERO A wounded trooper from the 1st Cavalry Division (Airmobile) waits to be evacuated in April 1968 during the fight at Khe Sahn, one of the war’s deadliest battlefields and noted for the heroics performed there. BETTMANN/CORBIS

D

onald Trump’s much ballyhooed comment about U.S. Sen. John McCain’s heroism deserves mention only because it illustrates how confused we are about words like hero, bravery, warrior and coward, and how loosely we define them.

A warrior is a person who is willing to risk his life, who is willing to inflict violence on others and who chooses a side in a fight, but that person may never have to perform an act of bravery. For example, someone who pushes the button to fire a cruise missile from a ship hundreds of miles from the front lines is as much of a warrior as the grunt who is in the thick of the fight. Acts of heroism are different from acts of Perhaps some people can’t imagine that the button pusher would be called bravery. People who are heroes go beyond what a warrior, but the history of warfare shows an increasing distance between a is expected of them, risking life and limb to benefit fighter and the enemy. Medieval knights thought crossbowmen were cowards others. There is an altruistic aspect to heroism. All and criminals who should be hanged because they shot from beyond the range acts of heroism require bravery, but many acts of swords and lances. Imagine what those knights would think of the Marine of bravery are not acts of heroism because they grunt, a quintessential warrior in our eyes today, who attacks with modern are done for self-serving reasons. An excessively rifles or even airstrikes. ambitious commander can exhibit bravery, and To be sure, the grunt endures harsher conditions and greater risks in actions even be awarded a medal, but he often does so that require grit and bravery far above what the button pusher experiences. But at the expense of his troops, rather than for their the button pusher is no less a warrior. Definitions need to change with changing benefit. Those who serve under him would probably technology. When the crew of an Air Force C-47 gunship, nicknamed Puff the never denigrate his bravery. They might, however, Magic Dragon, saved our asses in Vietnam, I never begrudged them their distance denigrate his character and secretly wish that his from the enemy or their warm showers. next act of bravery would Everyone who serves in the military is a be his last. Any grunt who How one is thrown into a warrior, and that should be accolade enough. does his duty in a firefight is But an honorable word has been corrupted acting bravely, but he won’t “hero’s journey” is beside the with overuse: road warriors, warriors for peace, be considered a hero until environmental warriors, warrior power gym he does something exceppoint; how one behaves on equipment and the like. tionally brave to benefit his Now, to Trump’s comment about McCain, whole group. the journey is what’s relevant a Navy aviator who spent almost 5½ years as It has become popular a prisoner of war in North Vietnam. During a to call everyone who serves July 18 forum in Ames, Iowa, the Republican presidential candidate said this in the military a hero. This trivializes the word in about McCain: “He’s not a war hero. He’s a war hero because he was captured. the same way we trivialize the word champion I like people that weren’t captured.” by issuing everyone a trophy at the end of the Nearly all acts of heroism arise from situations caused by stupidity or bad season. Most people who serve in the military feel luck. Medals of Honor result when a group has the bad luck of a grenade landing embarrassed being called heroes. This is because in their hole and someone sacrifices his life to save the others. McCain had the most people in the military are not heroes. They bad luck of being shot down and taken prisoner. That is not what made him are, however, warriors. a hero. How one is thrown into his or her “hero’s journey” is beside the point; Warrior is a word that conjures images of Conan how one behaves on the journey is what’s relevant. and Cochise, although few serving in today’s miliMcCain is a hero because of the way he conducted himself while a prisoner. tary will ever be warriors like Conan and Cochise.

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VIETNAM

OPPOSITE TOP: EVERETT COLLECTION/ALAMY; BOTTOM: DAVID GROSSMAN/ALAMY

Navy Lt. Cmdr. John McCain is taken prisoner by Vietnamese civilians at a lake near Hanoi on Oct. 26, 1967, after his A-4E Skyhawk was shot down by a surfaceto-air missile.

He endured torture that he could have avoided by telling secrets that would have hurt his fellow aviators. He refused early release, which his captors offered because McCain’s father was a top Navy commander. Accepting an early release would have violated the POW code of conduct, which was designed to prevent the enemy from using prisoners for propaganda and to help POWs endure their terrible ordeals by assuring them that rank or privilege would not be a factor in determining the time of their release or the amount of torture they had to withstand. McCain says that he wasn’t a hero, but was with a group of heroes. Well, he fits my definition of a hero. One word used to contrast heroes from others is coward. It has become popular to call suicide bombers cowards. I disagree. They behave bravely. I certainly wouldn’t have the guts to do what they do. They are not, however, heroes. Suicide bombers are willing to target innocent civilians who are not even their enemies. No one on their side is in any immediate danger, so their brave act could only tortuously be construed as being done to benefit others. One could even argue that looking for a reward in heaven is actually self-serving. Heroes act as brave individuals and that distinguishes them from others in a group, but they remain part of the group because they act in its best interest and help its cause. People who spend their lives acting for themselves and not for others might find it difficult to understand what heroism really is and get it wrong when asked to comment on it in an interview. All of us, however, need to be mindful of how we use “hero” and other words associated with it. ★ Karl Marlantes, a Marine Corps first lieutenant in Vietnam, received the Navy Cross for “extraordinary heroism” while leading an assault on enemy bunkers. He is the author of the novel Matterhorn and the nonfiction What It Is Like to Go to War. DE C E MB E R 2 0 15

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SHOOTOUT AT LZ ALBANY The 7th Cavalry’s Second Fight for Survival at the Battle of Ia Drang By Dan Reed

Parachute flares illuminate the landing zone at Albany as 1st Air Cav troopers battle to hold their lines against a regiment of North Vietnamese on the night of Nov. 17, 1965. ASSOCIATED PRESS, PHOTO BY RICK MERRON

L

anding Zone Albany in the Ia Drang Valley blazed with fire on the night of Nov. 17, 1965. The 2nd Battalion, 7th Cavalry Regiment, wavered under relentless attack from the North Vietnamese Army units that had missed the fight at nearby Landing Zone X-Ray just a few days before. The cavalrymen walked into a hornet’s nest of NVA troops who were ready to settle the score for heavy casualties their comrades had suffered at X-Ray against the regiment’s 1st Battalion. In the inky black darkness, tracers of green and red crisscrossed overhead, with the light of parachute flares and

On November 17, 2nd Battalion, 5th Cavalry, heads out at 9 a.m., followed by 2nd Battalion, 7th Cavalry, and Alpha Company, 1st Battalion, 5th Cavalry, which split off toward Albany.

30

VIETNAM

the sound of explosions accentuating the battle. The aviation liaison officer attached to the 2nd Battalion, Captain Ken Weitzel, tried to coordinate by radio with his commanding officer, Major William Bennett of Charlie Company, 229th Assault Helicopter Battalion. “We’re inbound on you,” Bennett said. “I can’t see anything down there but tracers and explosions in a sea of black….Is that you? Over.” “Roger,” Weitzel replied, “that’s us. Set down to the left of where the red tracers are coming from. Over.”

The men who flew the combat missions into X-Ray and Albany were well trained for these missions. They had been part of the 11th Air Assault Division (Test), formed in 1963 to test the concept of airmobility on a division-size organization. In July 1965 the 11th Air Assault was designated the 1st Cavalry Division (Airmobile), which was sent in September to An Khe in South Vietnam’s Central Highlands. The battles in the valley of the Ia Drang, a river in the highlands, in the fall of 1965 provided the stage for deploying the new airmobile forces in offensive actions, such as at LZ X-Ray on November 14—made famous by the book We Were Soldiers Once…and Young— and in defensive maneuvers on the 17th at Albany, a few miles north of X-Ray. This airmobility concept transformed the battlefield from an arena where units fought each other head to head on the ground to one where troops could be flown into battle, anywhere, any time. Helicopters could precisely place infantry troops on the battlefield in an airmobile assault and quickly resupply them. The Army also developed a new type of artillery: helicopters armed with rockets and machine guns called aerial rocket artillery. In addition, traditional artillery could be transported by other helicopters into a landing zone within firing distance of an airmobile assault and could be quickly flown out again without digging in or even filling a sandbag. This allowed artillery and aerial rocket artillery to provide close support for an infantry assault. The Air Cavalry’s aviation elements consisted of the 227th and 229th Assault HelicopMAP: BAKER VAIL; OPPOSITE: ASSOCIATED PRESS

A battle-worn survivor at Albany gets water from a relief force soldier following the 1st Cav’s engagement with the NVA on November 17.

Remnants of the 1st Cav await evacuation from Albany on November 17.

ter battalions and the 228th Assault Support Helicopter Battalion. Each assault helicopter company in those battalions assisted an infantry battalion and assigned a pilot to act as a liaison officer with that infantry unit. The liaison officer coordinated airlifts, assaults, resupply flights and medical evacuation.

I

n the summer of 1965, the NVA began preparing its major divisions for a push into South Vietnam, escalating its involvement there. An ancient military maxim in Southeast Asia stated that whoever controlled the Central Highlands would control Vietnam. The Communists had been infiltrating South Vietnam’s highlands region through trails in neighboring Cambodia and had begun setting up bases just inside the border. They planned to move east from the Central Highlands toward the coast and divide South Vietnam in two. Two U.S. camps, however, at Duc Co and Plei Me in Pleiku province, obstructed that path. The NVA planned to attack those bases and lure an unsuspecting larger American or South Vietnamese force into a deadly ambush. In July 1965 Communist forces attacked Duc Co, and in October, they hit Plei Me, to the east of Chu Pong Massif, which was the NVA’s staging area for its attacks in the Central Highlands. In both assaults, the NVA regiments were mauled by American and South Vietnamese air power and limped back to their base camps to rest and prepare for their next operation. Units of the U.S. Army and South Vietnam’s forces, the Army of the Republic of Vietnam, had begun preparing for operations in the area prior to the Plei Me attack because of the enemy activity on the Cambodian border near Chu Pong Massif. The 1st Air Cav’s area of opera-

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VIETNAM

tions for the Ia Drang battles was in the province of Pleiku, which included a helicopter base at Camp Holloway. The airmobile force began its first real offensive operation on October 10 as part of Operation Shiny Bayonet, aimed at suspected NVA escape routes toward Cambodia. The 1st Cav troopers would wait in ambush while a larger ARVN unit drove the enemy into traps. Most enemy units, however, had already left the area set for the ambushes. After the attack on Plei Me, the United States retaliated with the Pleiku Campaign, which began on October 23 and lasted until November 25. The 1st Air Cav’s initial strategy was to use patrols in suspected enemy areas until contact was made. Then a quick reaction force would attack with aerial rocket artillery from Bell UH-1 “Huey” gunships and regular artillery batteries flown into local landing zones by Boeing CH-47 Chinook helicopters. On November 14 the 1st Battalion, 7th Cavalry (1-7), led by Lt. Col. Harold Moore, landed at X-Ray, at the base of the Chu Pong Massif— right at the NVA’s divisional base camp. Though quiet at first, within an hour, when a second airlift of troops arrived, the clearing erupted in gunfire from two Communist regiments on the mountain. For three days the North Vietnamese and the Americans fought it out, with Hueys fly-

CBS News Report: Battle of Ia Drang “Just six days ago, the people of America were jolted by an announcement. Our casualties in Vietnam in a single week had exceeded the average weekly dead and wounded in the Korean War,” pronounced Walter Cronkite at 10 p.m. on Tuesday, Nov. 30, 1965, during a CBS News special report on a battle in the Ia Drang Valley. An attack on the American Special Forces Camp at Plei Me on Oct. 19, 1965, had turned into a campaign for, perhaps, all of Vietnam. Correspondent Morley Safer, narrating film of his reporting at Ia Drang, told viewers that American casualty rates would be growing. U.S. ground troops— which came to Vietnam in March 1965 and had been mostly involved in battles with

ASSOCIATED PRESS, PHOTO BY RICK MERRON; OPPOSITE: CBS PHOTO ARCHIVE/GETTY IMAGES

ing medevac and resupply. Reinforcements arrived from the 7th Cavalry’s 2nd Battalion (2-7), commanded by Lt. Col. Robert McDade; the 5th Cavalry’s 2nd Battalion (2-5), under Lt. Col. Robert Tully; and Alpha Company, 1st Battalion, 5th Cavalry (A/1-5), under Captain George Forrest. On November 16, the 1-7, as well as units from the 2-7—Bravo Company and Alpha Company’s 3rd Platoon—were airlifted to Camp Holloway. The rest of the 2-7 and elements of the 2-5 and A/1-5 dug in for another night on X-Ray. On the morning of the 17th, units readied themselves to pull out of X-Ray. A bombing raid near the Chu Pong Massif and on X-Ray was scheduled for later that day by Boeing B-52 Stratofortress bombers, and all the units, almost 900 men, on X-Ray had to clear a 2-mile safety zone. The men began their march to nearby landing zones after briefings around 9 a.m. The orders were for 2-5, with about 500 men, to lead the procession out of X-Ray and move toward LZ Columbus, about 2 miles northeast. Ten minutes later, 2-7 and A/1-5 would follow, breaking off to LZ Albany, more north-northeast, closer to the Ia Drang. Earlier that morning, Captain Jim Spires, operations officer for 2-7, and Captain Weitzel, the aviation liaison officer, had taken a recon flight so Spires could select the small clearing for LZ Albany, which many cavalrymen assumed would be their extraction point.

N

ear LZ Albany, the 8th Battalion, 66th NVA Regiment, was waiting for orders after it had moved east of the Ia Drang. The North Vietnamese had dug defensive positions and were eating lunch around noon, when they got word from a scout of a company-size American force moving in their direction. Their commander, Lt. Col. Nguyen Hu An, hastily put his men into firing positions on the right flank of the 2nd Battalion, 7th Cavalry, which was strung out for 550 yards in triple-thick can-

Viet Cong insurgents—were now fighting large-scale professional forces of the North Vietnamese Army for the first time. Cronkite stated: “What the American public had not known until then, they know now: the United States is indeed at war—a full-dress war against a formidable enemy.” Up to that point 1,100 Americans had died in the war. In just over one month the Ia Drang battle and related fights had added 305 American dead to the toll. November 1965 was the deadliest month yet for the Americans, with 545 deaths. Safer described a “new kind of war” that began on November 16 when American troops in Ia Drang pulled back to leave the field open for B-52s of the Strategic Air Command, the first time the big bombers had been used to support ground troops. “They came in

opy along a narrow trail. When they paused, the NVA attacked, cutting the American column in two. The men, who had had little or no sleep for three days, moved into defensive positions and returned fire. As the NVA swept over the companies, they fought hand to hand for survival. At the front of the column the headquarters command group and the company officers, who had been called forward for a conference, established positions at a little clump of trees in the landing zone, the only ground they could hold. Farther back in the column, wherever men could find safety with others, they formed small perimeters to await help that they hoped would come from the air. Normally an infantry unit would secure a 360-degree perimeter around a landing zone to protect it, as was done at X-Ray, but with most of the units outside Albany, that was impossible. Alpha Company, 1st Battalion, 5th Cavalry, at the rear of the column, pulled out of the kill zone and found a small open area, enough for one helicopter, and moved to secure it. Captain Forrest called in medevacs to assist with his wounded, but pilots would not land, claiming the area wasn’t secure. Forrest told them, “I wouldn’t be standing here if it wasn’t secure.” With enemy fire all around him, Forrest was able to direct a helo in to pick up a few of

Morley Safer reports in Vietnam on the growing casualty rates in 1965. and plastered the Chu Pong Hills with thousands of bombs. The deadliest war machine in the world was cranking itself up against the toughest guerrilla army ever put in the field.” Recounting the ambush of American troops at landing zone Albany on November 17, Safer said: “The Americans and North Vietnamese lay side by side in the grass….It was a rare kind of combat—

the enemies facing each other sometimes only a few feet apart….Overall a very important point was made: that the U.S. infantryman, using established techniques, impromptu ingenuity and plenty of support in the air, can seek out and destroy the best guerrilla army in the world.” General William Westmoreland is seen congratulating his troops and calling the Plei Me–Ia Drang operation “the most successful so far.” At the end of the 30-minute broadcast, Safer offered his conclusions on the battle: “It taught us the value of mobility in fighting a guerrilla army. Our armed forces are prepared to take the necessary casualties in order to seek and destroy the enemy. The question remains: Are the American people prepared to lose more and more young men in Vietnam?”

DE C E MB E R 2 0 15

33

Chief Warrant Officers Gerald Towler (top) and Lee Komich of the 229th Assault Helicopter Battalion each flew three missions into Albany on the night of November 17.

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his wounded. Before night fell, three or four choppers landed to evacuate Alpha’s wounded and resupply the besieged company. The aviation group’s radio at Camp Holloway was abuzz with calls for support from 2nd Battalion, 7th Cavalry, at Albany. The battalion’s Bravo Company, under the command of Captain Myron Diduryk, just beginning its rest from the hard fight at X-Ray, was put on alert. Around 5:45 p.m., Bravo Company was mounting up to go to the rescue. At Holloway, Major Bennett, who commanded Charlie Company, 229th Assault Helicopter Battalion, led 12 Hueys from three companies of the 229th on rescue flights to Albany. He had four helicopters from Charlie, four from 2nd Platoon, Alpha Company, under Captain James Wall, and four from 2nd Platoon, Bravo Company, under Captain Robert Stinnett. They flew to the Albany area around 6 p.m., with the sky just becoming dark. Chief Warrant Officer 2 Gerald Towler remembered: “The LZ was adequate for maybe 12 ships to land during daylight. Albany was a grassy field that sloped gently downward to the left. A large clump of trees arose from the center of the field dotted by numerous anthills and scrub brush. This is where the battalion commander had set up his command post.” Flying overhead, Henry Ainsworth, a chief warrant officer 4 in a command-and-control Huey for the 2nd Battalion, 7th Cavalry, guided Bennett’s choppers to the LZ. At around 6:10, Bennett recalled: “Artillery was firing, there were Air Force A-1s zooming in and out, dropping ordnance, rockets, tracers, flares. The whole thing was brilliantly lit up.” After two attempted landings thwarted by the confusion from all the lights and tracers— and further complicated by the North Vietnamese using captured U.S. radios to disrupt American communications—Bennett ordered the pilots to break into sections of two and come in one behind the other. “Finally, a guy on the ground started blinking a pocket flashlight, and one of us picked it up,” Bennett said. “We followed that thin red beam of light in, almost like an instrument approach.” At dusk, Captain Weitzel, the helicopter unit’s liaison on the ground with the besieged 7th Cavalry battalion, began taking turns with battalion operations officer Spires, battalion executive officer Major Frank Henry and Captain

Joel Sugdinis of Alpha Company on trips into the middle of the landing zone, outside their defensive position. They shined a small hand flashlight so the pilots could see the LZ. “All the time we received intense small-arms fire,” Weitzel said. After he saw that the first two landing attempts had been aborted, he got on his radio. “I talked to the pilots on approach with direction on when to bottom the pitch, flare, etc.,” said Weitzel. As Bennett and his co-pilot, Warrant Officer 1 Tom Gehman, made their first landing attempt, enemy rounds pelted their fuselage. Captain Donald Piotrowski, who piloted the first Huey to land, said the helos were taking fire through the roof and later learned that NVA troops were “tied to the tops of trees, firing down on us as we made our approach.” The helicopters landed, and gunners and crew chiefs dumped the needed supplies from each aircraft, then jumped out and started loading the wounded. Once loaded, the helos had to pitch forward to pick up speed to take LEFT: COURTESY LEE KOMICH; ABOVE: ASSOCIATED PRESS, PHOTO BY PETER ARNETT

Albany followed on the heels of another massive fight in the Ia Drang Valley at LZ X-Ray, where wounded were loaded onto Hueys on Nov. 16, 1965.

off. The next two helicopters lined up, ready to come in as soon as the loaded Hueys left the area, with about 30 to 45 seconds between lifts. Meanwhile, the 50-plus men from Diduryk’s Bravo Company were dismounting and rejoining their fellow troops from the 2nd Battalion, 7th Cavalry. Watching the landing unfold from his position inside the copse in the middle of the landing zone, 1st Lt. Larry Gwin, the executive officer of the battalion’s Alpha Company, saw the arrival of 1st Lt. Rick Rescorla, the leader of Bravo’s 1st Platoon. “[Rescorla’s] enthusiasm and high spirits were infectious, and before long the original defenders were feeling better and full of fight,” Gwin said. Another veteran remembered Rescorla “running around hitting men on the helmet yelling, ‘Let’s go! Let’s go!’ motivating all in the perimeter to fight.”

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s the battle raged around Albany, the pilots of the helicopter battalion at Camp Holloway were settling in for the evening. Captain Stinnett of the 229th Battalion’s Bravo Company went to the pilots’ billets and asked those who had just returned from Albany whether any of them would volunteer for another mission. “I need a crew for my aircraft and a second aircraft to go with me,” he said. “Hell, I’ve just had a shower, I’m clean enough to go,” said Chief Warrant Officer 2 Lee Komich. Towler and Chief Warrant Officer 2 Kenneth Dicus volunteered as well. Two other crews a few miles away at LZ Colum-

bus had been asked for volunteers, too. Robert Kiess, Dallas Harper and Donald Reynolds, each a chief warrant officer 2, and Warrant Officer 1 Robert Mason loaded medical supplies, water and ammunition into their Hueys and lifted off around 10 p.m. When they arrived at Albany it was pitch black, except for the fires from napalm strikes and tracers arcing over what they thought was the landing zone. They hovered at 2,000 feet to get their bearings, spotted the flashlight beam and began their run. Komich said that all of the aircrafts’ external lights were turned off and the crews used the dashboard lights of the helicopter ahead of them as a guide. “Few besides those who were there believe that, but that technique got us both in and out [alive] that night,” Komich said. Stinnett was the first to land, followed by Kiess and Mason and then Komich and Towler. By that time, there was too much fire coming into the LZ to get another bird in safely, so DE C E MB E R 2 0 15

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Harper and Reynolds had to orbit the area. Stinnett, with the wounded in, supplies unloaded and his ship suffering multiple hits, announced that he was taking off and making a 180 turn, coming back over the other two choppers. While Komich waited for the wounded to be loaded, the landing zone suddenly became the center of a field of fire. Someone next to Komich’s window yelled, “Get out!” and dived for cover. “There was a WHAP and it sounded like he was hit,” Komich said. “The tracers laced the LZ, and we left without one of our crew chiefs. He was recovered the next day after fighting as a grunt that night.” As Komich lifted off, he reported to Stinnett that smoke was spewing from Stinnett’s Huey. “Stay with me,” Stinnett replied. They made it back safely, but his damaged bird was grounded. Around midnight Komich and Towler were called into action a third time. They led three ships, minus the Stinnett and Dicus chopper, back to Albany, and the crews made another successful run.

7th Cavalry: 1876 and 1965 By James T. Lawrence

M

uch has been made of the fact that on Nov. 17, 1965, in the jungles of Vietnam, the 2nd Battalion of the 7th Cavalry Regiment, my unit, almost suffered the same fate as Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer’s 7th Cavalry on the plains of Montana, June 25, 1876. The key word here is “almost.”

BATTLEGROUND SIMILARITIES. Custer’s 7th Cavalry was annihilated on the banks of a river, the Little Bighorn. The 7th Cav troops in Vietnam were ambushed at Landing Zone Albany, near the Ia Drang. Custer was outnumbered, maybe 10 to 1. The troops at LZ Albany were outnumbered, maybe 6 or 7 to 1. Custer had

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t 2 a.m. a call went out to the 229th Assault Helicopter Battalion for another flight to Albany. Bennett, the battalion’s Charlie Company commander, was rousted from his bunk in Pleiku by the operations officer. “The wounded aren’t going to make it,” he told Bennett. “They’re crying for ammunition.” “I told him I’d fly it and asked him to get another crew to go with us,” Bennett said. Gehman, Bennett’s co-pilot from the first flight into Albany, went with him. The situation was worse. American jets were taking turns bombing and firing into enemy positions. Bennett warned Weitzel that they couldn’t find a suitable place to land and were low on fuel. They requested to come back in daylight. Weitzel said that if they waited until morning, there might not be anyone left to help. According to Weitzel, “Bennett gave it one more shot and broke through the chaos, landed and stayed on the LZ until all the wounded were aboard.” Bennett’s yellow “low fuel” warning lights began to flicker. The tanks would be empty in 20 minutes. “If we beelined it back to Pleiku, that was probably close to 15 minutes,” Bennett said. He waited patiently for the loading to be completed and took off. Bennett recalled that his Huey could carry its complement of four crewmen plus five or six others, but on that night he believed that it must have carried more. After Komich’s third landing, Weitzel called for one more pickup of wounded. Ainsworth offered to go to Albany. It was the fifth and final combat mission into Albany for the night. As dawn broke on November 18, the survivors at Albany found

limited intelligence and was surprised by the size and strength of the forces at the Indian encampment. The 7th Cav battalion moving into Albany had limited intelligence and was surprised by North Vietnamese forces camped there. It was attacked by regular soldiers of the NVA 8th Battalion, 66th Regiment, and the 1st and 3rd battalions of the 33rd Regiment.

But apparently Custer was egotistical enough to believe that he and his 7th Cavalry were invincible. At Albany, the 7th Cav burned a storage hut on its way to the landing zone. The plume of smoke in the jungle announced the Cav’s presence and location. Delta Company’s recon patrol, in the lead position, and Alpha Company were both moving in a tactical formation, MISTAKES MADE. Custer divided his prepared to go into battle, but much of forces, sending Captain Frederick the column behind them was moving in Benteen one way and Major Marcus administrative formation, a more relaxed Reno another. Additionally, Custer’s march used when enemy contact is not troops weren’t properly supplied. They expected. Troops had been told that were too far from their pack train. they were moving to a landing zone to be picked up and flown back to base camp. When two NVA prisoners were captured Custer’s by elements of the recon personal battle platoon, the column flag that he took halted and took an to Little Bighorn. administrative break. Why stop? The troopers were hot, hungry and

that the NVA had left the area. The grim task of recovering the bodies and the rest of the wounded began. Years after the battle, Captain Weitzel pointed out that two out of three men who walked into Albany didn’t walk out. Piotrowski said the cries of the wounded could be “heard over the whine of the turbine and the insulation of the flight helmets— tough to forget.” But, he added, “All wounded were evacuated to Pleiku in record time.” A grimmer task went to the Chinook crews, ordered that day to fly out the dead. The battle at Albany had ended, just before Thanksgiving 1965, adding the names of 155 Americans to the growing list of those killed in Vietnam, accompanied by 124 wounded. Later the next day, the Hueys came back and flew the rest of 2nd Battalion, 7th Cavalry, and Alpha Company, 1st Battalion, 5th Cavalry, to another landing zone and then to Camp Holloway. Every Huey that landed at Albany was hit, but none was brought down. One crewman was slightly wounded. Considering the amount of fire in the landing zone area, many of the

sleep-deprived, and they assumed that the battle was over, that the 7th Cav’s 1st Battalion, had killed all the “bad guys” on nearby LZ X-Ray. Finally, when lead elements of the 2nd Battalion reached Albany’s clearing, all the companies were “beheaded,” their commanders and radio operators called forward, presumably for deployment around the landing zone. WHAT HAPPENED. On “Last Stand Hill,”

Custer and the men of 7th Cavalry companies C, E, F, I and L were wiped out by a superior force. At Albany, the enemy also had several major battlefield advantages—firepower, concealment and, most important, the element of surprise. The initial phase of the fight favored the NVA. But the battle turned. The soldiers of the 2nd Battalion survived and rallied. Alpha Company, Delta Company’s recon platoon, elements of the command group and some stragglers from Delta organized in a group of trees between the two clearings that made up the landing zone and defended the front of the

chopper crewmen to this day still wonder how they managed to carry out their dangerous mission and survive. But the battles in the Ia Drang Valley demonstrated that the helicopter was a formidable weapon and a crucial asset to American forces in Vietnam. ★ Dan Reed, a history teacher in Lorain County, Ohio, researched LZ Albany and the changing strategy of U.S. policy in Vietnam while earning a master’s degree in history and government.

column. Pockets of troops from Delta, Charlie and Headquarters companies organized and resisted in the overrun column. Captain George Forrest’s Alpha Company, 1st Battalion, 5th Cavalry, did the same at the rear of the column. The momentum shifted. The Americans went from being attacked to defending to attacking. When the Albany battle was over that November afternoon, the dead included many more NVA than Americans. Recent North Vietnamese records have indicated that more NVA senior officers died on Albany than on X-Ray because so many North Vietnamese, from “cooks to colonels,” rushed in to participate in the anticipated massacre of the Americans. At X-Ray, the 1st Battalion, 7th Cavalry, counted 79 soldiers killed and 121 wounded in 2½ days of combat. At Albany, 155 American soldiers died, and 124 were wounded in roughly eight hours. (All 210 men from the five companies under Custer’s command at the Little Bighorn were killed. Additional

OPPOSITE: HERITAGE AUCTIONS, DALLAS; ABOVE: ASSOCIATED PRESS, PHOTO BY PETER ARNETT

The fight at Albany left 155 Americans dead and 124 wounded, who were carried out by cavalrymen and evacuated in record time.

deaths nearby of men under Reno’s command put the total 7th Cavalry deaths at more than 260.) THE DIFFERENCES. Pretty simple: Custer didn’t have artillery support and two Douglas A-1E Skyraiders overhead, armed with rockets, bombs and napalm. And at Albany, there were no egos. Troopers were “down for the count,” but they found their resolve and fought back, and in the end they prevailed. After dark, the NVA withdrew, probably back into Cambodia, and changed tactics. It has been suggested that the enemy took a new approach to fighting the Americans after Albany. I believe they realized the U.S. Army could fight with tenacity when confronted. I think they felt that they had met their match.

1st Lt. James T. Lawrence was a 24-yearold executive officer of Delta Company in November 1965. Adapted from Reflections on LZ Albany: The Agony of Vietnam, 2014, Deeds Publishing.

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HOME FOR THE

HOLIDAYS TROOPS IN THE WAR WHO CELEBRATED CHRISTMAS TRIED TO BRING A LITTLE BIT OF HOME TO VIETNAM FOR THE HOLIDAYS

The iconic pop culture image of Santa Claus, which troops carried with them as they dressed for the part in Vietnam Christmas events, was largely the product of the Coca-Cola Co., specifically artist Haddon Sundblom, whose original creations appeared in Coke ads from 1931 to 1964 (and were the basis of ads in future years).

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THE ADVERTISING ARCHIVES/ALAMY

A South Vietnamese Christmas tree seller hopes to make a deal with an Australian soldier at a Saigon outdoor market in December 1966.

Arthur Wallis, a corporal in the Australian army, is ready for carving duty as he eyes the hams that will be served for Christmas dinner in 1970 at Nui Dat, a base in South Vietnam.

The idyllic view of a 1960s holiday dinner is shown in this photograph of an unidentified family. TOP: WS COLLECTION/ALAMY; BOTTOM: CLASSIC STOCK/ALAMY; OPPOSITE: BETTMANN/CORBIS

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TKTKTKKTKTKTKTKTKTKTKKTKTKTKTK

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ROLLS PRESS/POPPERFOTO/GETTY IMAGES; OPPOSITE, TOP: BETTMANN/CORBIS; BOTTOM: EVERETT COLLECTION/ALAMY TKTKTKKTKTKTKTKTKTKTKKTKTKTKTK

Nestled in a sandbagged trench, American soldiers decorate a tree at Duc Lap, South Vietnam, in December 1969.

A chaplain conducts Christmas services in 1969 at the Cu Chi base on the outskirts of Saigon.

President Lyndon B. Johnson poses for a Christmas Eve 1968 photo with, from left, Luci Johnson Nugent, holding Lyn Nugent, Lady Bird Johnson and Lynda Johnson Robb, holding Lucinda Robb. Sons-in-law Patrick Nugent and Charles Robb were serving in Vietnam.

Santa (actually a U.S. soldier) hands out new “Skipper” dolls to South Vietnamese children in 1965. Skipper, introduced in 1964 by Mattel Inc., is Barbie’s little sister.

A young boy checks out his new pedal car in this photograph from the 1960s.

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TKTKTKKTKTKTKTKTKTKTKKTKTKTKTK

American troops enjoy a peaceful moment on Dec. 25, 1967, at Hill 875 near Dak To, South Vietnam. They had faced a major attack by the North Vietnamese Army just days earlier.

TOP LEFT: WILLIAM JAMES WARREN/SCIENCE FACTION/CORBIS; BOTTOM LEFT :M&N/ALAMY; ABOVE: CORR/AFP/GETTY IMAGES

A crew member mans twin .50-caliber machine guns as one of the Navy’s “Apocalypse” boats in River Division 53 patrols the Mekong Delta near My Tho in 1967.

WATER WARRIORS In the rivers and canals of the Mekong Delta, Navy patrol boats chased down and destroyed the enemy By David Sears

A

S MONSOON CONDITIONS SWEPT ACROSS

South Vietnam in September 1966, the deluge flooding the Mekong Delta presented an opportunity to the U.S. Navy: High waters allowed speedy river patrol boats to operate in normally unreachable areas while restricting the Viet Cong’s mobility and reducing ground cover for attacks. Navy Lt. Cmdr. Morton E. Toole, commander of River Division 53, established a 24-hour patrol near Ngo Hiep Island, 15 miles west of My Tho, a delta town southwest of Saigon. He hoped to head off the Viet Cong trying to infiltrate the Plain of Reeds south into Kien Hoa province. Late in the afternoon of October 31, Boatswain’s Mate 1st Class James E. “Willy” Williams, patrol officer for Patrol Boat, River 105 and PBR-107, part of River Section 531 (RS-531), spotted two small sampans motoring out of the Nam Thon, a branch of the Mekong River. With PBR-107 covering, Williams’ PBR-105 approached to inspect one craft, only to have its lone occupant fire at his boat and flee into a narrow canal. The 105 and 107 crews opened up with bow- and stern-mounted .50-caliber machine guns but almost at once were hit by crossfire from the second sampan. Its occupants dove into the water but were killed. Williams knew his patrol boats couldn’t follow the escaping sampan into the canal, but he spotted a possible shortcut that would enable him to cut off the sampan at a point where it would have to return to the river. As he completed the detour, Williams turned at top speed to intercept his foe in the sampan. But he ran into something else: “I looked up and didn’t see nothing but boats and people,” Williams said in a 1998 interview. And they had guns. The Halloween action was just beginning. As the Mekong River crosses from Cambodia into South Vietnam, it fans into four additional branches—the My Tho, Ham Luong, Co Chien LARRY BURROWS/TIME MAGAZINE/THE LIFE PICTURE COLLECTION/GETTY IMAGES

and Hau Giang (also known as the Bassac)— which feed the Mekong Delta south of Saigon. Only one major road coursed the delta, so travel, commerce and governance depended on ready access to the region’s rivers, canals and streams. That area was vital to both the South Vietnamese government and the Viet Cong. Vietnamese navy patrols, supported by American Navy advisers and aircraft, targeted VC infiltration of the region via the South China Sea as part of Operation Market Time, which formally began in March 1965 and continued through the end of the war. Additionally, a U.S. Navy fact-finding report in 1964 had identified the Mekong Delta as another “easily penetrable waterway route.” The report prompted the creation of a token U.S. river patrol force equipped with converted amphibious landing craft. Meanwhile, the Navy began to build a more substantial river force. It contracted for 120 (later expanded to 250) patrol boats, designated the Mark 1, a 31-foot fiberglass-hulled craft propelled by two Jacuzzi water-jet pumps. A later version of the patrol boat, the Mark 2, became known for its appearance in the 1979 movie Apocalypse Now. The boat transported Captain Benjamin L. Willard, Martin Sheen’s character, in the hunt for Colonel Walter E. Kurtz, portrayed by Marlon Brando. DE C E M B E R 2 015

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MOST HONORED James E. “Willy” Williams is the most decorated enlisted sailor in Navy history, according to the U.S. Navy Memorial Foundation. Williams, born in Fort Mill, South Carolina, on Nov. 13, 1930, enlisted in 1947, served in Korea and Vietnam and retired from the Navy in 1967. He died on Oct. 13, 1999. A guided missile destroyer commissioned in 2004 was named after Williams. His decorations include: • Medal of Honor • Navy Cross • Silver Star (with gold star) • Legion of Merit (with “V” for valor) • Navy and Marine Corps Medal (gold star) • Bronze Star (“V” for valor, two gold stars) • Navy and Marine Corps Commendation Medal (“V” for valor, gold star)

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Each patrol boat was armed with twin .50-caliber machine guns forward and a single .30-caliber machine gun aft (later replaced by a .50-caliber gun). The boat also carried a light machine gun or grenade launcher amidships. But there was little armor protection. The four-man crew’s combat tactics were based on stealth, speed, maneuverability and firepower. In December 1965 the Navy created a unit called Task Force 116 and began recruiting volunteer boat crews to establish river patrols, which began in mid-1966. Training was initially haphazard. “The Navy was in a big hurry to get in-country,” said Charlie Verales, then a lieutenant junior grade and among the first volunteers for service in Vietnam. But as it rushed the boats into war, “the Navy had no idea of the dangers to be faced, the tactics required to survive,” said another volunteer, Fred McDavitt, a lieutenant.

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eginning in March 1966, the first units deployed to Southeast Asia for Operation Game Warden, an effort to interdict enemy arms, supplies and troops and prevent the Viet Cong from taxing the population. The Navy created two subsidiary task groups, one in the Mekong Delta, the other in the Rung Sat area, closer to Saigon. McDavitt and Verales’ RS-531, one of the first delta units, went operational in midJune 1966, eventually running round-the-clock patrols in 12-hour shifts with 10 patrol boats and roughly 50 officers, petty officers and sailors. Implementing this new Mekong “police beat” presented many problems, including cultural ones. McDavitt, the officer in charge, recalled: “We set up a sunset-to-sunrise curfew on a river where for the past 1,000 years people had been running sampans with the tide. Telling the people they could no longer go to the market until after sunrise did not have them applauding.” Complicating their work, the new river police lacked maps of their roughly 40-mile-long beat from My Tho west to Vinh Long. “Charlie Verales talked an Army helicopter pilot into flying us up and down the Mekong,” McDavitt said. “We took pictures with our own cameras and sent a set back to a mapping agency in Washington.” Equipment problems also plagued the boat crews. Steel-hulled Navy ships servicing the patrol boats dinged their fiberglass; snakes and foliage fouled pumps; and humidity corroded metal parts. The armored forward turret made the boats too bow-heavy, reducing their speed. Boat crews

Sampans loaded with armed Viet Cong are sculled through a canal in South Vietnam in 1966.

removed the armor even though “there were screams from [the military brass and politicians in] Saigon, Hawaii and Washington,” McDavitt said. Perhaps the biggest challenge was deciding who would perform which jobs. A typical patrol consisted of two boats. A patrol officer, aboard one of the boats, was in command of both, and each craft had a boat captain at the wheel, while other crewmen manned the guns and engine equipment. “The original plan was that chief and first class petty officer boatswain’s mates would be the boat captains,” recalled Chester B. “Chet” Smith, then a 26-year-old first class signalman assigned to RS-531. “The patrol officers would all be junior officers”—lieutenants or lieutenants junior grade. But soon chief petty officers had to take on patrol officer responsibilities because of manpower constraints. Some chiefs resisted the riskier assignment, Smith remembers. They almost had enough time to retire, he said, “and this was hot country.” Even a gung-ho chief could be a poor fit for the patrol officer position. Frank Spatt, a 32-year-old first class radioman, recalled a chief boatswain’s mate named Caldwell: “He took out two patrols and each time got stuck on a sandbar. They called it Caldwell’s Corner.” LEFT: COURTESY DAVID SEARS; ABOVE: ASSOCIATED PRESS

In the end it was assignment of the fittest. Boat captain Willy Williams, a burly 36-year-old South Carolinian, easily stood out. During the Korean War he had shuttled U.S. and South Korean coastal raiders from an island base off North Korea. “From a combat standpoint, there really wasn’t anyone better,” McDavitt said. Spatt’s unforgettable introduction to Williams’ skills came on a July 1 “familiarization patrol,” just after RS-531 crews had moved into their My Tho facilities. Williams was at the helm, and 20-year-old Seaman Rubin Binder, who grew up on New York’s Coney Island, the son of Holocaust survivors, was stationed at PBR-105’s bow .50-caliber guns. Spatt was assigned the stern .30-caliber gun. Hours into the patrol, with orders to watch out for a VC night-shift taxman, Williams picked up a radar blip. When Rubin turned on the spotlight attached to his guns, it lit up a 12-foot sampan. The rules of engagement were explicit: Don’t shoot unless shot at. But just then, the sampan occupants opened fire. In a heartbeat, Binder unleashed the .50s, and Williams kicked in the Jacuzzi jets. With tracers flying, the Mark 1 bore down on the sampan. Williams swung the patrol boat just short of collision, throwing a rooster tail that nearly swamped the sampan and left the stern so high that Spatt couldn’t depress the .30 caliber. Instead, he reached for a shotgun, pulled the slide, aimed and fired. When the noise and smoke settled, five sampan occupants were dead and four others had escaped. The sampan contained tax collection instructions, tax rolls and account books. Three weeks later Williams was at it again, this time staging a close-in night ambush that killed six Viet Cong and netted contraband and key intelligence documents. Williams advanced to patrol officer, as did former crew members Smith and Spatt. “They sort of followed Williams’ example,” McDavitt said.

“You could go patrol in the center of the Mekong River and nobody would ever bother you.” Or you could run less than a hundred yards offshore, he added, “and get your ass in trouble. And that’s where Williams lived.” By August, with Market Time coastal patrols pinching the Viet Cong in the Rung Sat, the action intensified in the Mekong Delta. Near midnight on August 22, after Williams’ patrol took rifle fire from a river-crossing sampan, the boat’s crew killed two top-ranking officers from the Viet Cong 261st Main Force Battalion, setting the scene for the October 31 showdown with the same VC unit. As darkness approached that Halloween night, Williams found himself in the midst of a Viet Cong staging area with no way out except straight ahead. When Williams was caught in a crossfire, his favorite trick was “to run up the middle and have his forward .50s shoot from one side and the after .50 shoot from the other,” McDavitt said. When that happened, “the enemy were shooting themselves across the river,” he said. “Fire came from all directions,” Williams related in the 1998 interview. “But their aim was off. We get through this area and I’m trying to hightail it back. We got around the next corner and by God, DE C E M B E R 2 015

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there’s another staging area. I did whatever I could to get them off our backs.” McDavitt, who was in the tactical operations center then, said that “Williams’ ‘signature’ in these situations was to turn his microphone on while the forward .50s were going off.” Commander Toole, also in the operations center, recalled “hearing Willie come on the radio with his engine throttles wide open and guns blazing.” Williams told McDavitt and Toole, “I got more people shooting at me than I’ve ever seen in my life.” McDavitt said Williams then “did his typical thing: Ran in to see what was going on [while another] boat covered for him. Then both

River Patrol Boats

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MARK 1

MARK 2

CREW Four (boat captain, seaman, gunner’s mate, engineman)

CREW Four (boat captain, seaman,gunner’s mate, engineman)

WEIGHT 7.4 tons

WEIGHT 8 tons

LENGTH 31 ft.

LENGTH 32 ft.

BEAM 10 ft. 7 in.

BEAM 11 ft. 7 ½ in.

DRAFT 1 ft. 10 ½ in.

DRAFT 2 ft.

SPEED 25-30 knots

SPEED 25-30 knots

FUEL CAPACITY 160 gallons

FUEL CAPACITY 160 gallons

ARMAMENT

ARMAMENT

FORWARD

FORWARD

One twin .50-caliber machine gun mount in a rotating tub

One twin .50-caliber machine gun mount in a rotating tub

ENGINE COVER

ENGINE COVER

One M60 machine gun, one Mark 18 40mm grenade launcher

Two M60 machine guns, one Mark 19 40mm grenade launcher

STERN

STERN

One .50-caliber machine gun, one 40mm Mark 18 grenade launcher

One .50-caliber machine gun

VIETN AM

retracted, talked it over and went back in. They kept doing this until they essentially ran out of ammunition, so they called in the Seawolves [Navy helicopters] from Can Tho.” McDavitt, meanwhile, dispatched support craft “carrying as much ammunition as they could.” In three hours, Williams’ patrol, augmented by additional patrol boats and the Seawolf helos, destroyed or captured 65 enemy boats. Clothing, debris and large pools of blood covered the area. It was RS-531’s heaviest action to date—“the Olympics,” McDavitt declared.

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eadly moves and countermoves continued in the delta. “We were like a couple of boxers,” Verales said. “We throw a hook and they gotta counter with something.” On December 11 Chet Smith’s PBR-98 followed a suspected Viet Cong sampan into a narrow canal and was ambushed—the beginning of a four-hour engagement. After suppressing fire from six concealed heavy-weapons positions, Smith and his cover boat routed a company-size VC force. A supporting Seawolf rocket attack on a camouflaged bunker exploded a large ammunition cache. Thus far these engagements had not resulted in severe American casualties. The patrol craft “were extremely capable boats, but surprise was the biggest thing we had going for us,” Smith said. That advantage faded with the new year. On Jan. 15, 1967, again patrolling the Nam Thon, Williams tangled once more with the Viet Cong. Spatt, who was off duty, went to the tactical operations center and heard Williams report that he had come across a large Viet Cong force. “He requested an ammo supply,” Spatt recalled. “My boat was already fueled and armed.” Spatt and his crew loaded extra ammunition and left without a cover boat because it was being repaired. They met up with Williams and his cover-boat captain, Terrell Carter. Williams and Carter had interrupted the infiltration of three Viet Cong heavy-weapons companies. “Stuff was flying everywhere,” Spatt said. “There were VC all over the shore and in sampans. Artillery and mortars were dropping in. A helo was overhead spraying the area. I managed to rearm both boats, but then my forward gunner, a kid named Tony Angelo, got hit and my pumps got jammed with debris.” As Spatt struggled to clear the patrol boat’s pumps, Williams’ and Carter’s boats also took casualties. “Willy was hit in the back, and Terry took a hit right through his helmet,” Spatt said. Again out of ammunition and in need of medical aid, the crews of the Williams and Carter boats withdrew to My Tho. After finally clearing the pumps, Spatt followed. “By the time we got back,” he said, “Terry Carter had died, and Williams was already medevaced to Japan.” Carter was RS-531’s first combat fatality. More would be coming, especially after tour rotations, when seasoned crewmen left and new ones arrived. On March 11, 1967, Lt. j.g. David G. Kearney arrived at My Tho to serve as an operations center officer, but he was eager to see the patrol boats in action and went on a “familiarization ride” with Spatt’s day patrol. When the boat was almost to Vinh Long, Spatt recalled, “we stop a big junk, and I board it.” Seaman Rene Garcia was at the coxswain station. Tony Angelo was on the stern .50-caliber gun and Boatswain’s Mate 3rd Class Bill Jarvis on the bow guns. “All the Vietnamese are up on the junk’s top deck so the gunners can watch them,” Spatt said. “I started to crawl down below to see what’s down there when I heard this ‘crack, crack.’ By the time I pop back up, our .50s are going off. A sniper on shore had fired twice. One bullet hit Garcia right in the jaw. The kid was in shock, blood running out of his face. Kearney had a flak jacket on, but it was open, and the second bullet hit him straight in the chest and

killed him. The sniper was long gone. I called in a medevac. That helo—those guys had balls—came right down on the beach, evacuated Garcia and even took Kearney’s body.” RS-531’s combat reputation emboldened new arrivals, among them 31-year-old Lieutenant Charles D. “Don” Witt, who replaced McDavitt as the officer in charge. Witt was due to report in March but showed up in February, hoping, he told McDavitt, to operate with RS-531’s veterans before his own men arrived. As Spatt remembers, Witt also wanted “to scare up some action.” After McDavitt rotated home in March, Witt joined Spatt on a day patrol. “We surprised a group of VC,” Spatt said. “Our guns were ready, and we killed them all. We called in artillery, withdrew and watched the fireworks from the main river. We had no casualties. It all happened so fast and so easily that we couldn’t believe it.” When his patrol returned that day, Spatt learned that he and Smith (both now chief petty officers) would leave for Saigon the next day, their tours unexpectedly completed a few days early. That evening, Spatt cautioned Witt: “I tried to make him understand that the morning’s action was ‘too easy,’ an anomaly.” On May 24, patrol boats 101 and 106, with Witt in command, probed the Ham Luong River, unfamiliar territory southeast of My Tho. They were on the lookout for a suspected VC unit of some 3,000 men when PBR-101 got stuck on a sandbar in a narrow channel, recalled Seaman Mike Devlin, who was stationed at the aft .50-caliber gun. “We were nonchalant,” he said, “waiting for the tide to lift us, when I heard the bees”—machine guns. Early rounds killed PBR-101’s amidships gunner and wounded Devlin. Enemy recoilless rifle fire then joined the ambush. An explosive round struck the bow, killing the forward gunner, the helmsman and Witt. Another recoilless round struck PBR-106 amidships, killing a Vietnamese policeman and wounding the boat captain and another crewman. A wounded Devlin struggled to reach 101’s helm only to see that “everybody was dead.” The steering system wouldn’t respond, but Devlin somehow backed the port engine to finally get 101 clear and out of range. The deaths of four men and the wounding of four more in a single firefight was a sobering blow. The element of surprise that marked the first months of RS-531’s Game Warden experience was gone, and with it went some of the improvisation and aggressiveness of the early crews. BETTMANN/CORBIS

In his book War in the Shallows, John Sherwood, a historian with the Naval History and Heritage Command, describes how “the PBRs had an uncanny ability to surprise, engage, and kill large numbers of Viet Cong whenever the enemy exposed himself.” But by 1967, he notes, “the enemy was also becoming much more careful about troop and supply movements, making it much more difficult for Game Warden forces to score the kind of successes” they had achieved initially. In October 1968 the operation’s patrol boats were combined with other units into a new program called Sealords (Southeast Asia Lake, Ocean, River and Delta Strategy), which set up a string of small bases and patrols along waterways near the Cambodian border to block enemy shipments of troops and supplies into South Vietnam. The early days of Operation Game Warden brought many valor awards. Rubin Binder (who died in 2006), Chet Smith and Willy Williams received Purple Hearts. Binder’s awards included a Navy Commendation Medal and two Bronze Star medals. Silver Stars were presented to Frank Spatt (now a retired Navy lieutenant) for the Jan. 15, 1967, action and Smith (a retired Navy captain) for the Dec. 11, 1966, action; Mike Devlin received one for his heroics on May 24,1967. Smith was awarded a Navy Cross for the December 11 engagement. Williams received the Medal of Honor for the Halloween 1966 battle. On May 14, 1968, when President Lyndon B. Johnson draped the medal’s ribbon on Williams’ shoulders, it was clear the recipient’s physique impressed the commander in chief. “How’d you get that big neck?” Johnson asked a beaming Williams. ★

A shallow-hulled river patrol boat goes out for a run on June 16, 1969.

David Sears was a Navy officer in Vietnam. He has also written for sister publications MHQ, World War II and Aviation History. DE C E M B E R 2 015

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Conservatives launched a counterattack on the antiwar movement during the Nixon administration By Sandra Scanlon

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At the “Honor America Day” pro-war rally in Washington on July 4, 1970, marijuana activists show up for a “smoke-in.”

GETTY IMAGES, PHOTO BY DAVID FENTON

ach president who dealt with Vietnam understood that military intervention would have far-reaching political ramifications. Both John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson sought to avoid a debate on Americanization of the conflict precisely because they realized that the complexities of any strategy would invite both opportunistic political challenges and sincere questioning of policy. Johnson attempted to rally the public behind his policies by deflecting political challenges and insisting on bipartisan support of American war aims. He also presented U.S. strategy within the widely understood contours of the Cold War consensus (in which both Democrats and Republicans backed strong efforts to contain communism). Johnson’s conservative critics continually harangued him for not fully explaining the goals of the United States and the importance of the war to national security. Popular support for Johnson’s handling of the war had plummeted by 1968, but the extent to which people remained committed to success in Vietnam was more difficult to measure. Traditional conceptions of how to express patriotism and a commitment to legitimizing the service of those who died in the war limited the acceptance of antiwar arguments. A majority of Americans did not endorse conservatives’ interpretation of the purpose or significance of the war. Many people, however, did take to the streets in support of the war effort and helped redefine the meaning of success in America’s struggle in Southeast Asia. President Richard M. Nixon understood, perhaps better than many of his contemporaries, the importance of harnessing the forces of pro-war sentiment for whatever policy he purDE C E MB E R 2 0 15

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sonal letters and gift packages to soldiers, pro-administration petitions and “Support Our Boys” rallies in towns across America. Vocal backers of the war talked about an unholy alliance between the North Vietnamese and the antiwar movement. Vice President Spiro T. Agnew and California Gov. Ronald Reagan were among the many public figures who called attention to the support for the Moratorium expressed by North Vietnam’s premier, Pham Van Dong. Hanoi’s depiction of the protests as “a timely rebuff” to the Nixon administration, the description of American deaths in Vietnam as useless and the praise lavished on the antiwar Students for a Democratic Society in North Vietnam’s official publication, Nhan Dan, heightened U.S. antipathy toward the dissenters. In early October an article that appeared in Nhan Dan described American th wi n tio cia so protesters as “our heroic comrades-in-arms.” Country music’s as Reagan declared that many of those marching ous in the name of peace “carry the flag of a nation patriotism was furthered by fam which has killed almost 40,000 of our young nters. se dis ar tiw an ng sti ba lam s ng men.” He demanded that all loyal Americans so support the president: “Those entrusted with the immense responsibility for the leadership of our nation deserve not only our support but our rejection of those in our streets who arrogantly kibitz in a game where they groups demonstrating in support of Nixon’s haven’t even seen the cards with which the game is played.” Such attacks Vietnam policies. Civic and veterans groups would continue for the remainder of the war and become a rationale for concentrated less on the substance of adminAmerican military failure after the war. Late 1969 marked the high point istration policy in Vietnam than on the symof popular activism against the antiwar movement, activism that had bolism attached to the war. Putting forward been steadily growing since 1967. a specific vision of patriotism, organizations The week of Veterans Day 1969 saw many Americans respond to Govcontrasted those dutifully serving their counernor Reagan’s “call to arms.” One of the more well publicized of these try in Vietnam (and by extension those loyinitiatives was a weeklong campaign that originated with two groups, one ally applauding their service) with people entirely ad hoc, the other more established in the field of interpreting and actively opposing the war. promoting patriotism. The motto of the American Legion, “For National Unity Week was conceived by Edmund Dombrowski, an God and Country Support Our Boys in Vietorthopedic surgeon from Redlands, California. Dombrowski decided to nam,” provided a context for supporting the organize a pro-America rally in order to contest the divisiveness in Amerwar that had little relation to reasoned arican society he attributed to antiwar protest. His agenda called for a petiguments justifying foreign military engagetion drive to enhance the public’s involvement in localized patriotic events. ments. The American Legion and Veterans of He helped establish a Committee for a Week of National Unity, which was Foreign Wars presented a positive view of the composed mainly of local businesspeople and patriotic activists. conflict through welcome-home parades for Bob Hope enthusiastically agreed to become its honorary chairman Vietnam veterans, campaigns that sent perand urged Americans to participate fully. The committee recommended that citizens fly the American flag; wear red, white and blue armbands; turn on car headlights during the day; leave houselights on over the Reprinted with weekend; pray for prisoners of war and sign petitions. permission from The The committee’s primary theme was encouraged by Nixon’s televised Pro-War Movement: “Silent Majority” address to the nation on Nov. 3, 1969, which was deDomestic Support liberately ambiguous to avoid political feeling around the war: “We are for the Vietnam War proud to be Americans. We support the integrity of our elected leaders.” and the Making of Charles Wiley of the National Committee for Responsible Patriotism Modern American developed a similar patriotic campaign. The New York–based NCRP was Conservatism. founded in the wake of the original “We Support Our Boys in Vietnam” Copyright 2013 by parade of May 1967. Wiley, a freelance journalist, had been involved in the University of anti-Communist ventures since the late 1950s. Massachusetts Press. sued. And independent grass-roots efforts to back the war effort appeared to find new voice through an intensified association of patriotism with support for the war. The large-scale antiwar demonstrations that took place in October and November 1969, collectively known as the Moratorium movement, engendered disparate but ideologically cohesive counterattacks across the United States from a loose coalition of

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ncouraged by popular discontent arising from Moratorium events, the NCRP developed its Honor America Week campaign. Wiley asserted that Honor America Week was not simply an “antimoratorium venture” but a way of overcoming the debilitating divisiveness in American society. Explaining the position of the NCRP, Wiley averred that during a war nothing should be done that could be construed as aiding the enemy or damaging morale at home. Wiley petitioned the White House for support and publicly said he had received endorsements from Nixon and the cooperation of the major labor unions and veterans, fraternal, police and firefighter organizations. The NCRP’s posters showed images of the Liberty Bell and an astronaut walking on the moon. It associated “honorable peace” with a measure of victory in Vietnam. Future wars would inevitably result from leaving Vietnam prematurely, according to Wiley. Americans could not abandon their commitment to their allies or, indeed, to their dead. “When you think about conscience,” Wiley said on CBS, “how do you explain to the loved ones of the nearly 40,000 Americans who thought they were dying to defend their honor that their cause was immoral?” The National Unity and Honor America campaigns did not formally unite but cooperated in order to promote their similar programs. The New York Times reported that the two organizations “have offices three doors apart in downtown Washington” and were both involved in suggesting ways for organizations around the country to generate support for the president’s “search for peace.” Whether because of the publicity campaigns appealing to patriotism, Nixon’s rallying call to the “great Silent Majority” or simple frustration with antiwar activism, the Veterans Day parades of 1969 had turnouts of unprecedented proportions throughout much of the United States. The “Rally for Freedom in Vietnam and All the World,” which took place at the Washington Monument, was conceived by Charles Moser, a George Washington University faculty adviser to Young Americans for Freedom, a conservative youth group that established pro-war drives on campuses across the country. Lee Edwards, a prolific conservative public relations activist, organized the Washington gathering. Edwards believed people would come to the monument to hear speakers and listen to coun-

EVERETT COLLECTION HISTORICAL/ALAMY

try music. Country music’s association with patriotism and approval of the war was furthered by famous country songs lambasting antiwar dissenters. The most successful was “Okie From Muskogee” by Merle Haggard, No. 1 in the Billboard country singles charts from Nov. 15 until Dec. 13, 1969. Up to 15,000 people listened as the stars of the Grand Ole Opry performed, but the organizers had hoped that the rally would rival that of the antiwar protests on the National Mall and may have been disappointed with that turnout. Even so, Time noted several weeks afterward, the demonstrators represented “a fresh force in the national controversy over the war.” The Chicago Tribune reported that many of the signs carried by participants challenged the antiwar movement: “November 15 Marchers Tell It to Hanoi” and “Nixon Stands for America.” Many of those who attended such rallies did not endorse an explicitly conservative interpretation of the war’s meaning, but they signified a new way of defying the antiwar perspective and helped legitimize conservative activism. Conservative magazine Human Events reached a similar conclusion, writing that the

The day after Richard Nixon’s “Silent Majority” speech on Nov. 3, 1969, he received a deskful of telegrams in support of his Vietnam policy.

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“silent, undemonstrative presence of thousands of persons who probably would have rather been home by the fireside on that chill fall day but whose principles and patriotism caused them to turn out as evidence of dissent from the dissenters” revealed the power of the silent majority. The rally’s keynote speaker, U.S. Sen. John Tower, a Texas Republican, emphasized the theme of “peace with freedom for South Viet Nam” throughout his address. “I

The Honor America Day rally was not officially associated with the NCRP, but at the behest of Nixon, the Honor America Day Committee borrowed many of the themes of the November campaign. The committee was chaired by J. Willard Marriott, Nixon’s friend and chair of his inaugural committee, Hobart Lewis of Reader’s Digest, Bob Hope and the Rev. Billy Graham. Marriott financed much of the operation and was the organizational impetus behind the determinedly pro-Nixon rally. Human Events claimed that between 350,000 and 400,000 people attended the July 4 rally. Hope was the emcee, and Graham gave the keynote speech. While acknowledging that the rally “was billed as non-political by its sponsors,” Human Events argued that a “top-heavy majority” of the participants heartily supported the president and showed their faith nd ela or tm es W n. Ge e, rad in the country’s institutions through personal At a pro-war pa comments, flag-waving and applause—and by to nd “te sts ote pr r wa t tha ed “just showing up.” The Chicago Tribune touted remark the theme of attacking the antiwar movement. nal will.” confuse Hanoi as to our natio It praised the restraint of the police, who were forced to deal with violent attacks by 4,000 antiwar activists, “mostly bearded and unwashed,” protesting the rally. Conservatives knew that want this war to end as much as anyone,” he said. overt acts of patriotism such as Honor America Day did not necessarily “But I want this war to be the last one we have to equate to full support for the Vietnam War, but they recognized the value fight.” Patriotism, particularly respect for those of using such events to combat antiwar activism. who had died in the war, was exploited to reinforce existing support for the president’s policies. ixon’s aides developed an extensive network of patriotic programs It was a trend repeated in parades nationwide. and pro-war organizations to blunt the effectiveness of the mainIn Atlanta, Gov. Lester Maddox rallied supstream antiwar campaign. The White House was encouraged by indeporters by claiming that the dissenters’ purpendent pro-war demonstrations, and it lent direct support to events such pose was to “betray our boys in battle.” General as Honor America Day. But Nixon’s aides showed a remarkable unwillingWilliam Westmoreland, who participated in ness to back and utilize existing pro-war campaigns, instead creating their a parade in Pittsburgh that drew a reported own nominally independent organizations aimed at winning the political crowd of 100,000 people, remarked that war backing of disaffected middle Americans in the 1972 presidential election. In his passion to win what Nixon biographer Herbert Parmet deprotests “tend to confuse Hanoi as to our nascribed as the war for the “soul of America,” Nixon had established a tional will.” Signs reading “Don’t Reason with secret Middle America Group in the White House in October 1969. The Treason,” “Bomb Hanoi” and “Support Our group, which included Nixon aides and advisers Martin Anderson, PatMen in Vietnam” were common in many of the rick Buchanan, Harry Dent, Tom Charles Huston, Bud Krogh, Clark parades. General Omar Bradley associated the Mollenhoff and Lyn Nofziger, was tasked with attracting the support of Vietnam mission with national vigor: “If we, as “the large and politically powerful white middle class” and, from early a nation…lack the courage to stand firm in our 1970, reaching “the blue collar worker.” beliefs, then we are unworthy of the sacrifices This Middle America Group was largely directed from the office of our veterans have made and are making for us.” Charles Colson, special counsel to the president. Colson worked with The Veterans Day rallies of 1969 marked the veterans groups and managed the administration’s public relations on climax of national demonstrations in support Vietnam. The White House emphasized national unity rather than foof the war. The NCRP tried to build on its earcusing on victory, as preferred by conservatives. Instead of using veterans lier activism regarding Vietnam and catch the and patriotic organizations to oppose the antiwar campaign, the Middle favorable tide of public opinion. Organizations America Group launched a clandestine counteroffensive. It intensified the that attached support for the war to mainstream covert and heretofore largely futile investigations and infiltrations of anpatriotism proved most successful in garnering tiwar organizations and began its war for what the Citizens Committee widespread acceptance of their efforts. This facfor Peace With Freedom in Vietnam had recently called the silent center. tor encouraged activists and administration offiNixon was determined to uncover Communist influence in the antiwar cials to organize an Honor America Day rally on campaign and augmented the existing programs of harassment and infilthe National Mall in Washington on July 4, 1970.

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tration undertaken by the CIA, FBI and IRS. The president approved programs such as the one developed in 1970 by Tom Charles Huston, a Nixon aide who had been national chairman of the Young Americans for Freedom in 1965. The Huston Plan recommended a series of surveillance operations designed to disrupt leftist activism, including “1) increased domestic electronic surveillance, 2) monitoring of international communications by Americans, 3) relaxation of restrictions on opening mail, 4) planting informants on campuses, 5) lifting restrictions on ‘surreptitious entry,’ and 6) creation of a new Interagency Group on Domestic Intelligence and Internal Security, to be controlled from the White House.” Huston commented, “Covert [mail] coverage is illegal....However, the advantages to be derived from its use outweigh the risks.” Surreptitious entry, he noted, “is clearly illegal: it amounts to burglary. It is highly risky and could result in great embarrassment if exposed. However, it is also the most fruitful tool and can produce the type of intelligence which cannot be obtained in any other fashion.” Nixon approved the plan, but it was abandoned when FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover opposed it, largely because he thought it would be ineffective and would undermine the bureau’s independence. Acting as the front-line man in this new campaign, Agnew personified the aims of the Middle America Group and became increasingly popular in the broader conservative movement following his public attacks on antiwar protesters and his effective use of rhetoric that emphasized the elitism of student protesters. Rather than relying on the conservative groups and individuals most vociferous in advocating victory in Vietnam, the Nixon White House sought the active support of moderate Republicans and the existing Vietnam lobbies, the Citizens Committee for Peace With Freedom in Vietnam, and the American Friends of Vietnam. In creating nominally independent organizations, the White House enjoyed some success in boosting the president’s standing. But a fixation on controlling the pro-war message caused the administration to ignore and sideline many active pro-war groups, which diversified and thus complicated the pro-war line. Although the Cold War consensus was foundering and severely challenged by the longevity of the Vietnam War, it retained sufficient sway ASSOCIATED PRESS

among the Middle Americans, and they were willing to back Nixon’s Vietnam policies. Nixon’s expansion of the war through an invasion into Cambodia, announced on April 30, 1970, and the antiwar fallout from that decision did much to resurrect support for Nixon and the war itself. Peter Brennan of the New York Building and Construction Trades Council lauded the boost in morale that the Cambodian incursion had given to troops in South Vietnam and called on all Americans to give Nixon’s plan a chance. While it was not possible to rally Americans to accept a war that continued indefinitely, the pro-war demonstrations gave Nixon muchneeded political capital as he prolonged the increasingly unpopular war. Ultimately, as Nixon wound down the war, fervent supporters reduced their activism. Few anticipated the war would last almost another three years. ★

The Rev. Billy Graham gives the keynote address on Honor America Day and notes that Nixon, from his White House window, could see the crowd.

Sandra Scanlon is lecturer in American history at University College, Dublin. The Pro-War Movement is a volume in the series Culture, Politics, and the Cold War, published by University of Massachusetts Press. DE C E MB E R 2 0 15

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MEDIA DIGEST

U.S. Strategy: Make Them Think Nixon Could Go Nuclear Nixon’s Nuclear Specter: The Secret Alert of 1969, Madman Diplomacy, and the Vietnam War, by William Burr and Jeffrey P. Kimball, University Press of Kansas, 2015

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as the United States prepared to use nuclear weapons to end the Vietnam War? In this book about a little-known incident in the war’s diplomatic history, the authors conclude that that’s at least what President Richard M. Nixon and National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger wanted leaders in North Vietnam and the Communist country’s superpower sponsor, the Soviet Union, to believe. Nixon explained how he thought, in an era of U.S.-Soviet nuclear weapons parity with the risk of uncontrolled escalation, such “nuclear threat diplomacy” would seem credible to Soviet and North Vietnamese leaders: “I call it the Madman Theory….I want the North Vietnamese to believe I’ve reached the point where I might do anything to stop the war.” The authors reveal that Nixon communicated his nuclear threat to Soviet leaders by ordering an October 1969 Joint Chiefs of Staff readiness test involving worldwide U.S. military forces, including strategic bombers, Polaris missile submarines, aircraft carriers and other warships. According to the authors, this “may have been one of the largest and most extensive secret military operations in U.S. history.” Only Nixon, Kissinger and their closest advisers knew the real purpose of the “readiness test”—the authors surmise that even Chairman of the Joint Chiefs General Earle G. Wheeler and America’s NATO allies were kept ignorant of the global alert’s true purpose. The American public, of course, was not even informed of the alert’s execution,

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let alone its intent to coerce Soviet and North Vietnamese leaders. The secret nuclear alert was conducted after several months of Nixon’s direct and indirect warnings to Hanoi’s leadership that if they failed to accept U.S. negotiating terms by November 1969 American leaders were prepared to “punish North Vietnam with measures of ‘great consequence and force.’” Therefore, the Oct. 13-30, 1969, “secret global nuclear alert”—which Nixon directed be “discernable to the Soviets”— was intended to lend credibility to the president’s threats to punish North Vietnam, thereby prompting the Soviets to pressure Hanoi to accept U.S. terms. Nixon and Kissinger believed that their nuclear saber-rattling would “signal the Soviet Union…that the United States was preparing its air and naval forces around the world for any and all military contingencies” if Nixon decided to escalate U.S. military operations against North Vietnam. In fact, prelim-

Richard Nixon tested what he called "the Madman Theory" to get North Vietnam to end the war on his terms.

inary planning for such a massive “shock and awe” campaign—code-named Duck Hook—had been set in motion a month prior to the October nuclear alert. Nixon, however, fearing widespread domestic and international condemnation that the inevitable devastation wrought by Duck Hook would certainly evoke, canceled that operation, substituting the nuclear alert—what the authors characterize as “a subterfuge, a bluff.” Although Soviet intelligence monitored the nuclear alert, Nixon’s threat diplomacy “failed in its purpose of coercing Moscow and Hanoi.” The significance of that failure was that it prompted a sea change in Nixon’s exit strategy for ending American involvement in the war. Nixon subsequently adopted what his advisers termed a “long road” exit strategy focused on “Vietnamization”—shifting the burden CLASSICSTOCK/ALAMY

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of combat to South Vietnamese forces while withdrawing U.S. military personnel, a years-long process not completed until early 1973. During that time, U.S. military forces in Vietnam suffered nearly 10,000 deaths. This book is a meticulous, detailed, scholarly account based on extensive archival research, interviews and in-depth examination of the papers of the principal U.S. government participants. At first glance, therefore, it may not appeal to readers more interested in what was occurring on Vietnam’s battlefields. But of course the behind-the-scenes diplomatic maneuvers had a profound effect on battlefield operations by determining how, when, where, why—and for how long—those battles were fought. — Jerry Morelock

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American Reckoning: The Vietnam War and Our National Identity, by

Christian G. Appy, Viking, 2015

I

f you are a believer in what has been called “American exceptionalism”— which commonly refers to the idea that the United States, despite some faults, has the best system of government on the planet—you will not be pleased with Christian Appy’s American Reckoning, a book-length essay on the Vietnam War and what it says about our national character. Appy, a University of Massachusetts historian with strong dovish feelings about the Vietnam War, is best known for his 1993 book, Working-Class War. That volume’s central premise is that the American enlisted men (not officers) who took part in the

war came predominantly and disproportionally from workingclass families. His next book on the subject, Patriots: The Vietnam War Remembered from All Sides (2003), is an oral history that does indeed look at the war from all sides. Appy includes the voices of war hawks, peace activists, former Viet Cong fighters, Vietnamese Communists and anti-Communists, veterans of many stripes, advocates for the captured and missing, poets, novelists, journalists, entertainers and former government officials. American Reckoning is Appy’s most political book. In this wide-ranging, often insightful work, Appy starts with the argument that the United States “could not win and should not have fought” the war in Vietnam. He goes on to analyze

American society, foreign policy, economic matters and what came after the Vietnam War—the “reckoning”—and constructs a brief against American exceptionalism. “The Vietnam War and the history that followed,” Appy explains, “exposed the myth of America’s persistent claim to unique power and virtue. Despite our awesome military, we are not invincible. Despite our vast wealth, we have gaping inequalities. Despite our professed desire for global peace and human rights, since World War II we have aggressively intervened with armed force far more than any nation on earth. Despite our claim to have the highest regard for human life, we have killed, wounded and uprooted many millions of people, and unnecessarily sacrificed many of our own.” In Appy’s view, the Vietnam War proved

Two women pause at the graves of relatives in a military cemetery near Saigon on April 29, 1975, as the Americans were leaving just ahead of the Communist takeover.

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ALMOST HOME

20” x 28”

Almost Home is a limited edition print commissioned to commemorate the 50th Anniversary of the Vietnam War. From the iconic image of the War in Vietnam; the Huey Helicopter, to the uniforms, M-16 rifle and F-4 Phantom, Almost Home is a symbolic representation of Vietnam Veterans service to the country. Even the number of prints and price are selected for their symbolism. The price is $65.73; the first and last year of the War for Combat units, and the number of prints is 2646…one for each man listed as Missing in Action. Sure to be a family heirloom, each signed and numbered limited edition print will hang proudly in your home, office or Veterans organization to commemorate and honor the service of our Vietnam Veterans. Order yours today!

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$65.73 $9.95 Each

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The Artist: Joe Kline is a renowned Aviation Artist whose works exhibit a highly realistic style; historically and technically correct. He traces his interest in aviation to his father who was a B-25 bombardier during WWII and his own experiences as a Huey Helicopter crew chief with the U.S. Army’s 101st Airborne Division during the Vietnam War. His work has illustrated many books, magazines and other publications and is on display in museums and galleries around the country.

FRANCOIS DEMULDER/AFP/GETTY IMAGES

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All sales subject to availability of this limited edition print.

DE C E M B E R 2015

61

TOGETHER THEN. TOGETHER AGAIN.

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50th Anniversary Tours It has been 50 years since the 173rd Airborne and the US Marines began combat operations in Vietnam. Return with us to historic battlefields, villages and famous cities where you spent part of your youth. Bring your family, your friends and buddies. Consider a reunion in Vietnam! We have a variety of tour programs to suit your interests. Check them out on our website today!

Vietnam History and Culture Tours III Corps and Central Highlands I Corps: Khe Sanh to Quy Nhon IV Corps: The Mekong Delta Panorama of Vietnam: The Best All-Country Tour

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Contact us to put your advertisement in front of thousands of history enthusiasts! 800.649.9800 [email protected] For information on placing a Direct Response or Marketplace ad in Print and Online contact us today: Vietnam 800.649.9800 / Fax: 800.649.6712 / [email protected] / www.russelljohns.com

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SPECIAL EVENTS 7/13TH ARTILLERY (Vietnam) Reunion All Red Dragon Batteries Gettysburg, PA, 9/27/15 - 10/2/15 at Gettysburg Wyndham Hotel. Call Robert Adams 859-806-5199 or Jon Taylor 603-677-6570.

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to be the straw that broke American exceptionalism’s back. The war, he contends, “shattered the central tenet of American identity, the broad faith that the United States is a unique force for good in the world, superior not only in its military and economic power, but in the quality of its government and institutions, the character and morality of its people and its way of life.” Appy believes that the 1968 Tet Offensive and its aftermath played a pivotal role,“the watershed moment,” in the war’s outcome. He uses Tet to buttress his American exceptionalism argument. When “public opinion turned decisively against the war” in the aftermath of Tet, Appy writes, it did so “despite fervent claims by the war’s supporters, then and ever since, that the United States ‘won’ the Tet Offensive” by crushing the VC-led uprising. “The counteroffensive did indeed produce a body count to beat all body counts,” Appy notes. “But that was irrelevant. The U.S. objective required a political triumph,” and Tet ’68 “actually made the odds of political victory all the worse, both at home and in Vietnam.” Appy all but forgoes politics in his explanation of the shameful homecoming given to the nation’s 2.8 million Vietnam veterans. He points out something every American veteran of the Vietnam War knows: Troops “returned to a country that was carrying on with business as usual.” Correctly pointing an accusing finger at the U.S. military and government, Appy writes that they “did not bring veterans together even for a simple thank-you, never mind for large-scale counseling, and other forms of concrete support.” Nor was strong support offered by “states, schools, churches, or civic organizations,” including the old-line veterans service organizations. And Hollywood certainly didn’t help with its stereotype of the “crazy Vietnam vet.” — Marc Leepson DE C E M B E R 2015

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THE NATIONAL INFANTRY MUSEUM

Vietnam Memorial Plaza and Dignity Memorial Vietnam Wall

240 Years of Military History Just 90 minutes south of Atlanta Nowhere is the American Soldier more revered than at the National Infantry Museum and Soldier Center. The 185,000+ square-foot world-class museum in Columbus, Georgia, just outside the gates of Fort Benning, honors the legacy of valor and sacrifice of Soldiers past, present, and future. Vietnam veterans from across the country hold their reunions at the National Infantry Museum, honoring brothers-in-arms at the new Vietnam Memorial and its 3/4-scale replica of the Vietnam Wall. The campus also includes a Memorial Walk of Honor and World War II Company Street. See for yourself why this is... A Place to Remember. Please check our website for hours of operation.

VISITCOLUMBUSGA.COM

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