The Monitors were the battleships of the Mobile Riverine Force. They were equipped with varied armament including 105mm cannon in turrets, 40mm cannon, or napalm weapons as in this photo. These Zippo Boats were very effective against VC spider holes or other such bunkers and fortifications.
A U.S. Navy Mk I PBR inspects a junk in Vietnam.
In contrast to carrier operations, which involved the very core of the navy’s self-image, its most prestigious weapons, and its most influential officers, the navy’s two other main activities in Vietnam received relatively little attention from the admirals. They were the navy’s patrol operations designed to interdict North Vietnamese seaborne supplies to the South and the navy’s “brown-water” operations on the rivers of South Vietnam. These involved small patrol craft, “Swift boats,” PBR river patrol boats, and amphibious craft, commanded by relatively junior officers, often reservists or ROTC graduates. The most outstanding aviators served in the carriers deployed off North and South Vietnam, but few served “in-country” in South Vietnam. As for the “nucs,” Vietnam had little impact on their operations and missions. “We sent some wonderful people and we sent some people we wanted to get rid of,” recalled Admiral Duncan. “Of course, we had many other things going on. We had nuclear subs, new aircraft. . . . We did not send our best people to this war.” The Chief of Naval Operations “paid little attention to what was going on in-country,” recalled one naval officer, viewing the protracted war being waged in the mountains, jungles, and rice paddies of South Vietnam as “an adjunct to what the major war was.”
Surface warfare officers were assigned to the “brown-water war” in the South, but few welcomed the opportunity. “Why would you want some duty that has nothing to do with your career?” recalled one former officer. A navy surface warfare officer’s career involved service aboard cruisers or destroyers, not time spent in odd, shallow watercraft that offered little but danger and discomfort. “The [commanding officer], a regular officer, is in many ways ignorant of this river patrol business,” wrote one junior officer who commanded a section of PBRs. “He has no confidence in my ability, probably because I’m a brand spanking new Lt. (J. G.) with no fleet experience. Still, he doesn’t have half the experience I have. . . . Success in fighting this war doesn’t come from years of naval service or age or intelligence. It comes from a sense of survival and the ability to profit from one’s experience. ‘”Admiral Elmo Zumwalt, upon assuming command of the U. S. naval forces deployed in South Vietnam, concluded that Vietnam was “a dumping ground for weak officers at the commander and captain level.’”
The high-tech navy of the 1950s and 1960s designed to confront the Soviets had scant room for or interest in the shallow-water operations in Vietnam. Indeed, the “Swifts” and PBRs that provided the backbone of the brown-water force were in reality based on civilian commercial and pleasure craft. The navy, preoccupied with supercarriers and Polaris submarines, had no desire to design and build really effective small combatants for its unwelcome brown-water war in South Vietnam.
Swift boats, designated PCFs, were fifty feet long, had a top speed of twenty-eight knots, and carried a crew of one officer and five enlisted men. They were armed with a pair of ring-mounted .50-caliber machine guns over the pilothouse and a single .50-caliber machine gun and 81mm mortar mounted aft. They operated in the coastal waters of South Vietnam and, after 1968, on the rivers of the Mekong Delta.” Originally designed as tenders to offshore oil rigs, the Swifts proved indifferent combatants. At sea they could not operate well in rough water. “Some of us . . . still visit chiropractors for the crashes we endured” in the thirty-foot waves of the South China Sea, recalled Senator John F. Kerry, a former Swift boat commander. “We soon learned to deal with them by lying prone on a bunk and leaving one guy at the helm.’ On the rivers, the Swifts’ aluminum hulls tended to corrode. Their engines operated poorly in the intense heat and were so noisy that “once Charlie [the Vietcong] got the idea of what we were doing he was pretty much able to avoid us, because the Swift boats, you can hear them a mile off.” As time passed, the Swifts’ propeller shafts and blades bent from frequent grounding of the boats in the shallow rivers and streams.” A more successful design was the PBR (Patrol Boat River), a thirty-foot fiberglass shallow-water patrol boat that carried a crew of four and was armed with three .50-caliber machine guns. The PBRs had a new water-jet propulsion system that gave them a speed of up to twenty-five knots and enabled the craft to turn around in its own length. When struck by bullets, the fiberglass hull did not shatter into deadly fragments, as metal hulls frequently did, and many heavier armor-piercing rounds tended to pass right through it without exploding.” The Swifts and PBRs were the workhorses of the river forces, engaging in firefights, setting ambushes, transporting troops, providing fire support, and carrying out medical evacuations.
Their most important function was to interdict the suspected flow of riverborne supplies and ammunition to the Vietcong. To accomplish that mission, PBRs and Swifts stopped and searched thousands of sampans and other watercraft. Between mid- 1966, and mid- 1969, U. S. patrols boarded some 400,000 craft and engaged in 2,000 firefights. “We expected to get ambushed every time we stopped a boat,” recalled one officer. “Hell, we couldn’t speak Vietnamese. We got some Vietnamese policemen to start riding the boats and this helped, [but] we caught a few pressuring the people we stopped for money.” Despite all this activity, “not once” during 1968 did the brown-water “force seize an important shipment of Vietcong munitions or supplies although such shipments were necessary for the enemy to keep active in the Delta.”
Along the narrow rivers and streams, the Vietcong and North Vietnamese established numerous ambush sites. Low-lying mud bunkers, well concealed in the foliage lining the riverbank, could not be destroyed by any weapon carried by the Swifts and PBRs. On the other hand, all American rivercraft were vulnerable to fire from 57mm recoilless rifles and armor-piercing rocket-powered grenade rounds. “You really feel like a sitting duck when you’re riding those boats going down the small canals,” observed Boatswain’s Mate 2nd Class William M. Harris. “You know that the VC are in the area and you know that if he wants to he’s going to hit you. . . . The only trouble is he always gets the first punch, so to speak. . . . When he does, all you can do is hope that you can get him worse than he does you.”
The common Vietcong practice was to use sampans, which appeared to be fleeing American surveillance, to lure a PBR or Swift boat into an area where it could be ambushed by forces concealed on the riverbank. Lieutenant (Junior Grade) Robert Moir described one such ambush against a PBR near My Tho in 1968. “When [PBR] 153 was about 75 meters from the south bank the VC opened up from the treeline. [The boat] took two rockets almost simultaneously. The first hit the radar dome and blew shrapnel all over the boat. The second hit . . . in front of the coxswain stand and set the boat afire. [The boat] commander was thrown to the deck, jerking the throttle into reverse as the blast knocked him.” The other three crew members were also wounded, but the after gunner “got off a good blast of return fire with the after gun. Then he saw the boat was backing into the south bank-so he left his mount and jumped into the coxswain flat which was burning pretty hot by then. He pushed the throttle ahead and drove the boat into the middle of the river. If it hadn’t been for Mac we might have lost everyone and the boat too.”^^ To deal with Communist bunkers a few amphibious craft were converted to fire flame throwers or 105mm howitzers. However, Swift boats could only completely destroy a bunker by landing and throwing explosives onto its roof or walls.
For sailors the river war was not only hazardous but uncomfortable and debilitating. “We carried huge cans of insect repellent and spread it on like shaving cream when we went on patrol,” recalled one Swift boat commander, “but those damn mosquitoes would still be at us like bees on a hive. . . . Most of the time we lived in our own sweat. Even at night the temperature would hover around 80 degrees with high humidity. Daytime temperature soared to 110 degrees. You couldn’t stand your own smell after a while. The only way to clean up was to jump in the river. But the rivers were as dirty as we were.” A PBR patrol might last up to a week or more. All available space aboard the tiny vessel would usually be utilized to store ammunition and supplies, allowing little sleeping room for the six-man crew even had they been inclined to try to sleep in the airless 100-degree heat. “It’s hot in Viet Nam,” observed one boat commander. “Guys sweat, get bored and become grouchy, which is [to be] expected, but the majority seem to keep a cool head and perform efficiently.”
Yet the discomforts and dangers of the riverine force gave it a special élan. “They were ordinary sailors,” observed Lieutenant Commander Don Sheppard, who commanded a river division of PBRs, “who for a short period in their lives were somebody. They controlled a slick powerful fighting machine that let them play out the fantasy of the American hero.” Consequently the navy never lacked for bold and independent-minded young petty officers and junior grade lieutenants to captain the boats. And morale remained high. “Aboard a ship, [when] you’re a first class petty officer, somebody tells you whether to start the job, somebody else comes up and tells you how it’s going to be done,” observed Engineman First Class Emil Cates. “As patrol officer if you’re out on [river] patrol, you made the decision and decided whether those people were going to be alive or dead in the next two minutes.”
Many younger enlisted sailors welcomed the increased prestige and responsibility of the jobs in the brown-water war. “There’s no officer, no chief, no first and no second,” declared Gunner’s Mate Second Class William Armstrong. “No matter what your rate is or what your grade is when you’re a boat captain you have to make the decision and that’s the difference between the brown water and the blue water.” Unlike the thousands of sailors deployed aboard ships in the Tonkin Gulf, who seldom saw the coast of Vietnam, riverine sailors had little doubt they were in a real war. As one group of PBR sailors chanted as they passed a destroyer:
PBRs get all the pay,
Get the tin cans out the way,
PBRs roll through the muck.
While the tin can sailors suck.
In addition to its patrol craft, the brown-water navy converted some World War Il-era landing craft into a river assault force called the Joint Army-Navy Mobile Riverine Force. The U. S. Army provided an infantry brigade, which was housed aboard floating barracks converted from ships. The soldiers sortied from their river base aboard armored landing craft supported by other landing craft converted to heavily gunned “monitors.” These converted LCMs could make little more than six knots on bodies of water where the currents sometimes exceeded five knots.
In the swamps, mud flats, streams, and flooded rice fields of the Mekong Delta the riverine force provided a practical means of penetrating Vietcong bases and strongholds. Yet the low speed of the rivercraft and the narrowness of many delta rivers often made the river force a large floating target for Vietcong armor-piercing rockets, machine guns, and recoilless rifles. Bloody ambushes were far from rare.
Ironically, it was the ugly plodding boats of the mobile riverine force that came closest of all naval forces in Southeast Asia to exercising a decisive influence on the course of the Vietnam War. When the Communist Tet attacks burst on South Vietnam at the end of January 1968, the towns in the delta suddenly found themselves under siege. The boats of the riverine force, with their infantry embarked, were the only forces in position to reinforce the South Vietnamese forces in the embattled delta towns. “It was sort of like the cavalry coming to the rescue of the fort besieged by Indians, or rather with the Indians already in it,” observed Captain Robert Salzer, who commanded the naval component of the river assault force.
In bitter and destructive fighting over the next two weeks, the river assault force forced the Communist troops out of the large delta towns of My Tho, Binh Long, Can Tho, and Chau Doc, although the towns themselves were reduced to ruins. The commander of the U. S. forces in Vietnam, General William Westmoreland, credited the mobile riverine force with having “saved the Delta.” Unfortunately it could not save the doomed American effort to ensure the survival of South Vietnam. Nor could it stop the waterbome infiltrations of Communist supplies into South Vietnam through the Cambodian ports of Kampot and Sihanoukville to outfit depots along the Cambodian border and in Vietnam along the vast and intricate waterways of the delta. Even when the new commander of naval forces in Vietnam, Vice Admiral Elmo Zumwalt, pulled all Swifts off blockade duty in the fall of 1968 and sent them up the treacherous rivers and canals of the delta in search of Communist supply junks and sampans, they were not able to stop the flow of materials into the country.
Though Zumwalt liked to refer to the Swifts as his “cruisers,” the PBRs as his “destroyers,” and the monitors as his “battleships,” the river war was fought not on the empty ocean but in the midst of one of the most heavily populated regions of Southeast Asia. The sheer destructiveness of the incessant combat between the riverine force and the Communists meant the frequent destruction of houses, fishing facilities, boats, and other property of the Vietnamese in the Mekong provinces and often the loss of life as well. General Westmoreland had established “Rules of Engagement” governing when and under what circumstances U. S. forces could employ artillery air strikes or naval gunfire and even when they could reply to enemy fire. The Rules of Engagement, based on generally recognized principles of the law of land warfare and frequently updated, were legally “impeccable.” Yet few officers even at the highest levels were thoroughly familiar with these Rules of Engagement, which, in any case, were open to conflicting interpretations and left much to the judgment of the officer on the scene. “You’d get a couple of rockets shot from the center of the town. Well, it’s very easy for me to say they will not be responded to by fire,” observed Captain Arthur Salzer. “But it’s very hard for the boat crew that’s been hit and perhaps lost its captain, had one or two men seriously wounded to remember that when they have guns in their hands and see their friends bloody and dead.” Any hamlet could be viewed as a Vietcong hamlet if it happened to be occupied by Communist forces, if Americans took fire from the hamlet, or even if tunnels or bunkers were found there. In the delta, American helicopter pilots routinely strafed and sank junks loaded with rice simply because they had been sighted traveling a portion of a canal in a free-fire zone. The crews of the junks, well aware of this practice, abandoned their craft and jumped into the water at the first sight of choppers. Such unusual behavior confirmed to the pilots that the crews were Vietcong, and they proceeded to attack them in the water.
