Vietnam 67 (3 Viewers)

"The Naked Counterattack," by Fred Fish, a retired group insurance underwriter/consultant in Irvine, California.

Two thousand years ago the Celtic warriors went to battle naked, and so did my squad in August 1967. My unit, Bravo Company, was moving on foot from Highway 1 along the north side of the Bong Son River. At a location about a mile and a half from the South China Sea, we established positions facing the river. Several miles south of the river, other units from our battalion were conducting a coordinated sweep and pushing the enemy toward our positions. So our mission was to be ready to engage the enemy as they crossed the river from the south.

It was a beautiful day, hot but not too hot, and along the riverbank there was plenty of shade from coconut trees and large bushes covered the large white sand dunes to our rear. It was mid-afternoon when a group of us couldn’t resist the temptation of a little swim. The river was wide and moved slowly, the water was deep and cool, and immediately in front of our positions was a little sand island about 10 yards from the bank of the river, which we could make temporarily our own. It was all very enchanting with the warm sun, the island, the shade of our position and the beautiful blue river flowing gently before us on its way to the South China Sea.

It was also very peaceful; there was not a sound from the far side of the river. So we stripped off our uniforms and headed for the river. Some of us swam in the deep water near the bank, some made it to the sand island and others had blown up their air mattresses to float to the island.

As we were enjoying our swim and the warm sun, automatic weapon fire suddenly broke out around us, hitting the trees and bushes and shore to our rear. We were expecting the enemy to come toward us from the far side of the river, and now we were being attacked from our rear. And we were naked!

Without hesitation we swam or paddled to shore, grabbed our weapons, and stark naked charged up the banks returning the fire. Our naked, burly M-60 machine gun operator ran forward yelling “feed me,” trailed by an equally naked assistant holding an ammo belt and trying to snap it on to the few rounds dangling from the M-60.

Looking back, I must admit that those of us armed with M-16s or M-79 grenade launchers, with extra ammo belts strung across our chests, probably looked very distressed as we charged naked toward the sand dunes to our rear. But this was nothing when compared to our miserable and pathetic looking M-60 machine gun crew. They certainly did not look anything like Audie Murphy as they charged naked toward the sand dunes, dodging palm-laden ground in bare feet and at the same time, trying to fasten a new belt of ammo to the dangling link. Quickly realizing the enemy fire had stopped and that we were doing much more damage to our feet than we could hope to inflict on the enemy, our imposing group pulled up, as horses being brought to a quick stop in western movies. Our naked counterattack must have scared the hell out of the enemy, because they swiftly withdrew. It was a bit unorthodox, but as they say, “no harm no foul.”​
 
jazzeum said:
Reading Vietnam - A comparison of Michael Herr's "Dispatches" and Phillip Caputo's "A Rumor of War."

This particular article is what are reader's favorite books on Vietnam, which are discussed in the article's comment section. If I have time, I will make a list and post it here.
Click to expand...

I went through the books mentioned by readers and here are the books they mentioned.

Vietnam Reading List:

365 Days - Ronald J Glasser
Decent Interval – Frank Snepp
A Bright Shining Lie - Neil Sheehan
Patriots - Christian Appy
Collateral Damage - Alice Boatwright
Chickenhawk – Robert Mason
Rumor of War - Philip Caputo
The Things They Carried – Tim O’Brien
Dispatches - Michael Herr
Born on the Fourth of July - Ron Kovic
One Very Hot Day - David Halberstam
Matterhorn - Karl Marlantes
Fields of Fire – James Webb
Phase Line Green - Nicholas War
Run Between the Raindrops – Dale Dye
Hue 1968 – Mark Bowden
Into Laos – Keith Nolan
Sand in the Wind – Robert Roth
KoKo – Peter Straub
Kill Anything That Moves – Nick Turse
Embers of War – Frederick Logevall
The Best and the Brightest – David Halberstam
The Quiet American – Graham Greene
Dereliction of Duty – H.R. McMaster
Going After Cacciato – Tim O’Brien
When Heaven and Earth Changed Places – Le Le Hayslip
The Living and the Dead – Henderson
Perfect Spy – Larry Berman
Fire in the Lake – Frances Fitzgerald
The Short Timers – Gustav Hasford
The Forever War – Joe Haldeman
In the Lake of the Woods – Tim O’Brien
War for the Hell of It – Ed Cobleigh
Street Without Joy – Bernard Fell
Anatomy of a War – Gabriel Kolko
Patches of Fire – Albert French
Suicide Charlie – Norman Russell
The Sympathizer – Viet Thanh Nguyen
About Face: The Odyssey of an American Warrior – David Hackworth
America’s Longest War – George Herring
Vietnam: A History – Stanley Karnow
Phoenix and the Birds of Prey – Mark Moylar
Doctor at Dien Bien Phu – Paul Grauwin
Small Wars, Favorite Places – Michael Burleigh
Giap: The General who Defeated America in Vietnam – James Warren
We Gotta Get out of this Place – Bill Bradley and Craig Hansen
After Sorrow – Lady Borton
The Cat from Hue – John Laurence
A Viet Cong Memoir – Truong Nhur Tang
They Marched into Sunlight – David Maraniss
We Were Soldiers Once – Hal Moore
Our Vietnam – A.J. Langguth
On Strategy -Harry Summers
These Good Men – Michael Norman
Bury Us Upside Down – Rick Newman
Triple Sticks – Bernard Fipp
The Killing Zone – Frederick Downs
Tim Page’s Nam – Tim Page
Hell in a Very Small Place – Bernard Fell
Vietnam: The Ten Thousand Day War – Michael Maclear
Dear America: Letters Home from Vietnam – Bernard Edelman, Editor
Red Thunder Tropic Lightning – Eric Bergerud
Dog Soldiers – Robert Stone
American Requiem – James Carroll
March of Folly – Barbara Tuchman
Battle of Long Tan – David Cameron
What it is Like to go to War – Karl Marlantes
Achilles in Viet Nam – Jonathan Shay
Odysseus in America – Jonathan Shay
The Eaves of Heaven – Andrew Pham
Sorrow of War – Bao Ninh
Battle of Dak To – Edward Murphy
Summons of the Trumpet Richard Palmer
In the Pharoah’s Army – Tobias Woolf
In Country – Bobbie Ann Mason
Black Tickets – Jayne Ann Phillips
Paco’s Story – Larry Heinemann
Brennan’s War – Matthew Brennan
Nam – Mark Baker, Editor
Long Time Passing – Myra McPherson, Editor
SOG – John Plaster
Reporting Vietnam – Library of America
Collateral Damage – Alice Boatwright
Vietnam Reader – Marcus Raskin
The 13th Valley – John Del Vecchio
Your Hero and Mine, Scott – Carrie Christofferson Handy
The Ravens – Christopher Robbins
Everything We Had – Al Santoli
Letters to Charlies and One to Jane – Fred Snyder
Who Shot the Water Buffalo – Ken Babbs
Once Upon a Distant War – William Prochnau
Walking it Off – Doug Peacock
Tree of Smoke – Denis Johnson
A Dangerous Friend – Ward Just
Thud Ridge – Jacksel Broughton
Shadow War: The Secret War in Laos – Kenneth Conboy
Meditations in Green – Stephen Wright
Green Knight, Red Mourning – Richard Ogden
The Fortunate Son: The Healing of a Vietnam Vet – Lewis Puller
 
I don't know a lot of the books mentioned above but the books that were repeatedly mentioned by readers were as follows:

Dispatches
Rumor of War
A Bright Shining Lie
The Things They Carried and all other novels by Tim O'Brien
Fields of Fire
Matterhorn
Embers of War
The Best and the Brightest
The Quiet American
Fire in the Lake
Street Without Joy and other books by Bernard Fell
 
In High School, we were shown a short film called "Why Vietnam"
It featured LBJ explaining the reasons we were in Vietnam.
 
When were you in HS? 1966. That's around when I was but don't remember seeing a film like that. Of course, my son says I have a terrible memory.
 
"McNamara's Mistake," by Hamilton Gregory, author of author of “McNamara’s Folly: The Use of Low-I.Q. Troops in the Vietnam War.”

One morning in the summer of 1967, I was among about 100 men at the Armed Forces induction center in Nashville. It was the height of the Vietnam War, and I had volunteered for the Army. A sergeant walked into the room and announced that all of us would leave soon to begin training in Fort Benning, Ga. Then he asked, “Is anyone here a college graduate?”

I raised my hand, and he motioned me to follow him. He took me down a hallway to a bench where I was introduced to a young man I’m going to call Johnny Gupton, to protect his privacy. Gupton was also assigned to Fort Benning. “I want you to take charge of this man,” the sergeant told me. “Go with him every step of the way.” He explained that Gupton could neither read nor write, and would need help in filling out paperwork when we arrived at Benning. Then he added: “Make sure he doesn’t get lost. He’s one of McNamara’s Morons.”

I had never heard the term, and I was surprised that the sergeant would openly insult Gupton. But I learned quickly that “McNamara’s Morons” was a term that many officers and sergeants used to refer to thousands of low-I.Q. men like Gupton who were taken into the military under a program devised by Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara.

The sergeant handed me a sealed envelope that held my personnel records and Gupton’s. I was instructed to give the package to the sergeants when I arrived at Fort Benning.

As we traveled by bus and by plane, I tried to make small talk with Gupton, but he didn’t say much. I asked him what state he was from, but he didn’t know. I later found out that he lived in Eastern Tennessee, in one of the Appalachian Mountains’ isolated “poverty pockets.” He was very thin – unhealthily thin. He knew nothing about the situation he was in. He didn’t understand what basic training was about, and he didn’t know that America was in a war. I tried to explain what was happening, but I could tell that he was still in a fog.

In basic training, he was virtually helpless. We had to make his bunk because he couldn’t follow Army specifications. I tied his boots for him every morning until another trainee took the time to teach him the skill. He didn’t know his left from his right, so he had trouble with basic commands like “left face” and “right face” and he had trouble with marching. When the sergeants screamed at him, he was terrified and confused.

On the rifle range, he was erratic and dangerous in handling his rifle – the sergeants feared he would accidentally shoot himself or someone else. Finally, he was put on permanent kitchen duty, cleaning and scrubbing in the mess hall all day. (Later, he was sent to Vietnam, and he survived because he was protected by a sergeant who gave him jobs away from combat. The sergeant was sympathetic because he had grown up with a sister whom he described as “mentally handicapped.”)

Why were Gupton and other low-aptitude men inducted? In 1966, the war in Vietnam began to heat up, and McNamara and President Lyndon Johnson found themselves short of men to fill the ranks. Johnson and McNamara could have drafted college students, but they didn’t want to anger middle-class voters. They could have sent men from the National Guard and Reserves, but that, too, would have been politically unpopular.

There was one group of men who had been beyond the reach of the draft – those who had been disqualified because they failed the military’s mental test. Desperate for warm bodies, Johnson and McNamara decided to induct the low-scoring men, whom Johnson referred to (in a secret White House tape) as “second-class fellows.”

On Oct. 1, 1966, McNamara started a program called Project 100,000, which lowered mental standards for 100,000 men each year. By the end of the war, McNamara’s program had sent 354,000 “substandard” men to all branches of the armed forces. The Army got 71 percent, the Marine Corps 10 percent, the Navy 10 percent, and the Air Force 9 percent. Among the troops, these men were often known as McNamara’s Morons, the Moron Corps or McNamara’s Boys.

Military leaders – from William Westmoreland, the commanding general in Vietnam, to lieutenants and sergeants at the platoon level – viewed McNamara’s program as a disaster. Because many of the Project 100,000 men were slow learners, they had difficulty absorbing necessary training. Because many of them were incompetent in combat, they endangered not only themselves but their comrades as well.

Barry Romo and his nephew Robert served in Vietnam at the same time. “I loved Robert like a brother,” Barry Romo said. “We grew up together. He was only one month younger.”

Barry was an infantry platoon leader in Vietnam in 1967-68, and he saw a lot of combat, winning a Bronze Star. During his tour, he learned that Robert had been drafted and was being trained at Fort Lewis, Wash., to be an infantryman, destined for Vietnam. Barry was alarmed because Robert was “very slow” and had failed the Army’s mental test. But then came Project 100,000, lowering standards and making him subject to the draft. A host of people – his relatives, his comrades at Fort Lewis, his sergeants, his officers – wrote to the commanding general at Fort Lewis, asking that Robert not be sent into combat because, as one relative put it, “he would die.”

But the general turned down the request and Robert was sent to an infantry unit near the border of North Vietnam, one of the most dangerous combat areas. During a patrol, he was shot in the neck while trying to help a wounded friend. He did not die instantly, but heavy gunfire kept a medic from reaching him. “He drowned in his own blood,” Barry said.

At the request of the family, Barry was given permission to leave Vietnam and accompany Robert’s body home to Rialto, Calif. The aluminum coffin was sealed and draped with a flag, and the family was not allowed to view the remains. (It was Army policy to discourage or forbid viewing when a body was badly mutilated.) In a speech 42 years later, Barry Romo said that the family had never recovered from losing Robert: “His death almost destroyed us with anger and sorrow.”

A total of 5,478 low-I.Q. men died in the service, most of them in combat. Their fatality rate was three times as high as that of other G.I.s. I knew some of these men at Fort Benning, and I was sickened and furious when I discovered their fate because they never should have been inducted, and they never should have been sent into combat.

As the war correspondent Joseph Galloway wrote, “The Good Book says we must forgive those who trespass against us – but what about those who trespass against the most helpless among us: those willing to conscript the mentally handicapped, the most innocent, and turn them into cannon fodder?”​

IMG_0612.JPG
Robert McNamara, right, speaking to soldiers during a visit to South Vietnam in 1965.

***

I had never heard of this program before and it's not one of our finer moments.
 
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The Grunt Padre

On the morning of Sept. 4, 1967, North Vietnamese soldiers ambushed two companies of the Fifth Marine Regiment in the Que Son Valley, a lush region in the northern part of South Vietnam. Within a few hours the Marines were pouring in men, artillery and aircraft fire, but the North Vietnamese refused to fall back. The fighting, which came to be known as Operation Swift, lasted 11 days and resulted in the death of 600 North Vietnamese soldiers and 127 Marines. Among the latter was Vincent Capodanno, one of 16 military chaplains killed during the war.

Capodanno was born and raised on Staten Island, one of 10 children. He attended Fordham University for a year, but left to attend Maryknoll Missionary Seminary in Ossining, N.Y. Maryknoll trains priests to serve in developing countries, and encourages them to live among the people they are serving; they are often called the Marines of the Catholic Church.

Ordained in 1958, Capodanno spent seven years in rural Taiwan and Hong Kong. He returned to the United States to enlist in the Navy as a chaplain, and was assigned, at his request, to the Marines. In June 1967 he joined the Fifth Marine Regiment, which was posted to a region just south of the DMZ. He quickly developed a reputation for living among the men, as much a fellow Marine – albeit unarmed – as a man of God. They called him the “Grunt Padre.”

Capodanno was among the first of the reinforcements to arrive in the Que Son Valley on Sept. 4. By then, 26 Marines had been killed, and dozens more wounded. Almost immediately, Capodanno was hit in the arms and legs. Still he rushed forward, pulling men to safety or, in too many cases, administering last rites. At one point he saw a wounded Navy corpsman pinned down by enemy fire; he ran over to help him and was shot, at nearly point-blank range, 27 times.

A year later Capodanno received the Medal of Honor, one of three Vietnam chaplains given the military’s highest award. In 2002 the Catholic Church opened a cause for canonization, which is now under consideration by the Congregation for the Causes of Saints in Rome.

Capodanno is buried in St. Peter’s Cemetery on Staten Island.

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Father Capodanno leading soldiers in prayer in Vietnam.
 
Thanks. Had you heard of that McNamara program. I was shocked but I suppose I shouldn't have been.
 
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