by Orr Kelly
Vice Adm. Robert S. Salzer worked with the SEALs for many years, first as commander of riverine warfare in 1967 and 1968 and again as commander of U.S. Naval Forces, Vietnam, in 1971 and 1972. He had mixed feelings about them:
They were in small detachments, and we kept them on a very firm leash. SEALs are a two-edged sword. It was something like having attack-trained German shepherds: you had to keep them on a very tight leash. They did good work, but what they really wanted to do was to get out and mix it up and have a shooting match. They had some real feats of derring-do. When General [Creighton W.] Abrams [American commander in Vietnam] was having a down period, I would always try and find some particularly hair-curling things the SEALs had done, because he loved tales of personal bravery, and those guys had that.
What they really were supposed to do is to lie very low. In that environment what I wanted them to do was to set traps, but not to give away their presence, to try to detect what the enemy was doing. They hate to sit still and do nothing. What they really want to do is find out what the enemy is doing by kidnapping some guy and getting it out of him.
One case in particular I remember. They had heard about a Viet Cong meeting, had gotten some intelligence on it down in the deep delta in the Ca Mau area, and they wanted to try and capture the politicos in there. You have to let the animal have his head once in a while. So they planned the thing. They came in by boat, quietly, and for once the intelligence was right. The guy who led them in pointed out the hut where the meeting was. I guess here were four SEALs, and they had an Australian SEAL type with them.
There were about twelve Viet Cong in this place. The guy kicked in the door, and all hell broke loose. Everybody drew their knives, and the rest of the Americans just came piling in. Afterwards, there were eight dead Viet Cong and one captured, another couple guys had run away, and one SEAL had sprained his wrist by swinging at a guy with his brass knuckles on. That tickled old Abe. It made his whole morning after an exasperating session.
One thing that frustrated Salzer was what he saw as the unwillingness of the SEALs to protect shipping in the route from the sea to Saigon by checking the ships for mines. “Searching muddy waters around the bottoms of ships for mines didn’t really send them at all,” he recalled.
Despite his apparent ambivalence about the role of the SEALs, it was during the period when he was commander of the riverine force that the SEALs began to come into their own. Many SEALs mark 1968 as the turning point, and they relate it to two events: the enemy’s Tet offensive, at the time of the lunar new year, in January-February; and the arrival of Vice Adm. Elmo R. Zumwalt, Jr., as commander of naval forces in Vietnam, in September of that year.
For the Tet offensive, the Viet Cong put into action all of their forces in South Vietnam. For years, many VC had remained hidden, carefully avoiding combat against the heavily armed American forces. But during Tet, armed Viet Cong suddenly appeared in Saigon and other major cities. Their confident belief was that the people would rise up and join them in defeating the Americans and the South Vietnamese government.
Although intelligence reports had been hinting at some sort of enemy offensive, the likeliest target seemed to be in the far north, near the border between North and South Vietnam. The scale and ferocity of the offensive in the far south; in the delta, caught everyone—including the SEALs, many of whom were stationed there—by surprise.
Lt. John S. Wilbur, Jr., a member of Team Two, was stationed in a hamlet near Can Tho, in the lower delta. In the days before the offensive, he had spent most of his time working with senior intelligence officials planning a double operation.
“Everyone, including the entire regional CIA cadre, the highest ranking military command units … had absolutely no indication of whatever sort and from whatever source, (1) that there was going to be a massive military eruption of combat, or (2) that the Viet Cong infrastructure had the means or capability in place to even initiate that kind of multiple phase attack which, in actuality, immobilized the entire South Vietnamese government structure in the delta,” Wilbur says.
At the time of Tet, Charlie Watson was a SEAL warrant officer stationed at My Tho. Watson had been a member of the UDT when the SEALs were being formed and was one of those prepared to parachute into Cuba at the time of the missile crisis. Because of the holiday, an uneasy cease-fire was in effect, and many South Vietnamese troops left their units to visit their families. Watson was ordered to take out a squad of six men and set up an observation ambush near the South China Sea. They were ordered, “Watch but don’t kill.”
During the night they heard laughter, and one of his men urged him, “Let’s wax those guys.” But Watson told him they couldn’t do that. The SEALs saw no one moving during the night and, except for the laughter, made no contact. But they noticed that it was, as Watson says, “a very busy night … lot of bombing.” When morning came, Watson got on the radio to call in a patrol boat to pick them up. But no one answered.
“I saw a PBR [patrol boat, river] racing along the opposite shore. I stood in the water and lit a flare, hoping he’d see me. Then I got to thinking, ‘He didn’t see me, but who the hell else did?’ Then another PBR came right to us and told us My Tho was under attack. He says, ‘the whole world has gone crazy.’”
When they reached the city, there was so much firing going on that they were told not to come ashore. Even years later, the words come tumbling out as Watson recalls the tension of those few days:
“We decided the hell with it. We grabbed a jeep and went roaring through town. Anyone stuck their head out, they got shot at. It was just like the rat patrol. We had to get back to the hotel. That’s where we stayed, in the hotel. Ain’t a bad way to fight a war, by the way. For five days we were not prisoners, but we were surrounded. My Tho was in bad shape.”
From a hospital next door, a number of foreign nationals, among them Filipino nurses and Dutch doctors, crowded into the hotel. It fell to the SEALs to provide protection for them.
“I said, ‘Goddamn, how are we going to protect all these people? There are only twelve of us.’ We set up a pretty good fire, aimed at certain points, and hoped no one came. We saw those bastard climbing around the hospital. We would take potshots at them, kill them,” Watson says.
The SEALs and the civilians they were trying to protect were on the fringes of a major battle for control of the city. From the hotel, they could see green rockets signalling a VC charge. Then they could see and hear the South Vietnamese marines and rangers meet the charge with point-blank artillery fire. “It was a terrible thing,” Watson says. The sickening smell of tear gas hung over the whole city.
“On the fourth or fifth day, near the end, it was just getting dark, they were in in the next street, and I was scared to death,” Watson says. “And then here comes a jeep with the CIA guys. They wanted protection. I thought, Goddamn, we’re gone. When them bastards come looking for help, it’s a sad goddamn day.”
But the South Vietnamese, their defenses bolstered by about thirty armored personnel carriers which had just happened to stop in the city, beat back the attack, and the shooting gradually tapered off.
By the time Zumwalt arrived to take over command of naval forces in Vietnam seven months after Tet, it was obvious to American commanders that the Tet offensive had been a terrible military disaster for the enemy. They had exposed their previously hidden forces, and they had been destroyed. The expected uprising by the South Vietnamese population had failed to materialize. But the surprise offensive had come as a devastating political shock back in the United States. President Johnson announced he would not seek reelection, and Richard Nixon, who said he had a plan to end the war, was nominated by the Republican party.
Zumwalt, an officer known for his openness to unorthodox ideas and willingness to try new approaches to old problems, quickly agreed to a proposal from Salzer, then commander of the riverine force: Put more effort into disrupting the use by the enemy of the delta’s vast network of rivers, especia
lly the smaller tributaries.
For years, the argument had waxed over whether most enemy supplies came in across the Cambodian border or whether they came down the coast on ships. As early as January 1964, Bucklew had been sent by his navy superiors on a survey trip to Vietnam to try to answer that question. His conclusion: While some supplies were coming down the coast, most were arriving from the other side, carried down by land from North Vietnam and then across the Cambodian border. The army liked to believe just the opposite, and Bucklew sent his report directly back to Pearl Harbor to prevent it being adulterated by more senior officers.
Despite his clear conclusion, there were strong forces in both the army and the navy that favored a major effort to disrupt the infiltration of men and supplies by sea. Many senior officers in the navy remained far more comfortable with a blue-water strategy and continued to resist greater involvement in the messy riverine warfare, involving dinky little patrol boats, muddy water—and SEALs. Perhaps the navy had done about all it could by stopping infiltration by sea and along the major rivers. Still, as Tet demonstrated, the enemy continued to receive a substantial flow of supplies.
By the time Zumwalt arrived, there was growing evidence that these supplies were not only coming overland, down the so-called Ho Chi Minh Trail through North Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, but also by sea through Cambodian ports on the Gulf of Thailand. While there was a good deal of debate over the volume of supplies coming in by sea, it was obvious that moving supplies from the Cambodian ports and then down the river network, especially along the many small tributary streams, into the delta made for a much shorter supply route than the overland one from the north.
Zumwalt’s new plan, called SEA LORDS, for South-East Asia Lake, Ocean, River and Delta Strategy, called for keeping the enemy off guard. “You can get away with almost anything once or even twice, but you must change strategies frequently in order to keep the enemy from exploiting you,” Zumwalt told his staff.
Zumwalt was a great believer in the SEALs and wanted more of them. Kaine, by then a captain and commander of the Special Warfare Group, Pacific, which included UDTs, SEALs, Beach Jumpers, and training commands, got frequent calls from Zumwalt: “I need fifteen more, twenty more, one hundred more SEALs.”
Anxious to increase the rate of training, Zumwalt called Kauffman, who had become an admiral and commander of U.S. naval forces in the Philippines, and asked for his advice. His recommendations didn’t make sense to Kaine.
“Of course Kauffman hadn’t anything to do with SEALs,” Kaine says. “He didn’t know a SEAL from a bowwow.” Zumwalt got the two men together, and they quickly agreed that the way to speed up training was to restrict it to what the men needed to know to operate in Vietnam.
The SEALs were perfectly suited to Zumwalt’s innovative, fast-moving strategy. But they faced one serious problem: the lack of accurate, timely intelligence. In the early part of their involvement in the war, they had been forced to rely on intelligence gathered by others. Often it was almost embarrassingly bad. The SEALs adopted a two-prong strategy of their own: They would gather their own intelligence and then act on it, sometimes almost immediately.
Platoon commanders were called to Saigon and handed bundles of piasters. The money was to be strictly accounted for, but the officers were told to use it to buy information on their own.
Down at the tip of the Ca Mau Peninsula, members of Team Two worked closely with a Chinese Catholic priest named Father Wa, who provided them with top-notch intelligence. Time after time, the SEALs amazed their superiors by coming back with high-ranking Viet Cong captives. Sometimes their intelligence was so good that they would wait at the side of a canal, knowing that a sampan carrying VC leaders would come along at a certain time. “The people we were looking for came down the canal at the time they were supposed to. They were this close. Just reach out. Just grab ’em. It was that easy a few times,” Bud Thrift recalls.
Thrift commanded one unit in that area at a time when antiwar protests were mounting back home. He found himself with almost complete freedom to run his own little war. “I told my guys, ‘Nobody gives a shit what we do down here as long as we do something. What we’ve got to do is win our little part of the war and don’t give a shit about what the congressmen are doing back in the States and just get back out of here alive. We’re just going to win our part and get out of here.’”
On at least one occasion, however, Thrift found that someone was paying attention to what they were doing.
“We went on an op, and the guy we were after didn’t show up,” he says. “I thought I’d do the smart thing. The guy’s wife and kid were there. I took them back and left a note. It said, ‘The men with the green faces have your wife. Turn yourself in.’ The guy’s brother was a major in the Vietnamese army, and we let the wife stay with him. But the guy we wanted had a girlfriend and had been trying to get rid of his old lady anyway. There was a lot of message traffic about taking hostages for trade. I didn’t come out smelling too good.”
Often when the SEALs began to penetrate the Viet Cong infrastructure, they found ties to the enemy cause very fragile indeed. William Cowan, a marine officer who often worked with SEALs in the Rung Sat Special Zone, says, “It was not unusual to have prisoners end up working for you. The first day, you capture a guy. The second day he is carrying the radio. The third day he is walking point without a weapon. After that he becomes our point man. That’s how quickly those guys would turn. They didn’t have in-depth loyalty. A lot of guys were just relieved they were not killed or eaten.
“Once they began working for the other side, the former enemy soldiers often provided remarkably accurate intelligence,” Cowan says.
“One time we had a good hit on a base camp. The way we determined who we had gotten and who we hadn’t gotten was by the serial numbers on their weapons. That’s how we knew who wasn’t there. We had very, very good intel.”
Once, Cowan says, his unit captured a North Vietnamese warrant officer who agreed to guide them to his base camp. Even though it was his first flight in a helicopter, the man was able to direct the Americans right to the camp.
“It was amazing he was able to go up in the air for the first time and lead us. He walked us right up these rivers and said, ‘that’s where the base camp is.’ When we rolled in the gunships, he went crazy. He was jumping up and down. I thought he was going to fall out of the helicopter, he was so excited.”
One of the most amazing intelligence coups of the war illustrates how many of the Vietnamese were simply trying to get themselves and their families through the war safely.
Bill Bruhmuller was serving with Team Two in early 1971 when a Vietnamese he had developed as an intelligence source asked him out for a beer. How would he like it, the man asked, if he could put Bruhmuller in touch with a high-level enemy official who was willing to sell information for money? Bruhmuller asked a few questions and then demanded proof the man really had worthwhile information. A few days later, Bruhmuller’s contact showed up with some documents.
“I purposely contacted the Defense Intelligence Agency rather than the army because I knew what would happen. They’d compromise him or not take it as seriously as I thought. The initial documents checked out, and they told me, ‘You’ve got somebody very important,’” Bruhmuller says.
A meeting was set up. But there was one condition: Bruhmuller must come alone and unarmed.
The proposed meeting site was way out in bad country. Bruhmuller arranged for another Vietnamese contact to dress as a policeman and take him to the meeting in a closed police van. As the van approached the spot, the driver slowed but did not stop, so no one listening would realize anyone had gotten out. Bruhmuller wore civilian clothes: jeans, a green shirt, and a bandanna on his head. For protection in the jungle, he carried a knife and a .38-caliber or 9mm pistol.
From the road, he walked about a thousand yards off into the woods. “I never saw the man wearing a watch, but he was always there,” Bruhmuller s
ays. “I don’t recall ever having to wait for him.”
The two men introduced themselves. Bill Bruhmuller told the man, “You call me ‘John’; I’ll call you ‘Mister.’“ Bruhmuller never did learn the man’s real name. He figured if he didn’t know, he could never tell anyone.
Quickly the two men strode back to the road and hopped into the van as it rolled past. From there, they went directly to the airfield for the flight to Saigon. The DIA had assigned an interrogator who was fluent in Vietnamese.
“He was a black fellow, and he had just the personality, the language, to put this gent totally at ease. There was never any hesitation to answer questions.”
Bruhmuller went off alone into enemy territory six times. Only once did he feel he was in imminent danger.
“On the way out once, Mister pushed me down into a hole. Within a couple of seconds, a VC patrol went by us. I saw eleven guys. I don’t know why they didn’t hear my heart going. If he ever was going to turn me in, this was it. The man saved my life.”
Each trip took about twenty-four hours, and Bruhmuller stayed with Mister the whole time. “I stayed primarily as a confidence builder for Mister. We became almost friends. We trusted each other. I didn’t want him messed over. I was there to protect him as well as to get information.”
Bruhmuller didn’t understand Vietnamese well enough to keep up with the interrogation, and he didn’t really want to know the details of the information the man was providing. But he gradually learned Mister’s story. Back during the war between the French and the Viet Minh, Mister was captured and sent to Hanoi for schooling. Later, he was sent back to set up his own organization in the delta.