The rest of the sweep was a continuing series of hit-and-run gun battles:
At one point, VC burst up from camouflaged holes just as the headquarters element came by, but they were taken out by the security platoon almost before Zinni realized what was happening. The platoon leader, a big guy and half French, carried a Thompson submachine gun without a stock and was deadly with it.
After another firefight, they found several VC bodies, including — to Zinni’s amazement — two young women, obviously twins and beautiful. “This isn’t unusual,” a lieutenant told him. “The VC have a number of women in their ranks.”
“Strange war,” Zinni thought.
Tony Zinni had arrived in Vietnam a month earlier, on March 26, 1967, leaving behind a large and loving blue-collar Italian family in Philadelphia and a bride of only a few weeks, who stayed with her own family in Atlanta in Tony’s absence.
He had come to be a Marine by way of Villanova University in Philadelphia, where as an undergraduate he’d joined a Marine equivalent of ROTC, called the PLC—“Platoon Leaders Class.” He had received additional basic and officers training at Quantico, and graduated from Villanova as a Marine second lieutenant.
After additional training at Quantico, he had been sent to the 2nd Marine Division based at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, where he spent a little over a year as a rifle platoon commander, infantry company commander, and commander of an infantry training company.
After his stint at the Infantry Training Regiment, he returned to his parent unit, the 1st Battalion, 6th Marines, where he expected to be a platoon commander. But because they were short of officers, he became a company commander… incredibly good luck, since it was a captain’s job, and he was still only a second lieutenant.
Meanwhile, the lieutenants in his battalion were getting orders to Vietnam. Soon, two-thirds of the Marine Corps were in that country fighting the first big battles. They were short of officers.
But there remained one lieutenant without orders to Nam — Tony Zinni. All of his contemporaries — his buddies — were going to be combat vets and he was going to remain a virgin. He wanted to go to Nam.
He got his wish after his wedding and brief honeymoon in Williams-burg, Virginia. When he returned to his battalion, his orders to Vietnam were waiting for him. They were strange orders. His buddies had all gone to U.S. Marine units, mostly to one of the two Marine divisions then in Vietnam. Zinni was to report to the Marine Advisory Unit, of the Naval Advisory Group, of the Military Assistance Command, Vietnam (MACV). He had no clue what this meant. He would only find that out in Vietnam.
But first, he was sent to attend the Army Special Warfare School at Fort Bragg and go through the school’s Military Assistance, Training, and Advisory (MATA) course at Fort Bragg, where, among other things, he would learn to speak and write basic Vietnamese.
After a week of orientation in Saigon, Zinni was taken to the headquarters of the Vietnamese Marine Corps on Le Thanh Ton Street, a collection of old colonial buildings that had once been the headquarters of the legendary French Foreign Legion.
After the inevitable processing and issuing of uniforms (he thought the Vietnamese Marine tiger-striped camouflage uniforms and green berets[8] were very macho), he was taken to an assigned hotel room. Advisers were provided with rooms either in Saigon or in Cholon, the Chinese section of Saigon. Zinni’s, in the Five Oceans Hotel in Cholon, became his “home” when he was in town from the field, and was a welcome oasis where he could clean up and get a decent night’s sleep.
The first days at Le Thanh Ton were devoted to briefings on the unit and its mission.
These were condensed, technical, and very fundamental: the number of VNMC battalions, their structure, their locations, their weapons, their day-to-day operations, what the advisers were doing… but not much history, background, or military culture. Though Zinni was eager to pick up much more information about this fascinating unit, that had to come later — on the fly or in bars.
Here are a few basics:
The Vietnamese Marine Corps — the Thuy Quan Luc Chien (TQLC) in Vietnamese — was formed in 1954 and had its origins in the French
In 1963, they were the force that engineered the coup that captured and later executed President Diem. They continued to play kingmaker in subsequent coups and what were called “elections”—including the one in 1967, which Zinni observed at close hand.
During 1967, the Vietnamese Marine Corps had five infantry battalions in the field (another, then forming, entered service that year). When the war ended in 1975, the TQLC had reached division size.
They were not desk warriors. Better than eighty percent of a Vietnamese Marine’s time was spent deployed in the field conducting combat operations. The remaining time was spent at the National Training Center or back at their battalion base camps where their families usually lived. These were all located near Saigon, except for the 4th Battalion whose camp was in Vung Tau, a beautiful seaside resort on the South China Sea.
Though they occasionally conducted amphibious operations with the U.S. Marines and more extensive riverine operations in the southern part of the country, most of their operations had them fighting as light infantry task forces comprised of one to three battalions plus support elements.
The heart of the TQLC was its infantry battalions, each with its own proud identity and colorful unit name — such as “Crazy Buffalo,” “Sea Wolf,” “Black Dragon,” “Monster Bird,” and “Killer Whale.”
They were much respected and admired by the Vietnamese people (anyone wearing their uniform — including Americans — was customarily honored in cities, towns, and villages throughout the country). And they traditionally marched at the head of the military formation in Vietnam’s annual National Day Parade, a place of honor that had to be earned each year from combat performance. A very different reaction came from areas controlled by the Vietcong — further confirmation of the respect they commanded.
Enlisted Marines were wiry, tough volunteers who’d earned the right to be Marines by going through a challenging boot camp. It did not take most of them long to develop the ability to accept hardships and pain and soldier on under extreme conditions that would break most men. Most of them had mottoes like “Cop Bien” (“Tigers of the Sea”) or “Sat Cong” (“Kill Communists”) tattooed on their forearms, thus ensuring their fate if captured and encouraging them to fight harder and never surrender. Many had been wounded, and most suffered from bouts of malaria. All had seen friends and comrades die in battle. Yet they were by no means grim; they looked for every opportunity to let loose their lively spirits and sense of humor. They were irrepressible practical jokers, never losing a chance to pull somebody else’s chain — yet never cruelly or meanly. It was always to share a laugh and not to cause pain.
The Vietnamese officers were no less tough, and no less lively. But they had also received serious professional training at the Vietnamese equivalents of our military academies, all graduating near the top of their class. Like the enlisted men, they spent more time in action in the field than at home bases. This experience had honed most of them into tactically competent leaders whose small unit skills and technical proficiency were exceptional; they all tended to lead from the front. Many older officers were highly decorated with both Vietnamese and American awards for heroism.
Discipline in the TQLC was predictably harsh.
The second-floor offices of the advisory unit at Le Thanh Ton overlooked the Vietnamese Marine brig where inmates were made to run in circles carrying huge rocks during the hottest part of the day. They were constantly harassed or struck if they faltered or failed to instantly meet a guard’s barked instructions.
They handled security with similar severity.
During a break one day, Zinni was standing out on the second-story balcony over the headquarters main entrance watching the traffic on the one-way street. A young man on a motor scooter was coming down the wrong
