by Karl Marlantes WAR HERO?

IA DRANG: Helicopter Rescues at LZ Albany

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CONTENTS

2 V I E T N A M

Visit our website today at vietnammag.com

Follow us at Facebook.com/VietnamMag

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

ABOVE: BETTMANN/CORBIS

DEPARTMENTS

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 Peter Prichard, an Army intelligence

analyst who became a prominent journalist

20 Homefront November-December 1965

22 Arsenal AH-1 Huey Cobra Gunship

58 Media Digest Nixon’s Nuclear Specter;

American Reckoning

64 Offerings Left at the Wall

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

38

FEATURES

24 What Makes a War HeroA Vietnam veteran and noted author reflects on the unique characteristics of true heroism.By Karl Marlantes

28 Shootout at LZ AlbanyAfter 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 HolidaysTroops did what they could to make the war zone look like home during the holidays.

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

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

Soldiers at Katum, South Vietnam, gather around a reminder of home

in December 1967 to clean their weapons rather than open presents.

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Vol. 28, No. 4 DECEMBER 2015

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EDITOR’S NOTEBOOK

6

By Chuck Springston

V I E T N A M

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 AirborneBrigade puts troops in positions near Saigon.

• The 173rd Airborne beginning the first major U.S. offensive withthree 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

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. ★

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

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8 V I E T N A M

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

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

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.

TOP: BETTMANN/CORBIS; LEFT: PHOTO BY JENNIFER E. BERRY; ABOVE: U.S. NAVY

My Guys in the A Shau PhotoIn “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.

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.

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. GeorgiouClearwater, 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 ThompsonThree Rivers, Mich.

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

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“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

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.

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

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 KirkOlympia, Wash.

CORRECTIONAn 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.

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

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· IN-COUNTRY

V I E T N A M

· IN THE NEWS · IN BRIEF

Political Prisoners’ Records OnlineThe 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.

with the United States.”Trong also addressed the war fought

50 years ago. “As we advocate to put behind the past, we should work hand-in-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.

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 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

Communist Party Leader Promotes Ties With U.S.

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

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

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

PTSD a Lingering IssueSome 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 post-traumatic 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.

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.

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.

TODAY

14 V I E T N A M

· IN THE NEWS · IN BRIEF· IN-COUNTRY

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

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 state-owned billion-dollar offshore project: the first deep-water, high-temperature,

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 AheadState-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

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.

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

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

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TODAY

16 V I E T N A M

· IN-COUNTRY· IN THE NEWS · IN BRIEF

IN BRIEF

• Vietnam veterans were 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 willbe 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

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-O-Cream’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-O-Cream 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.

Duery Felton was honored for his work

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18 V I E T N A M

VOICES: PETER PRICHARD

ILLUSTRATION: DAN WILLIAMS

The 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.

Born Dec. 18, 1944, Auburn, California

Residence Essex, Connecticut

Education Bachelor’s degree in English, Dartmouth College

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.

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 edu-

cation and by changing their point of view about the West,

and that’s a big project.

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.

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HOMEFRONT 1965

20 V I E T N A M

CHARLIE BROWN’S FIRST CHRISTMASspecial 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 HEEPillsbury 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.

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.

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.

600+ MPH Craig Breedlove sets a land-speed record on Nov. 15 in Spirit of America Sonic 1 at Bonneville Salt Flats, Utah.

DEC 31 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.

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 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 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.

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.

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.

BATTLEFRONT 1965

MOVIE MAGICOmar 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

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

LINCOLN LOGS is a popular toy that pays homage to the

humble origins of America’s 16th president.

ARSENAL

22 V I E T N A M

By Carl O. Schuster

GREGORY PROCH

Asingle Bell AH-1G Huey Cobra en route to Muc Hoa on Sept. 4, 1967, noticed a sampan car-rying 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

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 Viet-nam 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.

AH-1 Huey Cobra Gunship (Snake)CREW2

FUSELAGE LENGTH44 ft. 7 in.

ROTOR DIAMETER44 ft.

ENGINEAvco Lycoming T-53-L13 gas turbine, 1,400 shp

MAX. SPEED/ CRUISE SPEED171 mph/ 125 mph

MAX. RANGE 257 miles

ARMAMENTThe 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.

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

LAST-MINUTE TWEAKSPre-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.

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

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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

Recipient of

the Navy Cross

and author of

an acclaimed novel

about the Vietnam War,

Karl Marlantes gives his

take on a controversial topic

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

Acts of heroism are different from acts of bravery. People who are heroes go beyond what is expected of them, risking life and limb to benefit others. There is an altruistic aspect to heroism. All acts of heroism require bravery, but many acts of bravery are not acts of heroism because they are done for self-serving reasons. An excessively ambitious commander can exhibit bravery, and even be awarded a medal, but he often does so at the expense of his troops, rather than for their benefit. Those who serve under him would probably never denigrate his bravery. They might, however, denigrate his character and secretly wish that his next act of bravery would be his last. Any grunt who does his duty in a firefight is acting bravely, but he won’t be considered a hero until he does something excep-tionally brave to benefit his whole group.

It has become popular to call everyone who serves in the military a hero. This trivializes the word in the same way we trivialize the word champion by issuing everyone a trophy at the end of the season. Most people who serve in the military feel embarrassed being called heroes. This is because most people in the military are not heroes. They are, however, warriors.

Warrior is a word that conjures images of Conan and Cochise, although few serving in today’s mili-tary will ever be warriors like Conan and Cochise.

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. Perhaps some people can’t imagine that the button pusher would be called

a warrior, but the history of warfare shows an increasing distance between a fighter and the enemy. Medieval knights thought crossbowmen were cowards and criminals who should be hanged because they shot from beyond the range of swords and lances. Imagine what those knights would think of the Marine grunt, a quintessential warrior in our eyes today, who attacks with modern rifles or even airstrikes.

To be sure, the grunt endures harsher conditions and greater risks in actions that require grit and bravery far above what the button pusher experiences. But the button pusher is no less a warrior. Definitions need to change with changing technology. When the crew of an Air Force C-47 gunship, nicknamed Puff the Magic Dragon, saved our asses in Vietnam, I never begrudged them their distance

from the enemy or their warm showers.Everyone who serves in the military is a

warrior, and that should be accolade enough. But an honorable word has been corrupted with overuse: road warriors, warriors for peace, environmental warriors, warrior power gym equipment and the like.

Now, to Trump’s comment about McCain, a Navy aviator who spent almost 5½ years as a prisoner of war in North Vietnam. During a

July 18 forum in Ames, Iowa, the Republican presidential candidate said this about McCain: “He’s not a war hero. He’s a war hero because he was captured. I like people that weren’t captured.”

Nearly all acts of heroism arise from situations caused by stupidity or bad luck. Medals of Honor result when a group has the bad luck of a grenade landing in their hole and someone sacrifices his life to save the others. McCain had the bad luck of being shot down and taken prisoner. That is not what made him a hero. How one is thrown into his or her “hero’s journey” is beside the point; how one behaves on the journey is what’s relevant.

McCain is a hero because of the way he conducted himself while a prisoner.

How one is thrown into a

“hero’s journey” is beside the

point; how one behaves on

the journey is what’s relevant

Donald 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.

27DECEMBER 2015

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 dis-tinguishes 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.

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 surface-

to-air missile.

SHOOTOUT AT LZ ALBANYThe 7th Cavalry’s Second Fight for Survival at the Battle of Ia DrangBy 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

30 VIETNAM MAP: BAKER VAIL; OPPOSITE: ASSOCIATED PRESS

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 (Air-mobile), 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 pro-vided the stage for deploying the new airmo-bile 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 Al-bany, 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, any-where, 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 trans-ported by other helicopters into a landing zone within firing distance of an airmobile assault and could be quickly flown out again with-out 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 con-sisted of the 227th and 229th Assault Helicop-

the sound of explosions accentuating the battle. The aviation liaison officer attached to the 2nd Battalion, Captain Ken Weitzel, tried to coor-dinate 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.”

Landing 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.

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.

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

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

In the summer of 1965, the NVA began pre-paring 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 Com-munists 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 High-lands. 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 ene-my activity on the Cambodian border near Chu Pong Massif. The 1st Air Cav’s area of opera-

tions for the Ia Drang battles was in the prov-ince 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 Cambo-dia. 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 strate-gy 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 regu-lar artillery batteries flown into local landing zones by Boeing CH-47 Chinook helicopters.

On November 14 the 1st Battalion, 7th Cav-alry (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

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

33DECEMBER 2015

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 com-panies, 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 infan-try 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 Al-bany, 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

ing medevac and resupply. Reinforcements arrived from the 7th Cavalry’s 2nd Battalion (2-7), commanded by Lt. Col. Robert McDade; the 5th Cav-alry’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 Com-pany and Alpha Company’s 3rd Platoon—were airlifted to Camp Hol-loway. 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.

Near LZ Albany, the 8th Battalion, 66th NVA Regiment, was waiting for orders after it had moved east of the Ia Drang. The North Viet-namese 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 Bat-talion, 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

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?”

Morley Safer reports in Vietnam on the growing casualty rates in 1965.

34 VIETNAM LEFT: COURTESY LEE KOMICH; ABOVE: ASSOCIATED PRESS, PHOTO BY PETER ARNETT

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 Hol-loway was abuzz with calls for support from 2nd Battalion, 7th Cavalry, at Albany. The bat-talion’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 com-manded Charlie Company, 229th Assault Heli-copter Battalion, led 12 Hueys from three com-panies 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, drop-ping 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 Viet-namese 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 ex-ecutive 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

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.

35DECEMBER 2015

bus had been asked for volunteers, too. Robert Kiess, Dallas Harper and Donald Reynolds, each a chief warrant officer 2, and Warrant Of-ficer 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 helicop-ter 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 Tow-ler. By that time, there was too much fire com-ing into the LZ to get another bird in safely, so

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 dis-mounting 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.”

As the battle raged around Albany, the pilots of the helicopter bat-talion 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 War-rant 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-

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.

36 VIETNAM

Harper and Reynolds had to orbit the area. Stin-nett, 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.

At 2 a.m. a call went out to the 229th Assault Helicopter Battalion for another flight to Albany. Bennett, the battalion’s Charlie Com-pany commander, was rousted from his bunk in Pleiku by the op-

erations 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. Accord-ing 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

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

Much 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

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.

MISTAKES MADE. Custer divided his

forces, sending Captain Frederick

Benteen one way and Major Marcus

Reno another. Additionally, Custer’s

troops weren’t properly supplied. They

were too far from their pack train.

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,

prepared to go into battle, but much of

the column behind them was moving in

administrative formation, a more relaxed

march used when enemy contact is not

expected. Troops had been told that

they were moving to a landing zone to be

picked up and flown back

to base camp.

When two NVA

prisoners were captured

by elements of the recon

platoon, the column

halted and took an

administrative break.

Why stop? The troopers

were hot, hungry and

Custer’s personal battle

flag that he took to Little Bighorn.

37DECEMBER 2015OPPOSITE: HERITAGE AUCTIONS, DALLAS; ABOVE: ASSOCIATED PRESS, PHOTO BY PETER ARNETT

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.

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, Cap-tain 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, ac-companied 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

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

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

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

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-year-

old executive officer of Delta Company

in November 1965. Adapted from

Reflections on LZ Albany: The Agony of

Vietnam, 2014, Deeds Publishing.

3838 V I E T N A M

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

HOME 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).

THE ADVERTISING ARCHIVES/ALAMY

TKTKTKKTKTKTKTKTKTKTKKTKTKTKTK4040 V I E T N A M

TOP: WS COLLECTION/ALAMY; BOTTOM: CLASSIC STOCK/ALAMY; OPPOSITE: BETTMANN/CORBIS

A South Vietnamese

Christmas tree seller

hopes to make a deal

with an Australian

soldier at a Saigon

outdoor market in

December 1966.

The idyllic view of a 1960s

holiday dinner is shown

in this photograph of an

unidentified family.

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.

TKTKTKKTKTKTKTKTKTKTKKTKTKTKTK4242 V I E T N A MROLLS PRESS/POPPERFOTO/GETTY IMAGES; OPPOSITE, TOP: BETTMANN/CORBIS; BOTTOM: EVERETT COLLECTION/ALAMY

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.

Nestled in a

sandbagged

trench, American

soldiers decorate

a tree at Duc Lap,

South Vietnam, in

December 1969.

TKTKTKKTKTKTKTKTKTKTKKTKTKTKTK44

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.

44 V I E T N A M

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.

47D E C E M B E R 2 0 1 5

AS 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 cov-ering, 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

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 Vietnam-ese 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 Cap-tain Benjamin L. Willard, Martin Sheen’s character, in the hunt for Colonel Walter E. Kurtz, portrayed by Marlon Brando.

WATER WARRIORS

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

LARRY BURROWS/TIME MAGAZINE/THE LIFE PICTURE COLLECTION/GETTY IMAGES

48 V I E T N A M LEFT: COURTESY DAVID SEARS; ABOVE: ASSOCIATED PRESS

Each patrol boat was armed with twin .50-cali-ber 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, maneuver-ability 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 vol-unteer, Fred McDavitt, a lieutenant.

Beginning 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 mid-June 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 sam-pans 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

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 con-sisted 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 con-straints. Some chiefs resisted the riskier assign-ment, 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.”

MOST HONOREDJames 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 MarineCorps Medal (gold star)

• Bronze Star (“V” for valor, two gold stars)

• Navy andMarine Corps Commendation Medal (“V” for valor, gold star)

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

49D E C E M B E R 2 0 1 5

“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 favor-ite 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,

In the end it was assignment of the fittest. Boat captain Willy Wil-liams, 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 “famil-iarization 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. Wil-liams 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.

50 V I E T N A M

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 ammu-nition as they could.” In three hours, Williams’ patrol, augmented by addi-tional 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.

Deadly 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 oper-ations 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 drop-ping 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

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 McDa-vitt 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

MARK 1

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

WEIGHT 7.4 tons

LENGTH 31 ft.

BEAM 10 ft. 7 in.

DRAFT 1 ft. 10 ½ in. SPEED 25-30 knots

FUEL CAPACITY 160 gallons

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

ENGINE COVEROne M60 machine gun, one Mark 18 40mm grenade launcher

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

MARK 2

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

WEIGHT 8 tons

LENGTH 32 ft.

BEAM 11 ft. 7 ½ in.

DRAFT 2 ft. SPEED 25-30 knots

FUEL CAPACITY 160 gallons

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

ENGINE COVERTwo M60 machine guns, one Mark 19 40mm grenade launcher

STERNOne .50-caliber machine gun

51D E C E M B E R 2 0 1 5BETTMANN/CORBIS

In his book War in the Shallows, John Sher-wood, 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 dif-ficult 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 pro-gram 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. ★

David Sears was a Navy officer in Vietnam. He has also written for sister publications MHQ, World War II and Aviation History.

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, with-drew 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, unfa-miliar 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.

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

52 VIETNAM

TORN NATION

53DECEMBER 2015

Each president who dealt with Vietnam understood that military intervention would have far-reaching political ram-ifications. Both John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson sought to avoid a

debate on Americanization of the conflict pre-cisely because they realized that the complexities of any strategy would invite both opportunis-tic political challenges and sincere questioning of policy. Johnson attempted to rally the pub-lic 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 Dem-ocrats 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 suc-cess in Vietnam was more difficult to measure. Traditional conceptions of how to express pa-triotism 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 contemporar-ies, the importance of harnessing the forces of pro-war sentiment for whatever policy he pur-

At the “Honor America Day” pro-war rally in Washington on

July 4, 1970, marijuana activists show up for a “smoke-in.”

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

GETTY IMAGES, PHOTO BY DAVID FENTON

54 VIETNAM

Country music’s association with

patriotism was furthered by famous

songs lambasting antiwar dissenters.

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 protesters as “our heroic comrades-in-arms.”

Reagan declared that many of those marching in the name of peace “carry the flag of a nation which has killed almost 40,000 of our young men.” He demanded that all loyal Americans support the president: “Those entrusted with the immense responsibility for the leadership of our nation deserve not only our support but our re-

jection of those in our streets who arrogantly kibitz in a game where they haven’t even seen the cards with which the game is played.” Such attacks would continue for the remainder of the war and become a rationale for American military failure after the war. Late 1969 marked the high point of popular activism against the antiwar movement, activism that had been steadily growing since 1967.

The week of Veterans Day 1969 saw many Americans respond to Gov-ernor Reagan’s “call to arms.” One of the more well publicized of these initiatives was a weeklong campaign that originated with two groups, one entirely ad hoc, the other more established in the field of interpreting and promoting patriotism.

National Unity Week was conceived by Edmund Dombrowski, an orthopedic surgeon from Redlands, California. Dombrowski decided to organize a pro-America rally in order to contest the divisiveness in Amer-ican society he attributed to antiwar protest. His agenda called for a peti-tion drive to enhance the public’s involvement in localized patriotic events. He helped establish a Committee for a Week of National Unity, which was composed mainly of local businesspeople and patriotic activists.

Bob Hope enthusiastically agreed to become its honorary chairman and 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 weekend; pray for prisoners of war and sign petitions.

The committee’s primary theme was encouraged by Nixon’s televised “Silent Majority” address to the nation on Nov. 3, 1969, which was de-liberately ambiguous to avoid political feeling around the war: “We are proud to be Americans. We support the integrity of our elected leaders.”

Charles Wiley of the National Committee for Responsible Patriotism developed a similar patriotic campaign. The New York–based NCRP was founded in the wake of the original “We Support Our Boys in Vietnam” parade of May 1967. Wiley, a freelance journalist, had been involved in anti-Communist ventures since the late 1950s.

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 Moratori-um movement, engendered disparate but ideologically cohesive counterattacks across the United States from a loose coalition of

groups demonstrating in support of Nixon’s Vietnam policies. Civic and veterans groups concentrated less on the substance of admin-istration policy in Vietnam than on the sym-bolism attached to the war. Putting forward a specific vision of patriotism, organizations contrasted those dutifully serving their coun-try in Vietnam (and by extension those loy-ally applauding their service) with people actively opposing the war.

The motto of the American Legion, “For God and Country Support Our Boys in Viet-nam,” provided a context for supporting the war that had little relation to reasoned ar-guments justifying foreign military engage-ments. The American Legion and Veterans of Foreign Wars presented a positive view of the conflict through welcome-home parades for Vietnam veterans, campaigns that sent per-

Reprinted with

permission from The

Pro-War Movement:

Domestic Support

for the Vietnam War

and the Making of

Modern American

Conservatism.

Copyright 2013 by

the University of

Massachusetts Press.

55DECEMBER 2015

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.

try music. Country music’s association with pa-triotism 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 Bill-board 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 af-terward, 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 interpre-tation 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

Encouraged by popular discontent arising from Moratorium events, the NCRP devel-oped 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 noth-ing should be done that could be construed as aiding the enemy or damaging morale at home.

Wiley petitioned the White House for sup-port and publicly said he had received endorse-ments from Nixon and the cooperation of the major labor unions and veterans, fraternal, po-lice 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,” Wi-ley 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 propor-tions 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 conserva-tive 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

56 VIETNAM

At a pro-war parade, Gen. Westmoreland

remarked that war protests “tend to

confuse Hanoi as to our national will.”

“silent, undemonstrative presence of thou-sands 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 dis-sent from the dissenters” revealed the power of the silent majority. The rally’s keynote speaker, U.S. Sen. John Tower, a Texas Republican, em-phasized the theme of “peace with freedom for South Viet Nam” throughout his address. “I

want this war to end as much as anyone,” he said. “But I want this war to be the last one we have to fight.” Patriotism, particularly respect for those who had died in the war, was exploited to rein-force existing support for the president’s policies. It was a trend repeated in parades nationwide.

In Atlanta, Gov. Lester Maddox rallied sup-porters by claiming that the dissenters’ pur-pose was to “betray our boys in battle.” General William Westmoreland, who participated in a parade in Pittsburgh that drew a reported crowd of 100,000 people, remarked that war protests “tend to confuse Hanoi as to our na-tional will.” Signs reading “Don’t Reason with Treason,” “Bomb Hanoi” and “Support Our Men in Vietnam” were common in many of the parades. General Omar Bradley associated the Vietnam mission with national vigor: “If we, as a nation…lack the courage to stand firm in our beliefs, then we are unworthy of the sacrifices our veterans have made and are making for us.”

The Veterans Day rallies of 1969 marked the climax of national demonstrations in support of the war. The NCRP tried to build on its ear-lier activism regarding Vietnam and catch the favorable tide of public opinion. Organizations that attached support for the war to mainstream patriotism proved most successful in garnering widespread acceptance of their efforts. This fac-tor encouraged activists and administration offi-cials to organize an Honor America Day rally on the National Mall in Washington on July 4, 1970.

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 commit-tee was chaired by J. Willard Marriott, Nixon’s friend and chair of his in-augural 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 at-tended 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 in the country’s institutions through personal comments, flag-waving and applause—and by “just showing up.” The Chicago Tribune touted the theme of attacking the antiwar movement. It praised the restraint of the police, who were forced to deal with violent attacks by 4,000 an-tiwar activists, “mostly bearded and unwashed,” protesting the rally. Conservatives knew that

overt acts of patriotism such as Honor America Day did not necessarily equate to full support for the Vietnam War, but they recognized the value of using such events to combat antiwar activism.

N ixon’s aides developed an extensive network of patriotic programs and pro-war organizations to blunt the effectiveness of the main-stream antiwar campaign. The White House was encouraged by inde-

pendent pro-war demonstrations, and it lent direct support to events such as Honor America Day. But Nixon’s aides showed a remarkable unwilling-ness to back and utilize existing pro-war campaigns, instead creating their own nominally independent organizations aimed at winning the political backing of disaffected middle Americans in the 1972 presidential election.

In his passion to win what Nixon biographer Herbert Parmet de-scribed as the war for the “soul of America,” Nixon had established a secret Middle America Group in the White House in October 1969. The group, which included Nixon aides and advisers Martin Anderson, Pat-rick Buchanan, Harry Dent, Tom Charles Huston, Bud Krogh, Clark Mollenhoff and Lyn Nofziger, was tasked with attracting the support of “the large and politically powerful white middle class” and, from early 1970, reaching “the blue collar worker.”

This Middle America Group was largely directed from the office of Charles Colson, special counsel to the president. Colson worked with veterans groups and managed the administration’s public relations on Vietnam. The White House emphasized national unity rather than fo-cusing on victory, as preferred by conservatives. Instead of using veterans and patriotic organizations to oppose the antiwar campaign, the Middle America Group launched a clandestine counteroffensive. It intensified the covert and heretofore largely futile investigations and infiltrations of an-tiwar organizations and began its war for what the Citizens Committee for Peace With Freedom in Vietnam had recently called the silent center.

Nixon was determined to uncover Communist influence in the antiwar campaign and augmented the existing programs of harassment and infil-

57DECEMBER 2015

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 much- needed political capital as he prolonged the in-creasingly unpopular war. Ultimately, as Nixon wound down the war, fervent supporters re-duced their activism. Few anticipated the war would last almost another three years. ★

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.

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 domes-tic 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) cre-ation of a new Interagency Group on Domestic Intelligence and Internal Security, to be con-trolled from the White House.”

Huston commented, “Covert [mail] cover-age is illegal....However, the advantages to be derived from its use outweigh the risks.” Sur-reptitious entry, he noted, “is clearly illegal: it amounts to burglary. It is highly risky and could result in great embarrassment if exposed. How-ever, it is also the most fruitful tool and can pro-duce the type of intelligence which cannot be obtained in any other fashion.” Nixon approved the plan, but it was abandoned when FBI Direc-tor 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 ad-vocating 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 Viet-nam. In creating nominally independent organi-zations, the White House enjoyed some success in boosting the president’s standing. But a fixa-tion 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 foun-dering and severely challenged by the longevity of the Vietnam War, it retained sufficient sway

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.

ASSOCIATED PRESS

58

MEDIA DIGEST

V I E T N A M

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 diplo-

macy “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

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

Was 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 esca-

lation, 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 com-

municated 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 subma-

rines, 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 clos-

est 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,

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 pres-

ident’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 contingen-

cies” if Nixon decided to escalate

U.S. military operations against

North Vietnam. In fact, prelim-

U.S. Strategy: Make Them Think Nixon Could Go Nuclear

Richard Nixon tested what he called

"the Madman Theory" to get North

Vietnam to end the war on his terms.

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61D E C E M B E R 2 0 1 5

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to be the straw that broke American ex-

ceptionalism’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 ex-

ceptionalism 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 ex-

planation 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

64 VIETNAM

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The Ultimate ShockAbsorbing FootwearWith each step our patented shoe technology returns energy to you, to help you stay active and on your feet longer. A more active you means your muscles build strength and endurance, your body receives more oxygen and nutrients, and the heart and lungs work

Feel better. Do more.The stress and discomfort of being active and on your feet can destroy your quality of life. As you age, cartilage and other tissues that protect your joints become thinner and less resilient. Gravity Defyer® footwear helps protect your body and provide shock absorption from the ground up. Jogging, running, walking – even routine standing, generate punishing impact. These forces produce lasting damage and wear on the body. Gravity Defyer footwear changes how our bodies

ENGINEERED toDEFYG-DEFY

EXTORA

AVAILABLE

Gravity Defyer Corp.10643 Glenoaks BlvdPacoima, CA 91331

PLUSFREE SHIPPING ONORDERS OVER $125

$30 OFFYOUR ORDER

Call 1 (800) 429-0039

GravityDefyer.com/MS9MGZ1

* Payment options and terms available at checkout. Credit or debit accepted. Shoes must be returned within 30 days in like-new condition for full refund or exchange. Credit card authorization required. See website for complete details. Free shipping on orders over $125 anywhere within the United States.

COUPON CODE: MS9MGZ1

Absorb harmful impactStay comfortable & activeSupport & protect your bodyStand & walk with greater ease

BLACK TB9007MBLWHITE TB9007MWS

BLACK TB9007FBLWHITE TB9007FWS

MEN · SIZES 7.5-15MED THRU X-WIDE WIDTHS

WOMEN · SIZES 5-11

Extora $149.95

BLACK TB9006MBLWHITE TB9006MWS

BLACK TB9006FBLWHITE TB9006FWS

MEN · SIZES 7.5-15MED THRU X-WIDE WIDTHS

WOMEN · SIZES 5-11

Extora II $149.95

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COMFORT FOOTWEAR TECHNOLOGY

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ARMFUL SHOCK

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.

THE NATIONAL INFANTRY MUSEUM

Please check our website for hours of operation. NATIONALINFANTRYMUSEUM.ORG

Vietnam Memorial Plaza and Dignity Memorial Vietnam Wall

240 Years of Military HistoryJust 90 minutes south of Atlanta

VISITCOLUMBUSGA.COM