by Larry Berman
35. “I developed a very high regard for Paul Ignatius. I did not have the close personal relationship with him that I had with Paul Nitze, who had, by that time, become a dear friend. But Paul Ignatius had obviously been left with a very good taste in his mouth about me by Paul Nitze, and by Worth Bagley, who stayed on with him. He was always extremely supportive. He had had a very good analytical background himself. He was Under Secretary of the Army and then an Assistant Secretary of Defense (I&L) and then he became Secretary of the Navy. So he’d had an opportunity to review a lot of studies, and he had a good analytical mind. He was very thoughtful; he didn’t let himself get pushed around by the brass, but neither was he at all contemptuous of the military mind. Most of the time good work would persuade him, and sometimes good work would not, and bad work never got by him. I guess, the best epitaph I can put on that is that when it came time for me to go to Vietnam, he called me in and gave me his personal appreciation for the work I’d done and showed me a letter that he’d written to General Abrams, commending me to Abrams’s attention. He’d worked with Abe closely when he was Under Secretary of the Army and had a deep reverence for him. He just kind of opened the door for me to General Abrams in a very helpful way.” Stillwell, Reminiscences of Admiral Zumwalt, Jr.
36. Zumwalt and Zumwalt, My Father, My Son, 41.
37. Market Time, conducted by the navy’s Task Force 115, consisted of offshore surveillance forces aimed at cutting off the waterborne flow of supplies to enemy forces in South Vietnam.
38. Bud had been tipped off by his detailer that he was being promoted to vice admiral and commander of naval forces, Vietnam. Howard Kerr noted that “those stars would also produce some strains in terms of bitterness on the part of others. He had jumped over an awful lot of people.” Stillwell, Reminiscences of Staff Officers, and author personal interview with Kerr.
39. I am indebted to Leslie Julian Cullen, whose dissertation was completed under the supervision of Jim Reckner, “Brown Water Admiral: Elmo R. Zumwalt, Jr., and United States Naval Forces, Vietnam, 1968–1970,” Texas Tech University, May 1998. I make extensive use of Cullen’s interview notes, which are available in the Cullen Collection at the Vietnam Archive.
40. Never missing a beat, Jim closed with, “You know my personal feelings about the war in Viet Nam. You also know how I feel about the great social forces which engulf the suffering human race on this planet. We have often debated these issues, sometimes with great feeling. In spite of all the political differences, I have never stopped loving you as a brother, nor have I questioned your integrity or sincerity. If ever a military figure had compassion, you have it. I cannot think of another officer whom I would be more confident in than you. God protect you my dear brother and may He bestow on Mouza and your children the strength and forbearance and the patience which your absence will entail.”
CHAPTER 8: BROWN WATER NAVY
1. January 10, 2000, letter to Mouza Zumwalt and family following Bud’s death. ZFC.
2. The first “Dear Clan” letter is dated October 23, 1968. Over Labor Day weekend, Bud went to the Naval Ordnance Test Station (NOTS), China Lake, California, for a briefing, but this merely provided cover to be given a party hosted by his proud father, Elmo, and Doris. Three days of parties in Tulare were intermixed with a trip to Carmel to visit with Saralee and her husband, Richard Crowe, and their son, Lieutenant Junior Grade Richard Crowe.
3. With longtime friend Harry Rowen, then president of the Rand Corporation, and with Rear Admiral William Heald Groverman, a commander in World War II and the Korean War, one of the leading Cold War experts on antisubmarine warfare and Soviet naval forces.
4. “I spent two years at the Fletcher School, and it was upon the completion of this tour that I first served with Admiral Zumwalt as his flag secretary and aide when he was assigned as Commander U.S. Naval Forces in Vietnam in late 1968.” Stillwell, Reminiscences by Staff Officers.
5. Ibid.; and author interview with Howard Kerr.
6. Ibid.
7. Frocking refers to the practice of donning the uniform insignia and assuming the title of a higher rank before actually being promoted to it. Promotion would come when he took command in Vietnam.
8. Interview with Ann Zumwalt Coppola.
9. “He shared with us quite frequently at dinner time his thoughts, feelings, and worries.” Ann Zumwalt Coppola e-mail to author.
10. October 23, 1968, “Dear Clan” letter. ZPP.
11. Jim was at the University of North Carolina and Elmo on his way to the USS Ricketts.
12. October 23, 1968, “Dear Clan” letter.
13. Stillwell, Reminiscences of Admiral Zumwalt, Jr.
14. Stillwell, Reminiscences of Staff Officers.
15. “My own personal belief at the time, based on what I knew from having sat in on, and done the studies about, the attrition of logistics coming down from North Vietnam, and from my long bull sessions with Paul Nitze on his farm over the weekend, was that he was getting very disenchanted about our prospects in Vietnam. And of even more importance, he thought that the support around the country was running out. It was clear to me that support was running out.” Stillwell, Reminiscences of Admiral Zumwalt, Jr., 490.
16. Stillwell, Reminiscences of Staff Officers, and personal interview.
17. Ibid. This chapter also makes extensive use of William C. McQuilkin, “Operation SEALORDS: A Front in a Frontless War, an Analysis of the Brown-Water Navy in Vietnam,” a thesis presented to the faculty of the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College, Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, 1997, as well as McQuilkin’s interview notes and correspondence with Zumwalt. These are in the Cullen Collection at the Vietnam Archive. I also draw on Thomas J. Cutler’s seminal contribution, Brown Water, Black Berets (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1988).
18. Stillwell, Reminiscences of Staff Officers.
19. Author interview with Kerr.
20. Ignatius, On Board: My Life in the Navy, Government, and Business, 160.
21. Paul Stillwell, unpublished interview with Vice Admiral Earl F. Rectanus, Nov. 19, 1982, ZPP.
22. Ibid.
23. Stillwell, Reminiscences of Staff Officers.
24. Leslie Cullen, Zumwalt interview notes, Leslie Cullen Collection at the Vietnam Archive.
25. Cutler, Brown Water, Black Berets, 249.
26. Edward J. Marolda, “Stories about Vance,” www.ussvance.com/Vance/marketa.htm.
27. Howard Kerr told me that he was present when Bud made this promise in the Admiral’s villa.
28. See Cutler, Brown Water, Black Berets, ch. 6, “SEALORDS.”
29. Lewis Sorley, Thunderbolt: From the Battle of the Bulge to Vietnam and Beyond—General Creighton Abrams and the Army of His Times (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992).
30. Stillwell, interview with Rectanus.
31. Lew Glenn to Mrs. Zumwalt, Oct. 1, 1968. ZPP.
32. “No eggs or milk; cereal with Apple Juice”—author interview with Dr. William Narva.
33. From: COMNAVFOR Vietnam, To: NAVFOR Vietnam, Subject: CHANGE OF COMMAND, Oct. 1, 1968, ZPP.
34. Cullen, Zumwalt interview notes.
35. Ibid.
36. Stillwell, Reminiscences of Staff Officers. Glenn named his son Russell after Bud; Bud was godfather to Howard Kerr’s daughter Heather.
37. Stillwell, interview with Rectanus, 63; Dan Lawrence, “Passing of VADM Earl F. ‘Rex’ Rectanus,” Naval Intelligence Professionals, http://navintpro.net/?p=134.
38. “VADM Emmett H. Tidd,” USS Richard B. Anderson DD-786, www.vietnamproject.ttu.edu/dd786/tidd.html.
39. McQuilkin interview with Zumwalt transcript, 17.
40. On June 23, 1969, Joe Rizzo left and Tidd arrived. When Tidd pointed out to Bud that there were four staff officers senior to him, Zumwalt replied, “They may be senior to you, but they are not senior to me.”
41. Chick Rauch spent thirty years in the U.S. Navy before retiring in the rank of rear admiral. He was commanding officer of two nuclear subma
rines, instructor in reactor engineering at the Navy’s Nuclear Power School, and senior naval advisor to the Vietnamese Navy. Chick also served as assistant chief of naval personnel for human resource development, during which time his office developed the navy’s early programs in race relations and equal opportunity, women’s rights, alcohol and drug abuse rehabilitation and control, and cross-cultural relations.
42. Author interview with Bob Powers. See Robert C. Powers, Save the Belknap: A True Story—a Night to Forget That Will Never Be Forgotten (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011).
43. Zumwalt tape, “History of Jogging,” ZTT.
44. Bud got his name and address and sent him a thank-you note on his official letterhead when he got back home, so the man would know that Bud wasn’t pulling his leg. See “I Run the United States Navy,” Noble Perspective, vol. 32, July 1999, 1. I am grateful to Bud’s son Jim for clarifying some facts in the published version.
45. Stillwell, Reminiscences of Staff Officers.
46. Vice Admiral Earl Rectanus, Mar. 3, 2008, the Naval Intelligence Organization Vietnam, ZPP.
47. Cutler, Brown Water, Black Berets, 253–55; see Cullen interviews with Zumwalt, 4.
48. Ibid.
49. Ibid.; Elmo Zumwalt, Jr., and Elmo Zumwalt III, My Father, My Son (New York: Dell, 1987).
50. Stillwell, interview with Rectanus.
51. The PBRs were being used as backups for the PCFs offshore. “We’ll bring the PBRs inland, and use the PCFs along the coast . . . in the past that had been discouraged. Zumwalt put these boats in place.” Cutler, Brown Water, Black Berets.
52. McQuilkin interview notes, Cullen Collection.
53. “And when he endorsed it as bold and risky, but doable, I felt very comfortable about going forward with it. And I guess I would also say that, in essence, by giving me those assets, Bob Salzer was giving me the battleships of the brown water Navy; the Swift boats, representing the cruisers; and Art Price’s forces, the PBRs, representing the destroyers of the brown water Navy.”
54. Tom Glickman, “Memories,” unpublished manuscript provided to the author, and interview with Tom Glickman. Glickman spent the evening at the villa, having dinner and breakfast with the admiral and staff.
55. Ibid.
56. Cutler, Brown Water, Black Berets, 252.
57. Ibid., 252–53. See Glickman account as well.
58. Glickman, “Memories.”
59. Ibid.
60. Personal letter, Sept. 22, 1995, Rex Rectanus to Pricilla Barry, on the occasion of the Zumwalts’ fiftieth wedding anniversary.
61. Author interview with Bob Powers.
62. Author interview with Chick Rauch.
63. Quoted in J. A. Davidson, USN, “The ‘Z’ Meets His Recruiters,” Navy News Release #21-74, NHHC.
64. Stillwell, interview with Rectanus, 29–30.
65. Bud told Paul Stillwell the same story. “I got the idea that we could fly boats by these huge helicopters from one river to another. If we could get enough of the helicopters, you could suddenly have a ten-boat convoy dropped in on a river in an area where the Vietcong weren’t expecting it and give them some surprise. Well, it turned out that when people did the numbers and calculations, there weren’t enough helicopters available to get more than one or two in at a time, and it would be a pretty hairy operation to get it there. So after just a little bit of staffing, we decided that was a downer.” Stillwell, Reminiscences of Admiral Zumwalt, Jr., 489.
66. Stillwell, interview with Rectanus.
67. Salzer Oral History, 653.
68. General Abrams requested that the navy brief Major General George Eckhardt, the IV Corps senior advisor, about the scope of the plan.
69. Letter from Bud to the “Clan,” July 30, 1969, ZPP.
70. Ibid.; See Ralph Christopher, Duty, Honor, Sacrifice (Bloomington, IN: AuthorHouse, 2007), and Ralph Christopher, River Rats (Bloomington, IN: AuthorHouse, 2005). I am indebted to Ralph for taking the time to discuss these issues with me at Texas Tech.
71. Stillwell, interview with Rectanus.
72. Reckner was the senior advisor of this group and can attest to the fact that they were there. Author interview with Jim Reckner.
73. “Naval Intelligence Field Operations Vietnam (NAVINTFOV), “The NILO Program: Tailoring Naval Intelligence to Fit the War,” Presentation, Texas Tech University Vietnam Symposium, Mar. 14, 2008; see also H. Lawrence Serra, NILO Ha Tien: A Novel of Naval Intelligence in Cambodia (Bloomington, IN: AuthorHouse 2009). I am indebted to Larry Serra for providing the insights and details of the NILO narrative. There are no available records of the NILOs’ actual post assignments or intelligence operations—only monthly summary reports of their combat deaths, capture, or participation in significant operations. There is an alumni group consisting of most of the two hundred living NILOs, IOs (intelligence officers), and Collection Branch officers.
74. Only a handful were experienced intelligence officers trained in agent handling, air intelligence, photo interpretation, communications security, and such. More than 75 percent were unrestricted surface line officers who had come from blue-water commands where they had served as qualified officers of the deck, navigators, gunfire director officers skilled in placing naval gunfire on enemy positions, and small-boat officers skilled in the operation of small craft in shallow coastal and riverine areas.
75. There were combat mishaps: NILO Ken Tapscott was killed in a firefight on the Song Ong Doc River (in Operation Sea Float) in August 1970; Rectanus’s friend and protégé IO Jack Graf was shot down several times, eventually captured, and killed in attempting to escape captivity in the delta. All in all, the NILOs sustained casualty rates similar to the boat forces with whom they operated, a result of Zumwalt’s aggressive combat strategy of taking the fight to the enemy.
76. Serra, NILO Ha Tien.
77. The NILO enthusiasm and audacity was infectious and spread to those around them. After the departure of one NILO by medevac, a local ATSB (advanced tactical support base) naval officer executed a covert coast-watching mission for enemy infiltration from a jungle hilltop on one of the Cambodian Pirate Islands, a mission originally conceived by the NILO. (See H. Lawrence Serra, “Pirate Islands, Cambodia,” The Monk, and Other Stories (Bloomington, IN: AuthorHouse, 2012).
78. See James G. Zumwalt, Bare Feet, Iron Will: Stories from the Other Side of Vietnam’s Battlefields (Jacksonville, FL: Fortis, 2010), 197.
79. Stillwell, Reminiscences of Staff Officers.
80. Ibid.; Lew Glenn.
81. Ibid.; and author interview with Howard Kerr.
82. This account appears in Sorley, Thunderbolt, as well as in Cullen, Zumwalt interview notes.
83. At the Oct. 29, 1968, meeting in the Cabinet room, Abrams told Johnson, “I am blessed with four good men: Goodpaster, Brown, Zumwalt, and Cushman. They don’t belong to any service. They belong to the U.S. Government.”
84. Stillwell, Reminiscences of Admiral Zumwalt, Jr., and also Stillwell, Reminiscences of Staff Officers.
85. McQuilkin interview with Zumwalt, 10.
86. Naval historian Richard L. Schreadley, a critic of Admiral Zumwalt, noted that the admiral used the opportunity presented by Abrams’s rejection of the air force plan to give a “virtuoso performance” in which “no one seemed to notice the lack of slick charts and graphs. . . . The new vice admiral had scored big.” Richard L. Schreadley, From the Rivers to the Sea: The U.S. Navy in Vietnam (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1992), 9.
87. McQuilkin interview with Zumwalt, 10.
88. Bud especially enjoyed the Saturday-morning meetings where the top commanders and senior staff officers met to dissect the war strand by strand “and then put it back together again analytically.” He was “intellectually vitalized by these meetings.”
89. See Dale Van Atta, With Honor: Melvin Laird in War, Peace, and Politics (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2008).
90. Nov. 29, 1968, ZPC.
91. Ibid.
92. Larry Oswald, letter to Mouza recalling event after Bud’s passing, ZFC.
93. Stillwell, interview with Rectanus, 66.
94. Author interview with Mike Spiro, who recalled the name as Ensign Billups.
95. Stillwell, Reminiscences of Staff Officers.
96. In a letter to the family, Glenn observed, “It was a real experience for me to be part of this Christmas holiday, and to share in the conviviality and the jocular repartee that characterizes the Zumwalts. They make up for their separations with a closeness, when together, that is a marvelous thing to observe.”
97. Oswald, personal letter to Mouza, ZFC.
98. Jim Morgan, patrol officer, senior patrol officer, and operation officer, River Division 593, e-mail to author.
99. Powers, Save the Belknap, 57–58.
100. Stillwell, Reminiscences of Admiral Zumwalt, Jr., 506.
101. Starry was recovered and eventually became a four-star general. Cullen interview transcript, 31.
102. Jimmy R. Bryant, Man of the River (Fredericksburg, VA: Sergeant Kirkland’s, 1998), 96–97; and author personal correspondence with Bryant.
103. “About John C. ‘Bubba’ Brewton,” USS Brewton DE-1086, www.ussbrewton.com/brewton.htm.
104. Aug. 2, 1971, letter, ZPP.
105. Bud was in attendance in 1968 when Elmo was commissioned an ensign in Naval ROTC at the University of North Carolina.
106. Elmo also wrote, “Your shadows of success and influence are a part of why I believe I must get out. . . . Dad, I realize the last letter I wrote you hit hard. I am not acting with a ‘sense of exaltation.’ I am doing what I feel I must. Captain Mullane agreed that if you were in my place that you would be doing the same.” ZFC.
107. “To Jock,” enclosing Elmo’s letter, saying he was proud of his son, ZFC and ZPP.
108. Letter to Nitze, Feb. 10, 1970, ZFC.
109. Undated letter from Elmo to his mother, ZFC.
110. Zumwalt and Zumwalt, My Father, My Son, 87.
111. Letter, Nov. 17, 1969, ZFC.
112. Letter, Jan. 20, 1970, ZFC.
113. Zumwalt and Zumwalt, My Father, My Son, 81; Harvey Miller, radarman.