Combat Swimmer (24 page)

I went into the administrative office, called the UDT/SEAL officer detailer in the Bureau of Naval Personnel, and asked what he had available for me on the East Coast. I didn't want to go to SEAL One, because there I would have been a very junior lieutenant. And I was still a reserve officer, with roots in the East.

I'd called at a good time. The detailer was looking for someone to relieve the executive officer of UDT-22. I took the job and signed an extension-of-active-duty letter about ten minutes later. I figured I could spend a tour as XO, extend again, and then come back to SEAL Two when the leadership changed. I still hadn't decided to make a career out of the Navy, but I was having such a good time in Vietnam I wanted to go back.

I checked into UDT-22 in December 1968. Becky was glad that I'd be out of the war zone for a while. Though I didn't know it then, I would never go back to Vietnam.

I
have mixed thoughts about my time in Vietnam. On the one hand, I consider it the defining period of my life; because I'd been successful as a SEAL in combat, I decided to make the Navy a career. But my satisfaction is tempered by a major frustration: SEALs were never employed to their full potential.

The military hierarchy in Vietnam completely failed to understand the SEAL capability. “Bing” West, a RAND analyst who spent a few days with me in 1968 observing our operations, put it best: “SEALs were a tactic in search of a strategy.” That remained true from the time SEAL platoons started operating in Vietnam, in 1966, until the bitter end.

For the most part, we were relegated to the Navy river patrol forces. SEALs killed considerable numbers of the enemy, and obtained locally important intelligence. A lot of our men were wounded, but surprisingly few were killed. The latter statistic I attribute to training and the fact that we called our own shots—we simply didn't operate where or when we didn't want to.

In my view, we should have been conducting high risk-high gain operations. Instead of chasing VC who harassed the river patrol forces, we could have been applied to such vexing problems as freeing American prisoners of war. I realize national policy, such as it was, barred U.S. ground forces from North Vietnam—but had we been given a chance, we would have developed executable plans. Plus, we could have been searching for and freeing Americans captured in South Vietnam before they could be transported to the North.

As it was, in the Mekong Delta we did what seemed to be the next best thing: targeting VC prisoner camps in our areas. But that proved to be a frustrating effort, not because of the VC but because of our own insufferable military bureaucracy in Saigon. I learned that the best way to find and liberate prisoners in the delta was to develop local intelligence sources and react quickly to good information. But an organization called the Joint Resolution Center stifled that modus operandi.

For example, in 1968 it was common knowledge in the intelligence community that the VC were holding American prisoners in mobile camps. These were prisoners the VC didn't want to send to North Vietnam, because the southerners increased their status by having their own prisoners to flaunt. Anyway, for whatever reasons, Americans were being held in the delta. We had fairly reliable information about Americans being held near the Cambodian border, in an area called the Plain of Reeds. I amassed enough information on one such location to launch what would have been a successful recovery operation—had I not needed helicopter support from the Army. When I asked for that support, an Army colonel from the Joint Resolution Center showed up and told me, “Step aside, Lieutenant, I'm taking over.” He had a bad plan, it fell apart in the rehearsal, and they never attempted the mission.

The SEAL experience in Vietnam was a microcosm of the larger U.S. military experience. We killed and captured a lot of Communists but never focused on the real problem. The United States fought the wrong kind of war. We were doomed to failure as early as 1964, when political leaders, on the advice of military leaders, decided to increase by an order of magnitude the number of conventional forces in Vietnam and commit ourselves to a war of attrition. President John F. Kennedy had recognized the potential quagmire in Vietnam and insisted that our involvement reflect the situation's overriding political-military aspects. He saw the conflict as one that could not be resolved by overwhelming military technology, but that might be thwarted by properly applied pressure using “unconventional” military force.

As a young lieutenant in Vietnam, I admit I wasn't much smarter than those who saw the solution in search-and-destroy missions. But after a while I realized that the best way to hurt the enemy was to cut off the heads of the political cadres who ran the show. The way to make a difference was not to set ambushes in free-fire zones, but to attack the VC infrastructure. Done early, on the scale of the much-lambasted Phoenix program, that might have changed the outcome of the war. We were fighting an ideology. Killing young men and women who had been forced, by terrorist means, into serving their Communist masters wasn't going to defeat the ideology. The only way to do
that
was to kill or capture the ones spreading the “idea.”

America lost the Vietnam War before I ever got there. Should the U.S. have become involved at all? Our motives were pure within the context of the time; we couldn't have done otherwise. There was no doubt that Soviet communism sought to establish its domination over the countries of the world. The only way to do that was to defeat its antithesis—the forces of democracy. That was the picture painted by the leaders of the Communist world in Moscow, and that was the canvas American leaders saw in the 1950s and early 1960s. To argue now that our position then was morally bankrupt is to ignore the realities of those times. What was bankrupt was the failure on the part of our military and political leadership to admit that by 1965 the situation in Vietnam could not be reversed by a massive influx of U.S. military forces. Our military leaders refused to understand that they were facing a political-military situation.

The key to the struggle lay in the South—the Mekong Delta. The Communists knew they had to win there in order to bring down the Saigon government. And the key to victory was the elaborate political infrastructure of dedicated Communists. A direct invasion from the North would have undermined the Communists' position that the struggle emanated from within the South and was being waged by South Vietnamese simply trying to overthrow the corrupt government in Saigon. But to keep the fight going long enough, there had to be an influx of fighters from the North. The Vietcong infrastructure in the South was the mechanism by which that infiltration was carried out. It was the infrastructure that picked up the troops coming down the Ho Chi Minh Trail and successfully moved them into the delta to merge with the local Vietcong main force units. And it held the effort together after the Vietcong main force units were virtually wiped out during the Tet Offensive of 1968.

The Communist movement in the South was much like a giant lizard. Its head was the small group of dedicated Communists who formed the political infrastructure. Its tail was the military force. Each time we hacked off a portion of the tail and proclaimed that we had seriously damaged the creature, the head of the lizard grew more tail. Our strategy all along should have been to go after the head. But our military was not keen on fighting anything but another military force, and as long as the Vietcong could give us a main force unit to kick every now and then we'd ignore the real problem. While we were busy searching and destroying with large U.S. military forces, the political infrastructure was busy setting us up, building the network that eventually paved the way for the takeover of Saigon. The vast majority of Vietcong military units were not made up of the dedicated, fearless fighters portrayed in our news media. Most people in the Mekong Delta were apolitical; they just wanted to be left alone to grow their crops and survive. The Vietcong infrastructure, through coercion and terror, filled its ranks with these average people. Eliminate the infrastructure and there would have been no Vietcong military force.

The Communist strategy for the war was simple—keep fighting until enough political pressure built up in America to get out of the war. Ho Chi Minh and his advisers in Moscow were students of the American way of war. They knew that we liked to enter a war only as a last resort and then commit ourselves to a total military victory, as we had done in two previous world wars. The Communist leaders knew that if they could prolong the war we'd eventually tire and go home—that was one lesson of Korea. Some in the U.S. military did understand the situation and attempted to point us down the right path. But the mainstream military structure couldn't accept any course that didn't include the core of the U.S. military structure—conventional forces. If any of our leaders had read and understood Bernard Fall's 1963 book about the French experience in Vietnam,
Street Without Joy,
they would have seen the error of the conventional strategy.

The correct course of action came too late and with too few resources to have an effect. It was the much-maligned Phoenix program. One of its objectives was to do away with the Vietcong political structure, particularly in the Mekong Delta. In the delta the strategy worked well considering its late start. The Phoenix Program went after the head of the lizard.

But our political and military leaders chose to wage a war of attrition, thinking that sooner or later the other side would run out of fighters and give up. This bogus strategy allowed the Communists to win. They managed to create 58,000 body bags filled with brave young Americans. With no discernible end in sight, our country lost the will to continue the fight. Communists also did a masterly job of working on the folks back home through our news media, which correctly pointed out the futility of killing enough Communists to make them quit. Other Americans with less-honorable intentions aided the Communist cause. The Vietnam War split our country. It gave certain U.S. citizens a platform to actively attempt to bring down our form of government, while being glorified by our news media for “doing the right thing.” The picture of Jane Fonda posing with a North Vietnamese antiaircraft gun crew after they had just shot down U.S. airmen doing their duty, is indelibly etched in my mind. No amount of apologizing on her part will ever convince me she wasn't providing aid and comfort to the enemy.

Escaping military service became vogue. In all previous wars, draft dodgers had been prosecuted. This time, draft dodgers fleeing to Canada were excused because they objected to war. I object to war. Many people object to war, but in the past they served, they didn't run. In December 1966 I encountered a former college fraternity brother at a party. He told me, proudly, that he'd conjured up a “hardship” reason to avoid the draft because he didn't want to go to Vietnam. I was furious. I had recently visited a friend in the Portsmouth naval hospital who had been shot down flying an A-6 over Hanoi, and I was on my way to Vietnam. Becky grabbed me as I was about to hit my “brother.” Fortunately, she only decreased the force of my punch. If I'd run into the guy a year later, after my first tour, I would have ripped his head off.

 

When the Vietnam Veterans War Memorial was in the planning stages, I thought erecting a black wall to the memory of the brave men and women who fought and died for their country was the final slap in the face. I avoided going there until I was stationed at the Pentagon in 1988. When I did go, I realized the color made no difference. I was struck by the view of the wall. It came out of the ground on one end, rose in the middle, and went back into the ground on the other—exactly the pattern of our effort in Vietnam in the 1960s. Equally striking was the fact that from the other side, the memorial was virtually indistinguishable from its surroundings. Instead of standing tall like the Marine Corps' Iwo Jima Memorial just across the Potomac River, the Wall was hidden, as if the country were embarrassed by the whole thing.

As I walked the length of the Wall, a strange feeling came over me. I was not the disinterested observer I'd intended to be. Tears came to my eyes as I randomly scanned the names and focused on that of Rick Trani, a SEAL Two officer killed during my second deployment. I went back to the directory to find the names of other friends and teammates. I had a hard time focusing, but I found and touched each name. I was affected by the Wall. It symbolized the bravery and dedication of our military and the incompetence of our political leadership. As I walked back to my car I told Becky, “The memorial is a good thing.”

I also remember feeling that the self-appointed guardians of the monument—the grubby, bearded, and camo-clad “Vietnam veterans” selling souvenirs—were not like the ones I remembered from the era. I wondered how many of these had actually served in Vietnam. I thought they provided a final fitting insult by a country seemingly embarrassed to honor its dead from an unpopular and unsuccessful war. I didn't buy a damn thing.

To this day, it's difficult for me to explain to non-SEALs what we did in Vietnam and why I liked it so much. People, including some military friends, think I'm crazy when I tell them I liked being in Vietnam. I know a lot of it had to do with SEAL Team Two, which was such a tightly knit unit in those days. I can't imagine going to war with a group of people who didn't have a background and bond like ours. We all felt we couldn't let each other down. No doubt that was part of the reason SEALs were so successful in keeping battle deaths low even though more than 90 percent of the men from SEAL Team One and Two who served in Vietnam have the Purple Heart.

I guess in the final analysis I found complete job satisfaction in Vietnam. Since we weren't part of a grander strategy, the next best thing occurred: we were left to our own devices. I had total control over my actions and the authority to do whatever I thought best. Not bad for a young Navy lieutenant. For the SEALs of that era, Vietnam was a tough act to follow.