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Brown-Water Small Craft

The brown-water navy patrolled inland waterways and close coastal waters during the Vietnam War. The brown-water navy was a joint venture between the Navy and Army modeled after the earlier French Riverine and coastal patrols in the First Indochina War. In Vietnam, control of the waterways was essential to controlling the country because of the nation's many rivers and lengthy coastline.

American sailors waged a "brown-water" fight reminiscent of the Mexican and Civil wars. This nineteenth-century-style war featured small combatants, relatively junior officers, and seasoned enlisted men. It began in the administration of President Kennedy, himself a veteran of "unconventional" naval warfare - the Pacific "PT" torpedo-boat campaign of World War II. On 29 April 1961 Kennedy approved American naval training for Vietnamese "Junk Force" crews in order to strengthen South Vietnam's coastal patrols. From that point until early 1965, in the words of Kennedy's successor Lyndon B. Johnson, "We increased assistance to the Vietnamese Navy to enable it to protect the coast against infiltration from the North and to patrol the inland waterways used extensively by the Viet Cong."

Three combat groups were created: the Sea Force, the River Force, and the Junk Force. To get those "forces" to fight aggressively in the American manner, naval advisers were attached "at the unit Ievel.” In May 1965 there were 235 advisers working under the supervision of the "Naval Advisory Group," a section of the supreme American headquarters in Vietnam, the "Military Assistance Command Vietnam" (MACV), headed by Army General William C. Westmoreland. By then, in the opinion of Thomas J. Cutler, the closest student of the topic, the "die was cast: the American Navy had begun its coastal and riverine involvement in Vietnam."

The problem was that unlike the air war, where ships, aircraft, and tactical doctrine existed to organize a sustained bombing campaign, the United States Navy itself lacked suitable vessels, trained men, or an ongoing tradition and doctrine with which to advise the South Vietnamese Navy on how to fight in rivers and along the coast. After every previous brown-water experience - from the gunboats of Thomas Jefferson through the Civil War monitors to the Yangtze River (Chang Jiang) patrols of the twentieth century - the navy had largely dismissed its shallow-draft experience as irrelevant to its true purpose-blue-water operations.

In the opening stages of the surface sailors' war in Vietnam improvisation was the name of the game. The navy contracted with South Vietnamese shipbuilders for diesel-driven junks, but they were built carelessly of green wood. Worms bored out their leaky hulls, and the Vietnamese crews lacked the mechanical aptitude for preventative maintenance of the engines. More reliable were the World War II-vintage British and American landing craft that U. S. advisers converted into armed riverine and coastal patrol vessels. Old LCMs (Landing Craft, Mechanized) were loaded with machine guns and used for heavy fire-support missions. On a platform such as this a navy lieutenant and one or two chief petty officers would risk their lives alongside Vietnamese "counterparts" in an unending attempt to stem the flow of food and supplies from North Vietnam to soldiers and Viet Cong in the south.

The first American naval officer to fall was Lieutenant Harold Dale Meyerkord of St. Louis, Missouri. He was hit with small arms fire from a jungle-lined river bank while sitting on the raised deck house of a converted LCM in the aftermath of what the navy officially described as "an amphibious assault and destroy operation" on 16 March 1965. In trying to pull his mortally wounded boss below decks, Meyerkord's chief petty officer, Eugene Barney, was severely wounded. The chief survived to receive the Bronze Star; the lieutenant had a ship named after him, the destroyer escort Meyerkord. The brown-water war beginning in Vietnam was a long, long way from the high-technology war the modern American navy had been built to fight.

About the time of Lieutenant Meyerkord's death the navy was forced to reappraise its largely "advisory" role in the war in the south. On 3 March 1965 an army helicopter discovered a North Vietnamese trawler literally disguised as an island making its way from the South China Sea to South Vietnam. It took the South Vietnamese, prodded by the Americans, five days to capture the vessel, which was found to carry North Vietnamese army regulars as well as a storehouse of arms and ammunition manufactured in Eastern Europe. The Americans were outraged by both the discovery and the slow pace of the capture. The so-called Vung Ro Incident led immediately to all upgrading of the U.S. Navy's participation in the offshore interdiction of suspicious vessels moving along South Vietnam's coast on the South China Sea. The operational code name was "MARKET TIME."

It soon became apparent that the relatively deep draft of U. S. destroyers kept them too far offshore for maximum eflectiveness in surveillance of the hundreds of small vessels plodding along the coast. There was nothing suitable for inshore patrols in the navy's inventory, so the Johnson administration turned to the Coast Guard for a flotilla of 82-foot-long, 5.5-foot-draft patrol boats (WPBs). Modified to carry a mortar and heavier machine guns, and put under the command of two officers and nine enlisted men, they were rushed to Vietnam. When the navy discovered that oil drillers in the Gulf of Mexico used very shallow-draft aluminum boats to ferry crews to offshore rigs, it ordered a naval version from the manufacturer. In less than six weeks, the first "Swift boats" - or more formally, PCFs (Patrol Craft, Fast) - were ready to join the WPBs as part of Task Force 115, the Coastal Surveillance Force. By May 1965 the U. S. Navy was ready to "stop, search, and seize vessels not clearly engaged in innocent passage" along the South Vietnamese coast, regardless of the distance out from the shore line.

Behind the WPBs and PCFs lurked the destroyers and the radarpicket destroyer escorts. Above all of them flew land-based navy patrol craft from bases as far away as the Philippines. The aviators could "go home at night," but for the men on the surface vessels the blockade duty of Task Force 115 was not unlike that of Union blockaders along the Confederate coast during the Civil War. It was hot, humid, and tedious work performed aboard improvised vessels, and when the enervating tedium gave way suddenly to quick movement and sudden danger, the change of pace was welcome.

Between June 1966 and June 1968 MARKET TIME sailors boarded more than 400,000 suspicious itinerant vessels, an average of 16,000 per month. The percentage of supplies intended for the enemy in the south intercepted in this manner cannot be estimated with any precision, but evaluations by several groups within and without the navy have uniformly praised MARKET TIME for significantly reducing the flow. Even the normally skeptical Elmo R. Zumwalt, Jr., the commander of U.S. Naval Forces Vietnam from September 1968 to May 1970, concluded, "By the time I arrived on the scene, the interdiction mission had pretty much been accomplished as far as the coast [was] concerned."

The navy also tried to interdict the movement of men and supplies by the Viet Cong in the sprawling Mekong Delta. Constituting about one-fourth of the area of South Vietnam, the rice-rich alluvial plain is cut by four large branches of the major river, called the Mekong by Westerners. The best that could be hoped for was to keep the main channel feeding Saigon open and to inconvenience the Viet Cong by going up the innumerable canals and river branches in search of sampans loaded with men and war materiel. For this limited purpose the navy in December 1965 authorized "Operation GAME WARDEN" and in February 1966 put it into effect under the organizational designation Task Force 116.

Once again, the navy's proud blue-water tradition offered no guidance in devising weapons platforms and tactical doctrine. The former were not so hard to acquire, because the flourishing and competitive American pleasure-boat industry had imaginative naval architects who knew how to modify designs to suit special purposes. Within a few weeks of the navy's call for proposals, shipbuilders were making final bids for contracts on a 31-foot fiberglass boat drawing only inches and driven by water-jet pumps. A yard in Bellingham, Washington, landed the contract for 120 boats costing $75,000 each. Delivery was set for 1 April 1966, and training began on California's Sacramento River, where the sloughs bear some resemblance to the marshy waterways of the Mekong Delta.

An approximate tactical doctrine could be devised from war gaming in central California, but by and large it had to evolve in actual combat. The basic idea was to operate the new riverine fighters, called PBRs (Patrol Boat, River) in pairs, with the trailing boat providing cover for the lead boat while it investigated the cargo of a suspect Vietnamese water craft. The Viet Cong proved ingenious at setting traps for the PBRs, which could be hurt badly by heavy fire pouring out of impenetrable mangrove forests lining the rivers and tributaries. Gradually, therefore, a force of modified army "Huey" helicopter gunships - called "Seawolves" by the navy - was assembled to provide air support to the PBRs.

A typical PBR mission lasted twelve hours, and the Seawolf had an on-station loiter time of only about 1.5 hours. That left the PBRs on their own too much of the time, so in late 1968 the navy decided to cover them more regularly with fixed-wing aircraft. The platform chosen was the OV-10A "Bronco" of the new Light Attack Squadron Four, commissioned at Naval Air Station North Island, California, on 3 January 1969. The "Black Ponies," as the squadron's airmen called their propeller-driven twin engine aircraft, carried machine guns, 20-mm cannon and supersonic "Zuni" rockets as well as illuminating flares for night operations. One historian describes this load as "a phenomenal amount of firepower." The Black Ponies arrived in Vietnam in April 1969 and quickly became a favorite of the PBR sailors. They had three attributes that enabled them to save many PBRs from destruction: "quick response time, heavy firepower, and long staying time."

It is impossible to assess with precision the exact impact of GAME WARDEN on the movement of enemy men and materiel through the waterways of the Mekong Delta, but it is indisputable that the PBRs boarded and searched a staggering number of watercraft, an average of 100,000 a month according to one report. Equally indicative that GAME WARDEN was serious business is the estimate of Rear Admiral Sayre A. Swarztrauber that by 1970 more than a hundred sailors in the force had been killed by enemy fire. "Yet, in spite of this high risk," Lieutenant Commander Thomas J. Cutler asserted, "the Navy never had difficulty filling its GAME WARDEN billets."

Beginning in December 1966 a second major American contingent operated in the Mekong Delta. The Mobile Riverine Force was jointly commanded by a navy captain and an army colonel. Its mission was to drive at least some of the Viet Cong from parts of the Delta. The idea of a shared army-navy operational command was consciously drawn from the Civil War experience on the Mississippi River. The Civil War also at least marginally inspired the Mobile Riverine Force's heaviest armed assault vessels, the so-called monitors, which replicated the configuration and silhouette of the double-turreted Union monitors. The use of the Civil War as a point of reference for naval warfare suggests how irrelevant the navy's twentieth-century bluewater experience had become by the mid-1960s.

The 2d Brigade of the specially reactivated Ninth Infantry Division - General Westmoreland's World War II division - was assigned to the Mobile Riverine Force to carry the fight to the Viet Cong in the delta. The soldiers were embarked in platoon-size units aboard converted amphibious landing craft nested alongside three or four larger headquarters ships of Task Force 117. From this mobile base the troops were ferried to spots along the rivers and canals of the delta where Viet Cong strongholds were believed to exist. The army men would land, and the armored carriers and the escorting monitors would back offshore and position themselves to provide covering fire and cut off the fleeing enemy. At the end of two or three days, the soldiers climbed back aboard the landing craft and rode down river to the headquarters and barracks ships. The entire operation was coordinated by a battalion commander orbiting overhead in a helicopter.

Neat and tidy in theory, it was bloody awful in practice. The Viet Cong soon perfected their marine ambush techniques in waterways so narrow that the monitors and assault craft of Task Force 117, caught in heavy fire, often could not turn around. By the middle of 1967 the Viet Cong had a rocket with a 500-yard range capable of penetrating a foot of armor. A four-hour battle on 11 September illustrated the carnage that now could be inflicted on the sailors of the Mobile Riverine Force. In a carefully prepared Viet Cong ambush along a thin 2-mile stretch of river, eighteen American boats were damaged, five navy men were killed, and seventy-seven were wounded. The monthly historical supplement published by the commander, U. S. Naval Forces Vietnam, made the hollow claim that it was all worthwhile because the Viet Cong suffered many more casualties than the Americans.

The best justification for the Mobile Riverine Force came during the Communist "Tet Offensive" of February 1968, the turning point in the war. While the claimed number of Viet Cong killed cannot be validated, the high mobility of the force did permit it to help save the major cities of the delta. "Had the force not been created and introduced into the delta a year earlier," Thomas Cutler concluded, "the Tet Offensive would more than likely have had a much different outcome in this southern ‘rice bowl' region of South Vietnam.”

That rationalization did not satisfy Vice Admiral Elmo K. Zumwalt, Jr., who took command of all American naval forces in Vietnam on 29 September 1968. A briefing by the navy boss of the Mobile Riverine Force, Captain Robert S. Salzer, convinced the admiral that Cambodia was shipping large quantities of supplies across its border along the waterways of the Mekong Delta. Worried that the slackened pace of operations was demoralizing his sailors, Zumwalt planned a restructuring and a new aggressive strategy. He designated it with the acronym "SEA LORDS,” - for South-East Asia Lake, Ocean, River, and Delta Strategy. As explained by Lieutenant Commander Cutler, the new strategy would "form an interdiction barrier across the upper reaches of the Mekong Delta. . . . This barrier would be intensive and would close off, or at least seriously hamper, the flow of supplies from Cambodia."

Zumwalt cleared the concept with General Creighton W. Abrams, Westmoreland's replacement as the senior commander of all U. S. forces in Vietnam. On 5 November 1968 the admiral issued Operation Plan 111-69 putting SEA LORDS into effect under the organizational designation Task Force 194. For almost two years, until it was disbanded as part of President Richard M. Nixon's "Vietnamization" process, this special task force set up naval barriers along rivers and canals roughly paralleling the Cambodian border.

SEA LORDS's success, like that of all the navy's "in-country" operations is questionable. On the one hand, the riverine boundaries created a "front" of sorts in an otherwise very fluid and irregular war. A geographic line with friendly forces on one side and the enemy on the other was the kind of reference point American soldiers and sailors could understand and appreciate. Admiral Zumwalt records his own optimistic appraisal in a characteristically personal tone: "By the spring of 1969, the Navy was blockading the entire river-and-canal system along the Cambodian border and as a result, General Adams told me, Viet Cong activity in the delta was much reduced and overall U. S. casualties were considerably reduced."

On the other hand, after the Tet Offensive of 1968 popular support for the war was fast eroding in the United States. Sailors now came to Vietnam questioning their own presence and mission. They were more anxious to survive their tour than to distinguish themselves by gallant dedication to duty. Admiral Zumwalt's flag secretary later recalled visits from "young lieutenants" who came to COMNAVFORV headquarters to discuss the problems of conscience "they had in executing . . . orders" that might involve killing innocent Vietnamese. To compound the uncertainty, the casualty rate for navy men in SEA LORDS was the highest for the surface navy in Vietnam. The official ratio was thirty enemy killed for every dead American SEA LORDS sailor, but that was scant recompense in a time of profound national doubt about the moral justification for the Vietnam War.

On 2 November 1968 Vice Admiral Zumwalt briefed General Ahrams, who had just returned from Washington with instructions from President Johnson "to turn the war over to the Vietnamese." In contrast to the other briefers, who were still predicting an American victory in 1976 or somewhere down the road, Zumwalt presented a plan for rapidly giving the South Vietnamese navy full responsibility for the naval war. Zumwalt coined another acronym, "ACTOV," for Accelerated Turnover to the Vietnamese, and said the U. S. Navy could be relieved of all operational missions by mid-1970. He was in step with developments in Washington. In a speech a year later, on 31 December 1969, President Nixon proclaimed "Vietnamization" the official policy of the United States. The wheel had come full circle: Americans assumed advisory roles as they prepared to withdraw, just as they had when first moving into Vietnam a decade earlier.

Kenneth J. Hagan. Toward a Six-Hundred-Ship Navy. This People's Navy: The Making of American Sea Power. The Free Press. Copyright 1991.

Flying Black Ponies: The Navy's Close Air Support Squadron in Vietnam Squadron member Lavell tells the tragic, comic, and moving story of the pilots who flew support missions for riverine forces, SEALs, and allied units.

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