Battle Ready

partial.

I remember talking to Marine friends who might have been up north in I Corps, where most Marines fought. They all thought their vision of the war was the true war. Yet I had to think, “Jeez, you saw only a small part of it.” I’d have the same experience talking with an army officer who’d served in the Mekong Delta or the Parrot’s Beak. Each man’s definition of the war would turn out to be completely different.

So my experience was almost unique. I didn’t see every possible way the war was fought, but I saw most of it.

What all this teaches is not how to deal with every possible situation. Fighting in delta swamps teaches you how to fight in delta swamps. Fighting in triple-canopy rain forest teaches you how to fight in triple- canopy rain forests. Fighting in mountains teaches you how to fight in mountains. Fighting in flat, coastal country where there are lots of rice paddies and villages teaches you how to do that. And you learn a lot simply shooting and getting shot at a lot, and working closely with others on a combat team. But there isn’t a great deal of carryover from any of that one to the other. The biggest lesson, in fact, is learning how to be open to surprising new experiences and then turning that openness into resourceful and creative ways of dealing with the challenges you face.

I was to rediscover these truths later in life when I began to be engaged in peacekeeping, humanitarian operations. After I’d gone through my first, I thought I’d learned everything there was to know about them. “These lessons apply everywhere,” I told myself.

But on the second one, it hit me that few of these lessons actually apply anywhere else. The previous experience helped, sure; it put me in the right frame of mind; but it didn’t tell me how to solve particular problems.

You have to be open to each new and very different reality. It’s wrong to use models and to think stereotypically about problems and issues.

Tony Zinni had come a long, long way from Philadelphia. He was to travel much farther.

THE FOREST OF DEATH

After Zinni completed his orientations in Saigon, Colonel Nels Andersen, the commanding officer of the advisory unit, decided that he should not wait for a hole to open up in one of the units, but immediately go out into the field to learn the ropes with experienced advisers. It was to be Zinni’s first taste of combat.

He was ordered to report to the Vietnamese Marines 4th Battalion, then conducting riverine operations in the Rung Sat Special Zone.

Rung Sat was a four-hundred-square-mile, strategically vital area southeast of Saigon — massive mangrove swamps and labyrinthine tangles of waterways. The shipping channels out of the South China Sea up to Saigon came through the Rung Sat Zone; and the Vietcong tried to interdict the shipping. They would pick people off the decks with snipers, shoot rockets or recoilless rifles at the ships, or mine the waterways — often attaching mines to ropes stretched from bank to bank. They kept it slack to let acceptable traffic pass and pulled the mines up when they spotted a target they wanted to strike.

Operating in the Rung Sat was tremendously difficult, with its tangled swamps and water levels at high tide so elevated that everything, including the villages, was under water. No place down there was dry all the time.

Advisers had “blanket” travel orders authorizing them to use any means of military transportation to get anywhere in South Vietnam if they weren’t moving with a unit. Usually this involved going to a nearby air base, such as Tan Son Nhut near Saigon, where you scrounged a ride to the region closest to your unit’s position. This could take days and involve a series of plane, helicopter, boat, and/or motor vehicle rides.

Even this basic knowledge didn’t much help Zinni. He had no idea how to get to the Rung Sat; he’d simply been told to go there, but was so green he had no idea about the best way to go.

He eventually found himself on a Vietnamese civilian bus overloaded with men, women, kids, grandmas, chickens, and bundles of possessions. The men, women, and kids all found this lone American in a Vietnamese Marine uniform, with all his combat gear, a puzzling curiosity. Americans in Vietnam didn’t travel on civilian buses.

He ended up at the gate of a small U.S./Vietnamese naval base at a place called Nha Be, not far from his destination. When he asked how to get to the 4th Battalion in the Rung Sat, he was led to the operations center, where he met the U.S. Navy operations officer.

“How did you get here?” the Navy officer asked, staring hard at Zinni, as though he had dropped out of the sky.

“I took the bus from Saigon.”

“You took the bus from Saigon?” he snapped. “You want to get yourself killed? You’ve got to be totally nuts! That’s offering yourself to the VC on a platter!” He then proceeded to chew the young lieutenant out for putting himself into such a risk.

Zinni tried to explain that he hadn’t realized taking the bus was dangerous, and besides it had been a pleasant ride and he’d met some nice people.

The Navy officer shook his head in amazed disbelief; and then cracked a tolerant smile. “Fools and children…”

“A resupply helo makes daily runs out to the 4th Battalion,” he said. “I’ll get you on tomorrow’s run. You’re welcome to spend the night here with the other officers in their hooch.”

The rest of the day Zinni met with other officers and NCOs learning about operations in the Rung Sat. They provided him with a wealth of knowledge about the local region, riverine operations, and the enemy.

Nha Be was home to U.S. and Vietnamese river patrol boat, helicopter, minesweeper, and River Assault Group (RAG) units (South Vietnamese units with U.S. advisers; the U.S. equivalent in the Mekong Delta was known as the Mobile Riverine Force). The RAGs used specially configured landing craft that were modified to move troops, control operations, and provide fire support on the complex of waterways in the southern regions of Vietnam. “Mother Ships”—really, barges — provided floating bases for these units. The Vietnamese Marines operated as the assault troops with the RAGs and had their own small boat units for these kinds of missions — high-speed fiberglass boats, called Dong Nai boats, with powerful outboard engines.

These operations were sometimes supplemented by air strikes using Vietnamese AD Skyraider aircraft. The ancient, prop-driven American planes were godsends to the guys on the ground. They carried huge loads of ordnance, remained on station for long periods, and flew slowly over targets to pinpoint their locations. Jets were sexier, but they couldn’t provide anything like the long-term satisfaction.

Spotter planes were also often used to cover waterborne movements and observe the areas in front and to the flanks of the Marine movements. The natural tendency was to run these parallel to the route, but the VC watched out for this. It tipped them off to which waterway the Marines were on and to their direction of movement. The best technique was to vary the route of the planes and to run them back and forth across the waterway.

The resupply helo the next morning touched down at a small village called Tan Hiep in the middle of the mangrove swamps and river mazes that made up the Rung Sat. The village’s thatched houses were perched on high stilts, with rickety ladders leading up to the doorways. Debris on the ground indicated it was low tide. Zinni couldn’t imagine what high tide would bring.

The two battalion advisers, Captains Joe Hoar and Bob Hamilton, greeted him as he scrambled off the helo. Soon they were explaining that Colonel Andersen had radioed instructions to “snap Zinni in” for a few weeks; but their skeptical looks told him they were wondering what a junior lieutenant was doing here.

They took Zinni to meet the battalion commander, Major Tri, and some of his officers, including the battalion operations officer, Lieutenant Hoa Dang Nguyen. Hoa was a slender young officer, about Zinni’s height (5 feet 9 inches), and a Military Academy grad. He spoke English well — as did many of the Marine officers — was very friendly, open, and outgoing… and very Westernized. He and Zinni hit it off instantly, and later became close friends.

Tri was just as Westernized as Hoa, but also very polished and smooth (having graduated from American