by Orr Kelly
This whole effort was very small and extremely secret. Even today, many aspects of operations carried out nearly thirty years ago remain highly classified.
The hope in Washington was that raids from the sea could make life so unpleasant for the leaders in Hanoi that they would back off from their growing effort to take over the south. The Bay of Pigs fiasco had demonstrated that if an operation grew beyond a certain size, it should cease being a covert CIA activity and become a full-scale military operation. This is what happened early in 1964. The CIA backed out, the military took over the SEALs at Da Nang, and the whole nature of U.S. involvement in Vietnam changed.
Planning for the step-up in pressure on the north had consumed most of 1963. The result was a blueprint for a three-phase, year-long campaign of increasing intensity. It was given the code name of Operation Plan 34A, or, as it came to be known, OP 34A. The United States’ involvement was to be carefully concealed, and the entire operation was to be very secret.
Although consideration had been given as early as the fall of 1962 to the use of American SEALs in these operations, that was eventually ruled out. Instead, the SEALs were assigned to train guerrilla fighters to carry out the harassing raids against targets along the North Vietnamese coast. The SEALs themselves were strictly prohibited from accompanying their charges north of the demilitarized line separating the two parts of Vietnam at the seventeenth parallel.
The Vietnamese commandos were hidden away in a chain of secret little camps along a ten-mile stretch of beach between two commanding promontories, Monkey Mountain on the north, and Marble Mountain on the south. At various times there were five to seven groups of forty or fifty men, each group in its own enclave. One group was trained as swimmers; the others were strictly shooters. Their boats were docked in a delightful little cove at the base of Monkey Mountain known as China Beach, where the SEALs had installed a base, with finger piers and a floating dry dock. In the early days, most of the commandos were ethnic Vietnamese. Later, there were Chinese, Thais, Nungs, Cambodians, and members of other minority groups in Vietnamese society. Many of them had been discriminated against by the North Vietnamese, adding to their eagerness to fight. During the CIA days there were even a few German and Norwegian mercenaries serving as boat crews.
Irish Flynn was still a very junior officer, but his background had given him some perspective. Born in Ireland, he had received part of his education in a French military school. He was embarrassed to be put in the position of teaching these tough warriors how to fight.
“At the time,” he says, “I was struck by our arrogance. I had never been shot at in my life, never shot at anyone. We had a few Korean War vets who had done some real shooting. But we were advising some guys who had spent ten years in the army with the French and had been in all kinds of fights. I thought it was an act of very great arrogance.”
When Flynn arrived, the commandos were already in training for raids against the north in which a few men would be dropped near the coast to swim in and plant mines on North Vietnamese vessels.
One of the most urgent targets was a naval base at Quang Khe, about 120 miles north of Da Nang. Not only was Quang Khe a staging base for small boats smuggling high-priority arms and infiltrators into the south, it was also a base for the formidable eighty-three-foot Chinese-built Swatow motor gunboats, which posed a danger to guerrilla operations along the coast and even to American naval patrols offshore.
A first attempt to send in swimmers to attack the boats failed in mid-February 1964. Another attempt was scheduled for early March.
“They really had a tough job to do,” Flynn says. “They had to go across a sand bar, go up a river a certain distance, dogleg left, swim accurately in on these patrol boats, and put two limpets on each boat. It looked like a really tall order.”
The bulky SCUBA gear worn by underwater swimmers creates a good deal of drag, and this means that they move very, very slowly, less than a quarter of the speed of a person walking. Even a slight current is enough to slow them further or to push them off course.
The swimmers had demonstrated that they could swim impressive distances, but the Americans planned a rehearsal to make sure the mission was feasible. North of Da Nang, they found a river similar to that at Quang Khe and anchored a boat to represent the target of the actual mission. Then the four Vietnamese frogmen were dropped offshore to make the practice swim.
One American trainer remained on the boat. Two more Americans waited at the target boat to make sure the swimmers got there. Everything went perfectly. The men at the target boat signalled to the man offshore that the swimmers had carried out the mission, doing everything except planting live explosives. Then the swimmers returned to the boat and declared the mock attack a success.
The SEALs had already learned that any delay in carrying out a mission increased the odds that the North Vietnamese would be forewarned. So as soon as the swimmers were rested, they were sent off toward Quang Khe.
But after the mission was under way, the two SEALs at the target boat reported an unsettling discovery. They had found footprints along the bank of the river where the swimmers had walked, rather than swimming. Too late, Flynn learned that the rehearsal had been a sham. Whether the men could carry out their difficult mission was in serious doubt. But it was too late to call it off.
The skipper of the small boat that carried the swimmers north saw them off and then waited much longer than he should have for their return. Finally, he gave up and headed back south in broad daylight.
Flynn says he doesn’t know what happened to the men. They simply failed to return. But North Vietnamese radio claimed the capture of four frogmen at about that time. One was said to have been killed resisting capture. Of the other three, one was sentenced to life in prison, one to eighteen years, and the third to seven years.
“The only way I could excuse myself was to blame youth and inexperience,” Flynn says.
Despite the early failures, OP 34A scored a series of successes in the spring and summer of 1964. A junk was captured; a storage facility was destroyed; a bridge was knocked down; a lighthouse was shelled. The operations were becoming a constant irritant to the North Vietnamese. Whether they were causing enough disruption to be militarily significant was another question.
Flynn thought back to the French military men he had known, how extraordinarily tough they were. And yet they had lost as many officers in Vietnam each year as St. Cyr, the French equivalent of West Point, was turning out.
“I was only a lieutenant, but I wondered, what the hell are we doing here? This is not going to bring the guys who fought the war with the French, who eventually won the battle of Dien Bien Phu, the battle of the Central Highlands, to their knees. This is not going to break their back, these pinprick raids we’re doing.”
William Colby, who was in charge of the operations for the CIA in the early days and who later became director of the agency, was one of the first to become disillusioned with the whole effort.
“Our experience demonstrated, quite frankly, that there was not much hope of generating any substantial resistance in North Vietnam. And having made a college try at it and having come to zero results in positive terms—minor effect, you know, tiny little pinpricks—I came to the conclusion—and I was in charge of them—that the operations just should be called off. They really were not contributing what they had hoped to, and they were suffering losses, and there was no point in it,” Colby later recalled.
For many of the SEALs, life at Da Nang from 1963 up to, and even after, the arrival of the marines in 1965 was almost idyllic. Since they were forbidden to accompany the commandos to the north, they were in little danger. The uniform of the day was a pair of shorts and tennis shoes, and hair styles were a matter of personal choice. They had the beach area almost to themselves. And since they didn’t bother the local Viet Cong, the VC didn’t bother them. Rules against fraternization with the population were not enforced against the SEALs. Instead, they were encourage
d to socialize with their Vietnamese counterparts.
At night, they gathered at little beach bars to talk and drink as they watched the moonlight sparkling off the breakers rolling in from the South China Sea. They didn’t even bother to bring their weapons. Maynard Weyers, who, in the fall of 1964, relieved Irish Flynn in charge of the detachment advising the commandos, recalls running by himself for miles along the beach between Monkey and Marble Mountains without a weapon. He never felt threatened.
Later, when the marines arrived, a marine general took over a little hideaway near China Beach, causing one SEAL to comment, “Generals and SEALs know how to get through a war.”
But the United States was moving inexorably toward deep involvement in the Vietnam conflict. And, although nobody knew it at the time, the little operations—the pinpricks—were to play a major role in the change from covert U.S. support of the South Vietnamese to large-scale involvement of American forces.
The increased tempo of commando raids against the north was made possible by the arrival in Da Nang, on 22 February 1964, of the first two of a fleet of Norwegian torpedo boats of the Nasty class. Although the name seemed to fit their job, the boats were actually named for a Norwegian sea bird. Before they arrived, operations had been limited by the fact that the boats available, ranging from junks to two 1950-vintage boats hurriedly removed from mothballs, were neither big enough nor fast enough and didn’t have sufficient range to carry out the more ambitious raids.
Michael L. Mulford, who served as executive officer of one of the first two Nasties, was impressed when they arrived at the amphibious base at Little Creek, early in 1963. They were eighty feet long and had plastic hulls and a shallow draft of only three feet, seven inches. They were powered by two British-built Napier Deltic diesel engines, each capable of 3,120 horsepower. The boats were brand-new, just out of the Norwegian shipyard. They were even stocked with silverware, china, and small glasses fitting into the bar in the tiny wardroom, which was made of mahogany.
When the Americans took the Nasties out for a test run, they were greatly impressed by the engines and the automatic clutching mechanism. The engines had a deep, throaty roar that would make any hot-rodder cry with jealousy, and they could push the boat along at more than forty knots. And then when the helmsman grabbed the throttles and rammed them into reverse, the craft shuddered to a halt within two boat lengths and began backing up. Of course anyone standing on deck when that happened would be thrown flat on his face.
The boats had room for a crew and ten SEALs and enough room for provisions for a forty-eight-hour mission. The armament carried by the Nasties was constantly changing. Originally, they were equipped with two 20mm and two 40mm guns. The 40mm guns were removed to make room for more fuel, but then the craft seemed too lightly armed, so 81mm mortars were added. At various times, the boats were equipped with 20mm and 40mm guns, mortars, 57mm recoilless rifles, 3.5-inch rocket launchers, and flamethrowers.
Despite the fact that the Nasties were destined to take part in one of the most secret affairs in recent U.S. history, they received a remarkably public send-off. In May 1963, one of the Nasties sailed north to the Washington Navy Yard and took the secretary and under secretary of the navy and a collection of navy brass for a thirty-minute dash up and down the Potomac River. President Kennedy, who had skippered a PT boat in World War II, was invited along, but he was busy greeting an astronaut. The press was welcomed to photograph the new boat, and a press release described its purpose. The new boats, it said, were “designed to perform amphibious support and coastal operations” and were for use “by the navy’s Sea-Air-Land (SEAL) Teams in unconventional and paramilitary operations.” Only after the two boats had been shown off on the West Coast and in Hawaii, on their way to Vietnam, did the chief of naval operations order a stop to the publicity splurge.
The Americans who took the Nasties to Da Nang had little to do with the commandos who rode the craft north to their combat missions. Mulford recalled:
We never knew very much about the commandos. They were kept on the other side of the peninsula from us, on the beach side. They would come in by trucks, climb aboard the boats, and off they’d go. And we’d see them when they came back again. My greatest memory of the commandos is one time they—we had been out on a training mission, we came back, the guy jumped off the boat. He had one of these rocket launchers on his back. Three rockets on a backpack. He jumped off the boat and pranged the back of the rocket launcher on the stanchion, firing the rocket out over the camp. It went over Monkey Mountain and—oh, yeah, it took the hair off the back of his head. He thought it was hilariously funny. We wondered just how effective they were when they got to where they were going with that kind of attitude.
One of the first ones I remember was when they went up to shoot up a lighthouse to get nighttime gunnery practice. And that was without, as I remember it, landing anybody. They just went up into this small harbor and shot the lighthouse up, shot up the area around it, and got out of there again. Another time they were extremely jubilant about one operation. And that was when they had taken the commando crowd out, dropped them off. They crept into a North Vietnamese army camp, laid out their rocket launchers, got everything set, and then just fired the rocket launchers into the middle of the camp. When everybody came running out of the tents and hooches, they just shot them up with machine guns and got out of there. They came back just ecstatic over that one.
We wondered at the time just how much was getting accomplished. You’d have to leave at four o’clock in the afternoon, steam all night, shoot up a lighthouse, and come back. You can do the same thing with one airplane in an hour. It seemed like a rather romantic, but not particularly effective, way of getting a job done. To me, anyway. Never made much sense to us.
Despite the doubts of American officers in Da Nang about the effectiveness of the secret raids against the north, they were certainly proving an annoying irritant. Under pressure from Washington to step up the tempo of the harassment, American commanders in Saigon approved a plan calling for an increase of operations in August of 283 percent over the July level. At the same time, Hanoi beefed up its sentry force along the coast and began running more aggressive patrols with its own torpedo boats. Those actions set the stage for one of the critical turning points in American history. And the SEALs, or their South Vietnamese counterparts, were right in the middle of it, although most Americans were not to know that until years later. What happened is this:
Just after midnight on the morning of 31 July, four Nasties carrying South Vietnamese commandos approached targets on two islands off the central coast of North Vietnam. The men were prepared to land and plant explosives ashore, but the commander received intelligence that the enemy had been alerted to the raid. He decided to hit the targets with gunfire rather than land his commandos.
They shelled both islands, destroying a gun emplacement and a number of buildings on Hon Me and a communications station on Hon Nieu.
In addition to their mortars and automatic cannons, the four boats were newly equipped with 57mm recoilless rifles, and that could have had a significant influence on what occurred next. The recoilless rifle fires its shell in a flat trajectory, with a high muzzle velocity. For a person on the receiving end, it is difficult to tell the difference between being shelled by a small patrol boat with a recoilless rifle and being shelled by the five-inch gun of a destroyer.
As the Nasties sped south early on the morning of 31 July, they passed about five miles away from the USS Maddox, a U.S. destroyer involved in what was code named the Desoto Patrol off the North Vietnamese coast.
Three days later, as the Maddox approached Hon Me island, three torpedo boats attacked the American ship about twenty-five miles off the coast, launching four torpedoes. The torpedoes missed their target, and American planes destroyed one of the boats and severely damaged another.
At about midnight the next night, three Nasties, again firing 57mm recoilless rifles, shelled two separate North Vi
etnamese installations.
Despite worries expressed by the skipper of the Maddox, he was joined by another destroyer, the USS Turner Joy, and they were ordered to resume patrols off the North Vietnamese coast. About eleven o’clock on the night of 4 August, the two ships reported they were under torpedo attack. Although serious doubts were later raised about whether there had actually been an attack on the American ships that night, an official naval history based on both American and North Vietnamese records provides convincing evidence that such an attack did occur.
Back in Washington, the two engagements were portrayed as unprovoked attacks by the North Vietnamese against American ships operating in international waters. Although the North Vietnamese complained to the International Control Commission, which monitored the agreement that had created separate governments in North and South Vietnam, about the shelling of the two offshore islands, top officials in Washington denied there was any connection between those operations and the destroyer patrols.
On 5 August, planes from two American carriers delivered a devastating retaliatory attack on North Vietnamese installations. And on 7 August, Congress passed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution. The vote was unanimous in the House and eighty-eight to two in the Senate. The Resolution authorized President Johnson to “take all necessary steps, including the use of armed force, to assist any member or protocol state of the Southeast Asia Collective Defense Treaty requesting assistance in defense of its freedom.” It was the equivalent of a declaration of war, and it served as the legal basis for the massive American involvement in Southeast Asia for the next eight years.