[00:00:01] (HOST) In mid-September, I attended a reunion of the Mobile Riverine Force Association in Saint Louis. It’s a topic we’ve wanted to explore here on Echoes for a long time, so I was grateful for the invitation and for the opportunity to speak in person to a whole bunch of River Rats in one place. I ended up with more than a dozen interviews, both Army and Navy, which I’ve organized into two episodes. In part one, you’ll hear about the origins of the Mobile Riverine Force in the Mekong Delta, and you’ll hear from soldiers and sailors about arriving in Vietnam and working and living with each other. In part two, they’ll share some of their most vivid memories of riverine operations and talk about what has stayed with them from that experience. Stick around. From the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund, Founders of the Wall. This is Echoes of the Vietnam War. I’m your host Michael Croan bringing you stories of service, sacrifice, and healing from people who still feel the impact of that conflict. More than 50 years later.

[00:01:33] (HAHN) My name is Harry Hahn. I’m president of the Mobile Riverine Force Association.

[00:01:40] (HOST) Harry enlisted in the Navy Reserve in 1967 as a radioman. He eventually was activated and sent to Vietnam, where he ended up in more than 100 firefights with River Squadron 13.

[00:01:53] (HAHN) Back during the Civil War. The Mobile Riverine Force was formed to have the Navy transport Army guys to fight the battles of the Civil War down the Mississippi. And what happened in Vietnam was the Mekong Delta, which is the breadbasket of Vietnam, all the rice is grown there, and it’s a very important area to Vietnam. At the time, there were no other roads or ways to get around the delta except on the rivers and canals. The canals that were there were formed by, dug by the French so that they, during their occupation of Vietnam, you know, because of the rubber plantations and the vegetation there that the French wanted to exploit, you know, they dug these canals that were very straight, very well built. And what happened during the Vietnam War, was, the Army, who were trying to fight the battles of the delta, had difficulty getting around in tracked vehicles because they couldn’t cross the canals. Or if they got into the rice paddy type, areas, the tracked vehicles would just get bogged down. So the Department of Defense put together what they called, Task Force 117, which was comprised of both Army and Navy. The Navy took World War II converted landing craft, like you see landing on the beaches of Normandy, took that type of craft. They had the ramps that would drop and offload the troops and made them into an up armored type of boat. So, they actually took World War II LCM-6s. And on the sides of them they put one inch ballistic steel. And then because they were weighting them down, so they actually put Styrofoam and bar armor, which was cement reinforcing rod on the sides to engage the these this Styrofoam floats on the sides of the boats. So it made what was a narrower boat a little wider. Uh, but we kept the same ramp that would then offload the troops. So we had boats that were called Tango boats, which were the troop carriers and the multitude of the boats, the mass numbers of the boats, were Tango boats. But to protect them, even though they had their own guns, they had 20mm cannons and 30 caliber, 50 caliber machine guns, to provide better armament to the armada, which would go down the rivers in a column. We had also what was called Monitors and the Monitors, like the Monitor and the Merrimack of the Civil War. The Monitors were gunboats, and we had both 40 millimeter cannon and 105 Howitzer, floating tank, kind of Monitor, to protect the Tango boats, the troops. So generally, the columns were led by a Monitor going into a canal or going into a particular river waterway, where they would drop off the troops that would engage the enemy. So that then became what was a river division. And in the in the time that the Mobile Riverine Force in Vietnam existed, there was River Squadrons 9, 11, 13 and 15. So there’s four different river squadrons. Each squadron had two divisions. For instance, I was in River Squadron 13 and we had River Division 131 and 132. So those were divisions of the actual squadron itself.

[00:06:46] (HOST) So the first two digits is the division number.

[00:06:48] (HAHN) Yeah. The first two digits is a squadron. And the last digit is the division.

[00:06:53] (HOST) Got it. Okay. Yeah.

[00:06:54] (HAHN) And then each division had generally, about, four Monitors. And then there was about 11 or 12 Tango boats per division.

[00:07:08] (HOST) Okay. How did the command structure work? I mean, if it’s a joint, if you got Army and Navy guys, at what point does it, is the decision maker?

[00:07:17] (HAHN) Well good question. You know, especially today where you have like SOCAM which determines operations for joint Army, Navy, Air Force, all the divisions. You know, back then, you know, because it was just Army and Navy, Army would basically determine what operation needed to take place. In other words, if there was an enemy, structure of some sort that was, spotted in a particular area. And let’s say they wanted to go after that enemy in that area. They would put together the battle plan and then involve the Navy and how we’re going to insert the troops. And sometimes the troops would be inserted on one side of call it a peninsula or an area, and then they would be picked up on the other side as they swept through the area. So in the coordination, you would have you know, a landing time and then you would have a pickup time. Okay. Now, this also involved later on, you know, we would also insert Seals because the Seals associated, of course, with the Navy, the Seals would have an operation and basically a Seal’s operation. Where, pretty much secret. They would be the only ones that would know exactly what their operation is. But, you know, they would say, well, we need a ride, you know, so we would drop them off at a particular place and then we’d get a time to pick them up.

[00:08:59] (HOST) Okay. So the Army would decide what the what the objective was. And then somebody on the Navy side would decide how how we were going to get the troops from one place to another. Yes.

[00:09:14] (HAHN) The early Tango boats. Troop Carrier boats were, affectionately called Rag boats. Okay. And in one of the, an acronym really, for a river assault group. Okay. So, you know, they would be called river assault groups. Uh, and that’s where the RAG came from. But the other thing was the RAG top. The early Tango boats had a canvas top over the well deck to protect the troops from all that terrible sun heat. That we had in Vietnam.

[00:09:53] (HOST) How many troops would you carry on one of those Tango boats?

[00:09:55] (HAHN) Oh, they might. They might carry maybe 20 to 30 troops per Tango boat. But as I said, the early boats would have, canvas tops and somewhere along the line after River Division 9 was there, they said, you know there’s actually no place to land a helo. So because of the jungle, and the water and the mud, you know, if you have to medevac somebody, where do you land the helo. So beginning, somewhere with the River Division 11 they started to experiment with putting corrugated steel tops on over the well, deck to land a helo on the on the Tango boat. And so beginning with River Division 13, where they made those boats, they made them with a steel deck over the well deck so that you could actually land a helo that and medevac somebody..

[00:11:02] (HOST) Wow. So, replacing the ragtop with a helipad, essentially.

[00:11:06] (HAHN) Exactly. And what was pretty interesting is the you know, the people who were the boat captains of those particular boats, you know, they said that they were the boat captain of the smallest aircraft carrier in the world. Yeah.

[00:11:24] (HOST) Randy Peat is from a working class family in southern Michigan. He was in line for a promotion at the automotive firm where he worked. But the draft seemed likely to disrupt things. So Randy enlisted in the hopes of staying close to home long enough to get his promotion before being shipped out.

[00:11:41] (PEAT) The Navy had a program that if you enlisted for six years that your first year you would stay home in active reserves, but you’d be home. And then the second two years would be active duty, and then another year of, you know, active reserves and then two years of inactive reserves for a total commitment of six. Sign me up. So I enlisted. They took care of the draft thing. I went. I was flown 12,500 miles from where I was born to halfway around the world. And little brown people were trying to kill me with guns. And at this point.

[00:12:25] (HOST) That wasn’t what they advertised, was it? That’s not the conversation you had.

[00:12:30] (PEAT) When I first joined the Navy, I thought, wow, I’m so smart, you know, join the Navy, see the world.

[00:12:35] (HOST) I’m a genius.

[00:12:37] (PEAT) Oh, I got this figured out right. And then when my orders came through I was assigned to River Assault Squadron 13.

[00:12:44] (HOST) What month and year did you arrive?

[00:12:46] (PEAT) I think we arrived in April of, 68.

[00:12:55] (HOST) Pretty tense time.

[00:12:56] (PEAT) That was the height of it all. There was 550,000 other Americans there during that period that I was there. And we were such a unique group because it was the first time the Army and the Navy had gone together and formed a joint unit since the Civil War. So we were cutting new ground all the time, which was interesting. And, I, you know, I mean, I look back on what we did and how we did it and all of that, and, I’m proud of the way we conducted ourselves and and how we handled, you know, tense situations. And, um, we never lost a battle, and we never lost a war. We just quit. So we I look at it.

[00:13:55] (HOST) Yeah. And, you know, you could even argue that we were ahead when we quit.

[00:13:59] (PEAT) I would argue that we were. I was there. I mean.

[00:14:03] (HOST) Yeah.

[00:14:04] (PEAT) In most cases replacements didn’t know until they arrived in Vietnam that they were being assigned to the Mobile Riverine Force for 9th Infantry. Guys like Bob Stump, the idea of riding into combat on boats came as a bit of a surprise.

[00:14:20] I got to Dong Tam and I’m not sure about the date. I do recall that when we got to Dong Tam, the boats, the ships were all down in Canto and we had to wait. And the funny thing is, they told me the ships are not back. And it’s like I’m in the Army. What’s the ship stuff? You know, that was my first inclination that I’m in the Army, but I’m also in the Navy. I had no clue that I was going to be in a war. I never heard of the Mobile Riverine Force. It was not the guys that would know more about the Mobile Riverine Force are the people that trained for it. In 1967, 66 or 67, a lot of these units came over together on ships.

[00:15:15] (HOST) A.J. McCaskey was drafted at the age of 21. He arrived in Vietnam in September of 1968 and was assigned to the 9th Infantry.

[00:15:24] (MCCASKEY) I don’t remember where we landed, but the oppressive heat and, uh, humidity was, the most incredible thing. Anything you did, as soon as you started walking, you started sweating. And the incredible vastness of these bases, and seeing 100 tanks lined up and 100 helicopters and the chaos and what’s going on in the dust and, yeah, it was a chaotic, busy time to get off that plane and see the activity that takes in a war. And then they assigned us and, off we went, I think, on the trucks to down to, Dong Tam. The 9th Infantry Division hadn’t been there that long, but you know, I saw a volleyball court next to the barracks, and I saw a sign on a building that said library. And I mean, it was a massive base camp and then I saw a swimming pool and I went, my God, this is a war, and they’ve got all these amenities. This is incredible. And the first few operations I went on weren’t with the Navy. It was a sweep across an open rice paddy with a bunch of guys walking into the jungle to make a massive presence known. And, with, helicopters overhead, shooting rockets into the jungle and, you know, it was even at the time not knowing anything about combat. I thought, this is crazy. This is guerrilla warfare. And we’re walking across a rice paddy. A hundred of us doing a sweep. And that was kind of the World War II tactics. I think that was evidence of General Westmoreland and it wasn’t long, I think General Abrams took over and we were going out in much smaller units and whatever sweeps were 5 or 6 guys or 10, 12 guys or whatever. And, from I think maybe within a few days, you know, I went out to I was we went out to the USS, Benoit and, uh, you know, we were living on one of the ships that were anchored in the Mekong River. And it was from there we started working with the Navy and the boats and the Tango boats and that kind of thing.

[00:21:18] (HOST) Terry Sater is the author of an excellent book about the Mobile Riverine Force in Vietnam called The Nightmare of the Mekong. When he and his buddies graduated from high school in 1965. They had to figure out how they would contend with the draft. One of Terry’s buddies said he wasn’t going to enlist. He preferred to take his chances with the draft. The Army sent that guy to Denver for two years. Another buddy took his chances and ended up spending two years in Germany. Terry’s strategy was to avoid being sent to Vietnam at all costs. So in April of 1966, he enlisted in the Navy. In March of 1968, he received orders for the Mobile Riverine Force in the Mekong Delta. He was understandably concerned, so Terry called the Bureau of Naval Personnel. The guy at the other end of the line said, look, if you’re worried about getting killed, don’t worry about it. We haven’t lost a boat yet.

[00:22:12] (SATER) It was a couple of weeks after Tet, and I remember it was just before we left, and we were watching the battles of Tet on our little black and white TV in our barracks, and, it was pretty scary, in the Delta. I know the Mobile Riverine Force was deeply involved in the action, and, helped save some of the cities. And, when I was on the plane to South Vietnam, I made the first entry in a diary I kept for six months, telling my family and Judy that I might not come back and, hope my mom and dad would just take care of the other five kids that were at home, and that Judy would find happiness with someone else. I called my brother on the phone just the night before I left. I had been telling the family and telling Judy that it was not a heavy combat unit, that all we did was patrol and, didn’t really see any action. I lied, of course. I didn’t want them worrying, but I called my brother to tell him that I’d put him down as next of kin so that he would be notified and he could take the news to mom and dad if anything happened to me. But when the plane landed, it was like 7:15 in the morning and Tan Son Nhat in Saigon. And I still remember walking out the door and there’s a scene in platoon that’s similar to it, where Charlie Sheen walks out and the heat hits him. And that’s just the way it was. It was like I couldn’t breathe. It was so hot and humid. It was, hard to breathe. And walking into the terminal, there were gaping holes in the roof of the terminal where they had been under a mortar attack just a couple of weeks earlier, and guys standing around. South Vietnamese troops standing around with submachine guns and that was kind of a startling sight to see. And we bummed rides on helicopters to our base, Dong Tam, quite a ways south of Saigon. And after the chopper dropped me off, I walked down to the harbor and I was looking out at the harbor, and I saw all the boats that had been shot up and sunk, and I kind of laughed to myself. I thought, yeah, the guy at Bureau of Naval Personnel was right. They didn’t lose the boats. They just lost the crews. And I saw a guy sitting on the bank, and I walked over to talk to him and learn a little bit about the place. And as I got closer, I noticed he had a cross on his lapels, his collars, and he was a chaplain. And as I got a few feet from him, he pulled up. He held up a roughly made wooden shovel and he said, look at this. I just took it off a dead gook. And that startled me that you would hear that phrase from a man of God. And that was my introduction to the base at Dogtown. Sometimes we go out 1 or 2 boats, but, uh, when we would go out as a squadron, there’d be like 31 boats, 31, 33, something like that boats in a row going down small canals. So when you picture now some of those boats had Zippos on them, flamethrowers. Some had 105 Howitzers. So you have that line of boats going down and get ambushed and they’re all firing all those machine guns, the cannons, the flamethrower. The firepower that it put out was unbelievable. And we were taught that the main thing we had to do and the thing that was drilled into us and I certainly followed, was that you had to put down such a field of fire that the enemy couldn’t poke his head up to fire a rocket at you. And that’s, that’s pretty much what we always tried to do. The amazing thing about the boats too, when you think about what kind of boat it was and what we experienced sometimes when we’d be ambushed and all of the firefights I was in were all, we were all ambushed all the time. We never found them and attacked them first. They always waited for us and hit us on both sides of the river. And picture a car going down a two or a three-lane road at 8 or 9 miles an hour with machine guns, rockets, automatic weapons, hitting it from both sides for a mile. That’s what we did.

[00:27:32] (MORAN) My name is Frank Moran and I live in Douglasville, Georgia, small town to the west of Atlanta.

[00:27:38] (HOST) Frank is originally from Manchester, New Hampshire. He enlisted in the Army right out of high school in the summer of 1963. By the time he arrived in Vietnam in December of 67, he had been through OCS and was a platoon leader assigned to the 9th Infantry Division.

[00:27:54] (MORAN) There was always two battalions on the boats, and the third battalion guarded the base camp for Dong Tam. So you had six weeks that you were on land, and 12 weeks that you were on boats.

[00:28:09] (HOST) And how many how many troops could a Tango accommodate?

[00:28:13] (MORAN) Roughly a platoon and a platoon, we had this discussion the other day about a platoon. A full loaded platoon was about 43 men. I never had that many men in my platoon. I think the most I ever had was 28.

[00:28:30] (HOST) Mm. Wow. Uh, so just over half strength.

[00:28:35] (MORAN) Yeah. And that that was not uncommon because of the rotation. If you remember that the bulk of them. So they couldn’t rotate everybody at the same time. And it worked out a little better that you would get, you know, one guy every two weeks or two guys in one week and that you’d rebuild that way. And that way you had time for the new guys to adapt to the old guys to learn the things to do. And then, of course, you lost some through combat, you know, through injuries, through illnesses. And so then those guys had to be replaced to the flotilla that we were attached to, had two boats called the Zippos. And what they had done, they had taken the well decks out of these things and put giant napalm canister in it. And they had on each side at the in the in the front would throw out a flame about 400m. So oftentimes it would go up the canals right before us. And if they drew fire, then they’d throw the Zippo out there.

[00:29:32] (HOST) Just to clear the to clear the jungle.

[00:29:34] (HAHN) Yeah. When they stop, whoever the heck was shooting at you, if you got, you got a bunch of fire coming at you, you’re going to stop. Midway through my tour, they started putting platforms on top of them where you literally you could land a helicopter on them.

[00:29:48] (HOST) Mhm.

[00:29:49] (HAHN) Which was kind of a neat thing because it could be a lifesaver if you had guys on your boat that had gotten hit or whatever, they could land that helicopter right on top of it and take off from there. We would get up generally 2 or 3:00 in the morning, depending how far away our drop station was going to be, and we would actually load the Tango when it was dark and then we would travel, well, we’d obviously leave Dong Tam or wherever the boats were based. We would leave the large boats, which was always in the Mekong River, and they were probably generally a mile off shore, so they couldn’t be shot at. So we would get on to the little boats, and then we’d slowly go up and down the canals, and until we reached the point where we were going to do an objective and then we, they would beach, they would drop the ramp and we would get off the beach, and then we would continue our operation. And it usually was some kind of circular operation. You went, you know, in a couple of kilometers and came back around and you were out there generally for two and a half to three days. And because we were always in the water, you had to come back and dry out. And so after about 2 or 3 days and the boats would come back, you’d reload the boats and go back to the main ships.

[00:31:09] (HOST) Randy Peat:

[00:31:11] (PEAT) What I ended up on was ATC, Armored Troop Carrier. We were 56ft long, about 12ft wide. I believe we weighed around 56 ton. We had two diesel engines and we could carry about 30 or so fully equipped troops.

[00:31:37] (HOST) Okay.

[00:31:38] (PEAT) And on our boat, we had, a well deck area, which is where the troops were at. And then the well deck area out of either side of the port and the starboard side, we had a 50 caliber Browning machine gun. And then next to it, we had two 30 caliber Browning machine guns. So we had six machine guns in the well deck where the troops are. Then on the aft end of the boat, we had three turrets and then the port and the starboard turret we had a 20 millimeter cannon, and in the aft turret, which was the only one that could swing and shoot either way. Excuse me. We had a Mk 19 40mm grenade launcher. And as soon as I figured all this out, that this is how we were going to be armed and all that kind of stuff. I said, okay, I’m taking the Mk 19 because I want it. I don’t care where they’re shooting from. I want to be able to shoot back. So I didn’t want to be stuck on one side or the other. I wanted to be able to swing my turd around and bring my gun to bear wherever I needed to. That’s where I learned to sleep standing up, was on that on those patrols or missions, I should say. As we all stayed at our general quarters, 100% while we were gone. So I managed and the other guys did too, you manage, you’re in your mouth. You kind of drape yourself around the gun. And, you know, I got to grab a few as best as you can. So that immediately you could, you know, pop up and, you know, start shooting.

[00:33:31] (HOST) Frank Moran:

[00:33:33] (MORAN) One of the things that you may not understand or know about is that in the Mobile Riverine Artillery, they actually had barges that had 105s on them, and they moved the barges onto the edge of the river. But the interesting was, is once they fired a shot, that barge would rock and roll. And so they had to shoot another one while it was on the updraft. And, you know, that becomes a little scary if you try. But anyway, so as an infantry.

[00:34:02] (HOST) You’re talking about the 105. Is that a Howitzer?

[00:34:05] (MORAN) Yeah. So it’s a cannon.

[00:34:07] (HOST) It’s a giant cannon.

[00:34:08] (HOST) So it’s sitting on a boat. They each had a cannon.

[00:34:12] (HOST) So when fired the boat rocks.

[00:34:14] (MORAN) The boat rocks.

[00:34:15] (HOST) The boat is rocking. But it has to continue firing.

[00:34:18] (MORAN) Yes.

[00:34:20] (HOST) Um, do you remember your first time getting on a Tango boat? AJ McCaskey:

[00:34:24] (PEAT) Yeah, it felt pretty, claustrophobic and vulnerable. Those B-40 rockets that the Viet Cong used were devastating, and, it was good to get off them. I mean, the longer you’re on the boat, the more vulnerable you felt. And, I couldn’t wait till the we never knew where we were going. It was just you get on, and sometimes it’d be a half an hour. Sometimes it’d be two hours, and, or the assignment, the destination would change and they’d turn around and go somewhere else. And so we were kind of confined and in the hold, I guess, of the of the Tango boat. I was never comfortable on those damn things because, they were just vulnerable. The problem we had was we were in water all the time and, talking with other guys that were further north in some of the hill country, they were out for weeks at a time, being resupplied and digging foxholes and, dealing with tunnels and that kind of thing. I never once rode on any kind of mechanized tank or armored personnel carrier. It was just too muddy. We had a lot of problem with, uh, ringworm and, jungle rot on our feet. And because we were wet all the time and, well, and part of the reason, too, we didn’t walk on the rice paddy dikes because they were always booby trapped, or the threat of a booby trap was there. So we’d always be walking in the in the rice paddy and the same in the, in the jungle. If you took a, a traditional path that the Vietnamese might be using, you really had to watch for booby traps and tripwires and things of that nature. So we’d be walking in water and uh, um, at one point and this was a months into it, but at one point, I had such bad jungle rot on my feet, I couldn’t walk anymore. I had to be helicoptered in and, you know, when we went back on the ship, when once we were picked up, we’d have maybe, I don’t know, 24 hours off. But, we always walked around in flip flops and, kept our, you know, go outside and let the sun hit our feet to dry them out.

[00:37:12] (HOST) Can you I mean, for people who don’t really have any idea what jungle foot is like, can you can you describe it?

[00:37:24] (PEAT) Oh, I don’t know. It’s a looks like a reddish rash and, you know, if you just if you’re, if you’re, well, if your feet are constantly wet and you’re wearing army issue wool socks with combat boots, and at night, you’re afraid to take them off because you don’t know if you’re going to be hit sleeping on the ground. Your feet never had a chance to dry off or air dry. Yeah, the rubbing and the constant wetness and they were just turned into a reddish rash, painful ringworm. It was disgusting. I can remember a new guy coming in, and we were on the ship at that point in time. We got a couple of new recruits, and the guy looked at my feet and said, oh, my God, I am never, ever going to let my feet get that bad. And I said, you know, after a few weeks in the jungle, you’re going to be praying your feet look this bad because it’s the only way you get some time off.

[00:38:45] (HOST) Terry Sater

[00:38:47] (SATER) We were constantly on the boat. As a matter of fact, I think it every once in a while, the guys in the 9th will say something that, shows me that they didn’t really understand what we were doing. Every once in a while, a guy from the 9th will say, well, you would drop us off, and then you’d go back and tie up to the ship and go in and have a hot shower and hot meal and lay in the bunk. And I said, no, we would drop off the troops and we’d usually go to another area called blocking stations to prevent the VC from escaping in a different direction or we would go back, and load up more supplies and ammunition and come back. I remember only sleeping on a nice bed out of the whole time I was there, maybe five times. We slept, we lived, we lived on the boats and, just had a canvas rack that folded down from the bulkhead and usually had a dirty sheet or poncho and a roll of dirty clothes for a pillow. And I still remember one night, a rat crawling across me. And a lot of the guys, including me are summertime takes us back, and we have a difficult time sleeping because I feel like I have bugs all over me. One buddy of mine, Frank Springer, was at the reunion. He still sleeps with a towel over his face because the mosquitoes would be so thick they would, like, fill up your mouth. And, there’s rats and snakes, it was, uh, it was not very comfortable.

[00:40:45] (HOST) More than 50 years later, he still sleeps with a towel over his face?

[00:40:49] (SATER) Yes. Yeah. It stays with you.

[00:40:53] (HOST) In part two of River Rats, you’ll hear from a lot of the same voices you heard from in part one, plus a few new ones. They’ll share stories about fighting the enemy and the environment in the Mekong Delta, and they’ll talk about the connections and the nightmares that have lasted the 50 years since. That’s two weeks from now when we come back with more stories of service, sacrifice and healing. See you then.

Full Interview with Harry Hahn

Full Interview with AJ McCaskey

Full Interview with Frank Moran

Full Interview with Randy Peat

Full Interview with Terry Sater

Full Interview with Bob Stumpf