We’re Heading to Vietnam
Question: How did you feel the mood was of service members, those that you served with, in the early stages of the war?
So I was, like I said, commissioned in 1962. I served on a carrier. It was a helicopter carrier—a WWII era Essex Class carrier that was converted to carry Marines—Marine ground troops and Marine helicopter squadrons. And so this was a whole new concept, this idea of being able to land—take Marines, and insert them into a battle area, basically behind enemy lines or wherever—very quick reaction kind of thing. This was a very new concept at that time. Before that, basically Marines loaded onto boats and they landed them on a beach somewhere. That was the preferred insertion for amphibious forces. So now we had this new element called vertical envelopment where the helicopters would take people in. So, I was on this ship, we had deployed to the Western Pacific in early 1964 and our home base was Subic Bay in the Philippines and that was our base of operations. We then operated all around the Western Pacific up to Taiwan, Okinawa, went to Hong Kong, to Singapore, all over.
In August of 64, was when the Gulf of Tonkin incident occurred. We were all in Subic Bay in the Philippines. After that attack by the North Vietnamese PT boats on our US navy destroyers, things started escalating from there. Basically, we got the word, we’re getting underway, we’re heading to Vietnam. We didn’t know much about that, and so it was all kind of new news for everybody concerned. In those days, there was not much communication available. We had no televisions on our ship, we had no newspapers on our ship, we had no internet, no computers, so when we sailed over the horizon, we were basically out of touch from what was going on. Except for Naval message traffic which would come over the radio route to the ship. But as far as the people, the crew on the ship, the officers, we really didn’t get much of a sense of what was going on in the early time.
So, after that, as in late August when we were stationed off the coast of South Vietnam, we were the flagship of an amphibious ready group. So, we had a bunch of other ships with us and we were the flagship that had the CO or the captain of that amphibious ready group. And, so we were basically doing circles in the ocean off the coast of South Vietnam, waiting to land Marines. And, I guess I was fortunate in one respect that I was a Supply Corps Officer in the Navy, and so I was responsible for a lot of things to keep the ship going: parts and food and [logistics] —logistics, right. That wasn’t a word then, logistics was hardly a word then. Anyway, so I had the opportunity and the duty to fly into Saigon quite often on one of the helicopters, the ship’s helicopters, to pick up mail, pick up parts and go in there. So, I got to fly over the Mekong delta, where there was a lot of Viet Cong activity going on. Always was wondering, sitting in the passenger area of the Marine helicopters. You know, the only thing between me and the Viet Cong was a thin piece of aluminum. And I was hoping that they didn’t have any ground fire that was gonna reach up that high and come roaring up through the bottom of the helicopter.
So I think, back to the original question: what was the mood/ what did people think. If I recall discussions we had in the officers wardroom about this whole activity, I think it was sort of the feeling that ok, you really pissed us off, you have awakened the sleeping giant, we are going to mass our Navy forces. We were in the South with our amphibious ready group. Up in the North, in an area called Yankee Station, off the coast of North Vietnam, we had all our carrier assets—aircraft carrier assets, and we were ready to start dumping some major hurt on the Viet Cong and so, I think the general feeling was, probably six to nine months, we were going to get in there, pound the crap out of them and it would be over. And you can see, history shows how wrong we were.