by Tom Clancy
I remember going to a playoff football game in which the Miami Dolphins were playing San Diego. I had a really great seat right down near the field, which gave me the best possible visibility; and I was able to observe Dan Marino, one of the greatest quarterbacks ever, at the very height of his powers. The San Diego quarterback (I forget his name) was a good, solid player, but he was several rungs down from Dan Marino.
Very often, Marino would come out of the huddle, go up to the line, and call an audible. You’d expect he would take a panning scan over the entire defense before he did that. But he didn’t work that way. He’d look at one guy in the defense and then make his call — and it was almost always the best call he could have made.
The other quarterback, though, would come up to look over the defense the way you’d expect. He’d have to look all over the place before he could make his decision. And I thought, “Dan Marino has reached a level of expertise that allows him to key on only one thing, and from that picks up what he needs to know. He has a much greater ‘sensing’ ability than the other quarterback.”
This has analogies with combat: The more experience you’ve got, the larger is your inventory of pattern analysis that allows you to pick up on what you need to know; and like Marino, you can make a solid decision based on a very few key indicators, rather than having to try to mentally process a complex or even chaotic set of inputs. So after I’d had sufficient experiences of firefights, I was able to process one or two indicators fairly quickly and come up with a satisfactory course of action.
I have to add that the kind of sensing I’m talking about is not just a matter of experience. It also involves understanding what you were sensing. There’s a strong analytical component, involving reading, research, and applied intelligence. If you don’t have a background of knowledge and understanding that allows you to appreciate these “sensings,” you might undergo these experiences and miss everything they’re trying to offer you. For example: Now that I know I’m hearing an AK-47 and not an M-16, I need to judge from the pattern of firing whether this is somebody who’s just taking a couple of random shots and moving away or somebody who’s hanging in there in a fixed position and plans to stay.
How is it that I can judge that the firing is coming from five hundred and not two hundred yards (in the beginning I couldn’t tell you if it was twenty or two thousand)? The answer: You estimate by means of the flash-bang method (as we called it): There’s a delay between the flash of a firing weapon and the bang. As soon as you see the flash, you begin counting seconds—1001, 1002, 1003. You then use a formula you’ve learned that lets you determine the distance of the weapon.
Why do sounds seem much closer at night? The answer: Because of atmospheric conditions and because activity levels are lower, creating less interference from white noise.
I gathered in information like this wherever I could find it — from reading, from Vietnamese Marines, from other advisers, from training.
There were times of course when what I’d learned did not compute with my own experience, and I had to come up with a different solution.
One example: In training, we were always told when you see a flare pop at night, you freeze. You don’t move. When they pop the flare, they’re looking for motion. When they detect it, they have your location.
This didn’t make sense to me. Your natural instinct is to go to ground and take cover. “Follow your instincts, go to ground,” I told myself. “Better they detect a motion but I end up under cover than me sitting there sweating and thinking, ‘Hope he didn’t see me.’ ”
You also have to understand that there are different kinds of flares, each sending a different kind of message: A hand flare or a grenade flare tells you something different from an artillery flare — though they all illuminate. An illumination grenade or a hand flare tells you your enemy is fairly close to you and he’s shooting it because he expects something, he heard something, or thought he heard something, so his senses are up. What do you do? Get your butt down.
My own processing of this information led me to a different conclusion from the one I received in training.
Later, I became directly involved in improving Marine Corps training — challenging much of what I had learned. I made several videotapes that are still used at basic school. Some validated what I’d been taught and some didn’t.
Zinni’s plunge into Vietnam was not confined to military operations. Along with his Vietnamese Marine companions he lived much of the time with ordinary Vietnamese in their villages and hamlets. Vietnam had a quartering law that required the people to allow troops operating in their area to move into their houses. This was not the burden on the people that it might seem. The Marines didn’t take a place over and throw people out of their houses. They treated the local people with respect, paying for their food and helping with the village chores. (The country-bred troops especially enjoyed helping out with the familiar tasks that reminded them of their own home villages.)
But for Zinni, moving into somebody else’s home was initially hard to get used to; he thought of it as an imposition and an intrusion. But after he saw that the villagers seemed to accept it, and in most cases welcome it, he began to overcome his own discomfort and realize that the kid from Philadelphia was onto a very positive thing. In time, he came to a further realization that all the hardships and extremes he and his companions had to endure were worth his interactions with the Vietnamese people.
Here are some memories of life in the villages — and of related encounters with the enemy:
Rarely did my contemporaries serving with U.S. units ever get to really know the Vietnamese; and then they viewed them with suspicion and even contempt. But living among the people gave me long-lasting insights into a very rich and wonderful culture… and into the impact of so many terrible decades of war and suffering.
When I’d talk with families at meals or during their daily chores, I always found them warm and friendly, yet shy, polite, and reserved. But once I took time to get to know them, they opened up. Making friends was harder, since they didn’t make friends easily. In their eyes, friendship was a serious long-term commitment — not lightly undertaken. But once you made a Vietnamese friend, you had a friend for life.
Where the war touched them, they were enigmatic and stoic. I never encountered self-pity; and this was hard to get used to. Where did they find the resources to stoically accept the pain and anguish I often saw them endure? Why did they so rarely show emotion even after the most traumatic experiences?
Though American units passed through the villages in large numbers, there was little contact. Neither the Americans nor the Vietnamese wanted it. So a lone American taking up residence in a Vietnamese village was a novelty — a curiosity to be checked out. In fact, the local kids were often initially unsure if I was real. They liked to give me a poke, to test if I was.
Though I always had a wonderful time with the Vietnamese, and was always treated with respect, it was hard to know what they thought of Americans in general or of our part in their conflict.
One memorable insight into that came during a warm, friendly conversation with the family of a village chief (I was sharing his house). It was a welcome cool evening in a picturesque hamlet, and we were sitting outside the house after an enjoyable meal.
“Show me pictures of your family and of your house in the USA,” the chief’s wife, an elderly lady, asked. “Do you have any?”
All I had was a picture of my wife and me taken in front of her parents’ home. I pulled it out, the old lady stared at it for a while, and then she looked up at me with a deeply penetrating expression.
“Why are you here in Vietnam?” she asked me.
I gave her the standard answer about stopping communism and protecting democracy and our Vietnamese allies.
She shook her head. “It’s sad that you have to leave your family and get involved in this tragic mess,” she said.
I continued to offer the party line.
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�But what are you going to do to protect us from ‘them’?” she asked, her hand pointing toward the south.
At first I thought she had made a mistake — the enemy was to the north, after all. But then I realized she was saying exactly what she meant to say. She was talking about the corrupt South Vietnamese government. As far as she was concerned, the enemy was both to the north and to the south.
These people, I was just coming to understand, were trapped between two options, both bad. And that was when I began to realize that the “center of gravity” [15] was the people… and that winning hearts and minds was not just a slogan; it was the only route to winning the war.
Meanwhile, they had to do whatever they could to survive.
Eventually, the winning of hearts and minds was thought to be important enough to engage the Vietnamese Marines in it — engaged specifically in running pacification programs in the II CTZ. The mission involved going into villages to ID, interrogate, and win over the population with civic action projects; and the Marines did not initially warm to it. They thought of themselves as fighters and not civic action wimps.
Usually the operation entailed setting up a “county fair.” They’d put up a series of tents, booths, and stations where the questioning and identification processes were mixed in with medical treatment, food distribution, and entertainment. Some political propaganda was also added in order to win “hearts and minds.”
It turned out that the people actually enjoyed these events, and the Marines soon learned the benefits of these efforts, became more receptive to them, and actually enjoyed running the fairs. Most of the Marines were kids from the country and villages. They liked connecting with folks who were very like themselves. And as time went on, the Marines developed a positive relationship with most of the population in II CTZ.
This did not please the VC, who began to threaten villagers who participated in the fairs.
But despite the intimidation, more and more villagers began to come forward and provide intelligence on enemy activity.
In one incident, a mother in a remote village brought her baby — its face hugely swollen — to a medical station we’d set up. When it turned out that the Marines’ medical personnel weren’t equipped to handle the baby’s infected abscess, she was brought to me.
I called the U.S. Army unit nearby, and they agreed to arrange a medevac and treatment at a hospital in the city of Qui Nhon. The anxious and frightened mother and baby, together with an aunt, were then assembled in the landing zone to wait for the chopper. By the time the helo was actually touching down, they were on the edge of panic. The mother immediately squatted down and peed right there, with the shocked helo crew looking on. But then she somehow mustered up the courage to scramble onto the helicopter. And off they went. Though I wished them well, they quickly slipped out of my mind.
Several months later, I was again in this village, but now with a company from another battalion.
The company commander told me a lady from the village wanted to see me. And I said, “Sure,” though I had forgotten all about the incident.
But when the lady approached us, proudly showing off her now chubby, healthy baby, I immediately recognized her, and I was of course pleased and happy for her as she thanked us for saving her baby. She then chatted with me about the care she’d received and her trip back to this remote village. Later, as she got ready to leave and was about to say good-bye, she turned to me: “There are VC hiding in tunnels nearby,” she whispered, “and I’ll show you where.”
We immediately mustered the troops and went to the location she pointed out to us, just outside the village. There we found the camouflaged entrance to a large underground complex.
As we began to clear the complex, we realized there were people inside. Our troops talked them out by threatening to blow up the holes.
Soon — to my amazement — a group of VC emerged, clad in pinkish uniforms. They turned out to be a regimental medical unit whose aid station was located in the tunnel complex. And then by some kind of wild coincidence that was not really surprising, once you thought about it, our battalion doctor recognized the VC doctor. They’d both attended medical school in France together and had once been friends. A friendly lunch and chat followed (strange but interesting to me), with the old friends bringing each other up to date about their lives and careers since they’d last seen each other. At the end of the meal, friendly good-byes and handshakes were exchanged; and the VC were handcuffed and moved out as POWs.
As they moved off, I recalled that similar events had occurred in our own Civil War.
The VC and NVA were masters at constructing well-hidden underground tunnel systems. We discovered elaborate networks connecting large, furnished subterranean rooms, fully equipped with handmade cloth gas masks with charcoal filters, and carefully booby-trapped dead-end wings.
When the deep rice paddies dried up in summer, the entrances to some of these complexes, submerged during the rainy season, would often be exposed.
We once stopped for a noon break and meal by one of the deep paddies where a tunnel entrance was visible near one of its corners, big enough to walk into standing up. Since it was the dry season and the entrance was exposed, we assumed the tunnel was empty. But while we rested, some of the Marines began poking around the entrance, and then suddenly became alerted when they detected noises from inside. We quickly surrounded the opening and ordered whoever was inside to come out. After some coaxing and threatening, we got an agreement to surrender; and out of the entrance came two young men dressed in sharply pressed khaki uniforms, with close-cropped haircuts. One was a NVA lieutenant and the other an NCO [noncommissioned officer]. When the lieutenant spotted me, he called the NCO to attention and snapped me a very sharp salute. And to the delight of the Marines, I returned it. The two were then taken off as POWs.
Other captures were much tougher. In the following, the VC tried to hide among fishermen on a lake, using them as human shields:
The area along the coast of Binh Dinh Province was filled with lakes, tidal inlets, and swamps, with fishing villages all around them. (Many of the villages in the area had been abandoned because of the resettlement program.) Since the availability of food and the population concentration made the area a favored objective of the VC, we never had any problems making contact with the enemy. We ran any number of sweeps in the region and never failed to end up in a firefight.
One day we had a big one on the Dam Tra O, the region’s major lake.
During a major sweep two of our battalions were conducting with the 1st Cav, we got into a running gun battle as we pushed eastward toward the lake with the lead element of our battalion. The other battalion was moving toward the lake from the south.
As we closed on the lake, rapidly forcing the VC toward the water, we could clearly see that we’d trapped them in one of the swamps. There was no way they could slip out to our flanks. Their only way out was into the lake.
When we made our initial contact, the Cav sent us an observer helicopter and a gunship (called a “a Silver Team”). They came on scene as we reached the villages near the water. I directed them over to the swamp where we’d last seen the VC, and they spotted several of them lying in the shallow water breathing through hollow reeds. The gunship fired into the water and killed a number of VC; and the others there surrendered to us. But the majority of the VC had reached the lakeshore, grabbed boats, and moved to the center of the huge lake, mingling with the civilian fishing boats.
We then gathered on the shore to decide what to do. As we were talking, I could hear on our radio net the senior adviser from the battalion to our south calling in an artillery fire mission — a VT (variable time fuse) mission, meaning the rounds would explode overhead and rain deadly shrapnel on the boats. I immediately jumped on the radio and called a check fire. “Wait a minute,” I shouted into the mike, “you can’t call in artillery. These are innocent people out there. The VC have gone in among fishermen. If they try to get away, the VC will
shoot them.” While I was doing this, the VNMC company commander with me was pleading with his own chain of command not to fire.
This brought on a heated argument with the other adviser, a captain, who kept insisting that the boats were all VC. Since I was a lieutenant, it was a touchy moment. Soon a task force adviser, a major, came on the net to sort it out.
Meanwhile, dozens of panicked civilians had crowded along the shore, all anxious about their relatives out on the boats. “These are our fathers, our brothers, out there fishing,” they kept pleading. “They’re not Vietcong.”
Even when I pointed that out to the major, he seemed to be leaning toward the captain’s version. At that point, since I was sort of a wiseass anyhow, I let it all hang out. “I’ve got to tell you, sir, if we shoot this mission, in my mind we’re killing a lot of innocents, and I’m on record for that.”
“So do you have any other ideas?”
When I threw this question at the VNMC company commander, he knew what had to be done: “My men will go out in boats and get the VC,” he answered.
This was dangerous, but he and his troops did not want to see innocents killed. When I passed on the proposal, the adviser from the other battalion broke in to say that he and his Vietnamese counterpart didn’t think much of it.
“Stay out of it,” I told him. “It’s not your ass on the line.”
I knew I would pay for that comment, but I didn’t care.
Though I knew that a lieutenant can never be sure he is doing the right thing when he’s challenged by seniors, I’d already run into a number of situations like this, when my only recourse was to stand up for what my gut told me was right and take the flak for it. After seeing the results of doubting myself and backing down, I’d sworn I would never cave in once I’d reached down inside and determined that what I needed to do felt right.
Though this position did not endear me to the others on the radio, no one was ready to challenge me.