by Larry Berman
The change-of-command ceremony aboard the USS Garrett County, moored at Pier Bravo in the Vietnamese Naval Shipyard in Saigon, occurred on Monday morning, September 30, 1968. After brief farewell remarks, Rear Admiral Veth turned to the commanding officer of the Garrett County, ordering, “Captain, haul down my flag.” Turning to Admiral Zumwalt, Veth said, “Sir, I am ready to be relieved.” Bud Zumwalt read his new orders, faced his predecessor, and replied, “I relieve you, sir.” Vice Admiral Elmo R. Zumwalt, Jr., had now assumed command of the navy’s operational forces and advisory teams in Vietnam, a command that included the coastal surveillance and gunfire support forces of Operation Market Time, the river patrol forces of Operation Game Warden, and River Assault Flotilla One, consisting of the navy elements of the Mobile Riverine Force and operations of the Naval Support Activities, Da Nang and Saigon. “On September 30 our lives changed forever,” recalled Rex Rectanus. “The days of established routine were gone forever and the ZWIs (Zumwalt Wild Ideas) were here to stay.”30
In the first of many letters he would write to Mouza about Bud’s daily activities, Flag Lieutenant W. Lewis Glenn explained, “All went smoothly at the change of Command yesterday. Admiral McCain and General Abrams both had good things to say about the Admiral’s past record and his new command.”31 Lew joked about his new boss being able to get back to quarters in time to watch television coverage of the ceremony. “Even though the television coverage started with Admiral McCain’s picture and Admiral Zumwalt’s voice, it all evened out in the end.” Glenn comforted Mouza by saying that his boss hoped to get to the Philippines on the twenty-second in order to celebrate the couple’s twenty-third wedding anniversary and that the stewards had already been briefed on the admiral’s diet.32
In his first message to in-country naval forces, Bud relayed that he had just relieved Admiral Veth as their commander. “During the past week I had the opportunity to visit with many of you and observe personally the professional performance in your assignments under difficult conditions. The results of your efforts are plentiful and evident . . . the job that remains, like the job that has been performed, is enormous.”33 Few reading this first message could have possibly conceived the magnitude of the changes on the horizon.
Bud understood that Abrams’s offer to sit at the table depended on having a product to sell. There was much work to be done, beginning with a radical makeover of the staff. Drawing on his years of BuPers experience and taking advantage of the twelve-hour time difference between Saigon and Washington, Bud was on the phone each evening at nine p.m. in Saigon, nine a.m. in Washington, demanding that detailers send him an A team, “people that I knew specifically had the talent, and then calling them and saying, ‘you’ve just been volunteered, don’t veto it.’ ”34
It was not necessarily a case of Veth’s holdover staff not wanting to do a better job. The truth of the matter was that the low caliber of senior staff officers at the commander and captain level was a direct result of detailers not seeing brown-water service as career enhancing. “It was clear that they’d been sending a lot of the dregs out there,” said Bud. “People that were clearly not going to go anywhere and clearly not highly motivated and ambitious.”35 Bud needed a staff that could respond at a higher level. With two notable exceptions, the holdovers were simply incapable of doing so.
The two exceptions were W. Lewis “Lew” Glenn and Earl F. “Rex” Rectanus. Lew had been serving as Veth’s flag lieutenant and immediately appreciated what Bud was asking of him. “There were guys that either could respond to his fast pace on things, or you couldn’t,” recalled Glenn. “I think, in general, you were either fast on the uptake and could move with him, or you just weren’t capable of moving at the motion and at the level that he wanted you to move.”36 Captain Rex Rectanus, assistant chief of staff for intelligence for the U.S. Naval Forces of Vietnam, thought that “as long as you were loyal and you tried your hardest to do what he wanted, he didn’t care if you were a holdover or if you were somebody new.”37
Bud’s initial ministaff in Vietnam consisted of Kerr, Rectanus, Glenn, Captain Dick Nicholson, whom Bud had known as a lieutenant commander in the office of the secretary of the navy when Bud was Paul Nitze’s executive assistant, and Captain Charles F. “Chick” Rauch, an engineer and nuclear submariner who had worked in Systems Analysis. They were soon to be joined by Captain Emmett Tidd, whose command of the destroyer tender USS Everglades was cut short by urgent orders to report for duty in Vietnam as aide to Vice Admiral Zumwalt.38 BuPers had originally charted Rauch as chief of staff and Tidd as senior naval advisor to the Vietnamese. Once on the ground, however, Rauch and Tidd requested that Bud allow them to swap assignments because each felt like square pegs in round holes.39 As chief of staff, Tidd worked tirelessly to impose order and clockwork precision to the staff operations.40 His “green stripe” attached to a document meant Zumwalt wanted immediate action. Rauch made extraordinary contributions working with the South Vietnamese navy and with Commodore Tran Van Chon.41
The senior staff officers roomed together in the admiral’s large villa, so their social life was a working one, bringing in for working dinners people from the field who had good ideas. Flag Lieutenant Bob Powers, who would replace both Kerr and Glenn, found that no one ever demanded so much in terms of time, energy, and substance but made you enjoy it so much.42 Their day began at 5:30 a.m., with Bud leading a two-mile run around the compound. Bud had started jogging at the age of thirty-seven when assigned as executive assistant to the assistant secretary of the navy. He had been diagnosed with a spastic colon. Doctors attributed the condition to long work hours, high tension, and little exercise. Bud started running each morning, running not jogging, two miles in under twelve minutes and in later years, fourteen minutes. Indeed, at the age of seventy-eight, he experienced unusual shortness of breath after a 5K run in which he finished first in his age division and was diagnosed with his pleural mesothelioma. “I found that this brief physical exercise, taken at a time of the day when I could always count on getting it in, 6 o’clock in the morning, and almost never skipped, provided the necessary compensation for the long hours and high-tension jobs in which I continued to serve and was never again troubled with this spastic phenomenon.”43
Running each morning did lead to one particular dilemma when Bud was serving as CNO. He had been invited to Houston for a dinner in honor of former governor John Connally. He was staying at the home of a friend, Rear Admiral Charles Howell, in Houston. As was his routine, he went out for an early-morning run the next morning, running mentally as well through a number of things he wanted to get done that day. Bud got so involved in the thought process he lost his way. Unfamiliar with the area, he saw a home being constructed where a worker had just pulled in. He told the man he was lost and asked if he knew where the Howells lived. The man didn’t, but invited Bud into the construction trailer to look up the number in the phone book. As the man handed him the phone book, Bud realized he didn’t have his reading glasses with him. He asked the man if he could look it up. This got a bit of a stare, but he did so. The Howells were unlisted. The man asked if Bud knew anyone else in Houston. He said only Governor Connally. That number was unlisted as well. So Bud called the operator and made a collect call to his aide Dave Woodbury at the Pentagon. “Dave, no smart remarks, just tell me the address of where I spent the night last night.” Dave responded, “Admiral, I can tell you where you were supposed to have spent the night last night,” and gave his boss the address. The construction worker took a look at the address and told Bud it was about a mile away. He offered to drive him there. During the ride, the man kept glancing over and finally asked, “What do you do for a living?” Sheepishly, Bud replied, “I run the U.S. Navy.” The man, somewhat in disbelief, said, “Huh, you can’t read, you don’t know where you are, and you run the U.S. Navy?”44
The morning run in Saigon was followed by breakfast and morning briefings, which covered the previous night’s activities, firefights,
wounded, and casualties. If it had been really bad, Bud and an aide would be on their way to the airport by 6:30 for a flight into the delta in order to visit an area that had been hit the hardest the night before. Each morning Kerr or Bob Powers would read the casualty reports to determine where the VC had hit or where the firefights had been. After visiting the field, they would return to headquarters for additional briefings and paperwork. Afterward, Bud almost always worked the phones back to the States. “I guess the thing that you have to say about him is that when you can work with somebody seven days a week, 16, 18 hours, and you love that guy, he’s got to be something special, because a situation like that where you never get away, could really grate on you if you weren’t working for a very special human being,” said Lew Glenn.45
Secretary Ignatius’s arrival in Vietnam was scheduled for October 5, 1968. Bud tasked Rex Rectanus with preparing the briefing, knowing that they were already on the same wavelength. At his first meeting with Bud, Rex pitched his analysis of the enemy’s logistics system, showing that Cambodia was a major supply depot. The enemy was thriving in the smaller waterways and canals of the delta. Rex offered a bold interdiction plan. “It did not take long for ADM Zumwalt to realize that the present passive/defensive strategy had no strategic validity,” said Rex.46 Bud and Rex sought to change the navy’s in-country role to a more aggressive one, and they did this by reorganizing the naval forces to be more dangerous to enemy operations around the clock.
On October 14, 1968, just two weeks following the change of command, Lieutenant Junior Grade Michael Bernique violated the rules of engagement (ROE) by driving his Swift Boat at high speed on the serpentine Rach Giang Thanh River, a bit south of the Vinh Te Canal, which connected the Gulf of Thailand to the Mekong River along the Cambodian border.47 The river winds back and forth, usually completely within Vietnam’s territory, but in places the left bank is actually in Cambodian territory. Bernique had been in Ha Tien, a forward location that was being used as a base for supporting Swift Boat operations close to the Cambodian border. A friendly informant had passed on information that the VC had set up a tax collection station a few miles up the Rach Giang Thanh. The ROE strictly forbade Swift Boats from operating so close to Cambodia, but Bernique decided to investigate. When he discovered the collection site, Bernique opened fire; three VC were killed. After regrouping, the VC returned, and a fierce firefight ensued, resulting in two more enemy deaths and the recovery of supplies, weapons, ammunition, and documents left behind by the fleeing Vietcong.48
Because of the neutrality of Cambodia and the sensitivity of U.S. forces waging war on or near that neutral country, the navy had remained a healthy distance from the Cambodian border—three to five miles. Bernique was called to Saigon to face disciplinary actions, including a possible court-martial. Bud sent instructions that he wanted to meet personally with Bernique. During the interrogation, one of Bud’s aides said to Bernique that Prince Sihanouk of Cambodia had accused him of shooting innocent children and civilians. “Well you tell Sihanouk he’s a lying son-of-a-bitch,” replied Bernique. Instead of a court-martial, Bud awarded his sailor the Silver Star. “When I got through talking to him, I decided first that he’d brought very valuable information, as had Horatio Nelson when he decided to cross the T in violation of orders.” Bernique was “the kind of captain we need more of.”49
Rex loved having an aggressive commander, but in this case disagreed with condoning and decorating Bernique, who had gone into the river without adequate intelligence information. “Zumwalt was damn aggressive and also terribly bright,” mused Rex. Bernique was just damn aggressive.50 Bernique’s trip fundamentally altered naval strategy at the border. Bud later sent him with a flotilla of Swift Boats to transit the entire Vinh Te Canal, from Ha Tien to Chau Duc on the Bassac River.
Bud asked Captain Bob Salzer to meet with him in Saigon, ostensibly to seek his field commander’s opinion on putting an operation into the canal about half way up the Cambodian border. Looking at a map of the area, Zumwalt saw an opportunity for waterborne interdiction of supplies in the Parrot’s Beak coming out of Cambodia, with the Vam Co Dong and Vam Co Tay rivers running along Parrot’s Beak. Pointing to the V along the Parrot’s Beak, Bud said, “We can interdict it here, and then there’s a canal running along the other border of Cambodia, where we can put those Florida boats, the outboards with the airplane motors on the back of them and use them in the areas where it’s too shallow for the PBRs.”51 When he worked as Paul Nitze’s executive assistant from 1962 to 1965, Bud had been involved in assembling the navy task forces. He and Nitze persuaded Treasury Secretary Fowler to give them Coast Guard WBPs that had been under the control of Treasury.52 “Well, it’s a breathtaking concept but I think it will work,” said Salzer. Zumwalt was convinced that he could go all the way up the Vinh Te Canal for a strategic interdiction campaign that had never been done before, to be called Operation Search Turn.53
Two weeks following Bernique’s brazen operation, Zumwalt called a meeting at the NAVFORV (Naval Forces Vietnam) headquarters conference room. The time had arrived to put his chips onto the table and get the navy into the war. The first signs that something was brewing arrived in a message from COMNAFORV (Commander Naval Forces Vietnam) headquarters directing that either the field commander or operations officer report to Saigon as soon as possible. Captain Art Price of TF-116 was on temporary duty in Coronado, California, and his replacement, Commander Wayne Beech, ordered Lieutenant Commander Tom Glickman to Saigon. Glickman caught the first Thai Air Force C-124 to Saigon and immediately after landing went directly to Bud’s residential compound. “As I entered, the Admiral was exercising by rapidly going up and down stairs to the second floor,” recalled Glickman, who was nursing a scotch and water while waiting. “Essentially he wanted to get the Task Forces working together on common goals to crack the hard nuts. He knew that we had been doing well in our respective general areas of operations, but he also surmised we had our own ideas about other areas we could and should expand into but had not been able to do so because of resource problems. His idea, integrated operation, could solve many of the resource problems.”
Their conversation lasted for about an hour. Bud instructed Glickman to return to Binh Thuy, consult with his task group commanders, and come up with a shopping list for future operations. “He specifically directed me not to mention anything of our conversation to anyone on the NAVFORV staff.”54 Returning to the delta, Glickman went directly to headquarters in order to brief Wayne Beech. They were joined by Duane “Dewey” Feuerhelm, the intelligence officer; Bob Peterson, who ran the river squadron at Binh Thuy; Jack Elliot from Vinh Long; and the squadron commanders from My Tho and Nha Be. They started drawing up their list.
The clarion call from COMNAVFORV came soon thereafter with notification of a meeting at Naval Forces of Vietnam headquarters in Saigon on Saturday, October 26, 1968.55 All three task forces were represented. From TF-116 were Wayne Beech, Dewey Feuerhelm, and Tom Glickman. TF-117 was represented by Captain Robert Salzer and his immediate staff; TF-115 was represented by Captain Roy Hoffmann and immediate staff. Rex was also present. “We sat at the conference table looking at each other,” recalled Glickman. “Although we were all part of the same Navy, we really had never operated together cooperatively.”
Bud entered the room and said he wanted to have the three in-country operating forces work together toward common goals to interdict VC supply lines and the VC/NVA themselves. He told them that the operation would be called SEALORDS, which stood for South-East Asia Land Ocean River Delta Strategy. Noting that “brown-water warfare was unsupported and likewise unencumbered by established doctrine,” Bud asked them to use ingenuity and improvisation. “You have to make up riverine warfare as you go along.”56 He wanted a new game plan based on the principle that the enemy needed to be kept off balance and the best way to do this was to “keep changing the game plan. . . . You can get away with anything once or even twice, but you must change strategi
es frequently in order to keep the enemy from exploiting you.”57
In October 1968, General Abrams was focusing on the dry-season campaign covering the entire delta. Bud understood that this was his opportunity to step into the game with multiple river raids and destruction of VC supply routes as a precursor to the major army campaign in the delta. He envisioned SEALORDS beginning with Swift Boat raids into VC sanctuaries, disrupting their logistical effort throughout the delta. “His words were like a breath of fresh air!” recalled Glickman, whose mind immediately went back to the Tet Offensive, when they had planned a joint TF-116/117 operation against Tan Dinh Island.58 “I remember Bob Collins, my TF-117 counterpart, telling me, “Keep your god damn plastic boats out of the way of my boats. If not, we’ll blow you and your silly black berets out of the water like we would the VC.”59 Bob Collins was now part of the working group, sitting at the same table as Glickman.
Before excusing himself so that the group could work freely in developing an operation plan, Bud urged his commanders to put aside their old competitiveness and animosities. Their brainstorming should be directed toward innovative ways of interdicting enemy infiltration routes whenever riverine forces found them. In his parting remark, Bud said he wanted a list of priorities and resources needed to accomplish the mission.
What especially attracted Rex to his new boss was this type of encouragement to challenge assumptions. “One of Bud’s first activities upon arriving in Vietnam was to inaugurate a system of thought-stimulation,” wrote Rex. Zumwalt Wild Ideas became the commander’s invitation to one and all to be constantly innovative.60 Bud called them ZWIs because he did not want staff to see them as directives. “We had a saying: ‘Be careful what you propose to the Admiral because he might approve it and then you’d have to do it,’ ”61 recalled Bob Powers. Chick Rauch offered another way of looking at it: “Bud was as good as anyone I know at nurturing creativity. I cannot remember him ever saying no to anyone who had a good idea.”62 As Bud would often say, “I have no prejudice against anything that makes sense.”63 In many respects, Vietnam was a perfect environment for this type of thinking, because there was no real bureaucracy or political strata in OPNAV for air admirals, submarine admirals, and surface admirals to lobby in Congress against the idea. “You didn’t have that in Vietnam.”64