Published: September 19, 2009 10:15 pm      

My secret war in Viet Nam

By John Hawkins Napier III

PICAYUNE — Forty-five years ago, Aug. 4, 1964, I brought my fiancee Cameron Freeman from Montgomery to Picayune for her first her first visit there with my mother.

The next evening national television news announced that North Vietnamese patrol craft had attack two U.S. Navy destroyers in the South China Sea in what would become known as the Tonkin Gulf Incident. Both my ladies looked worriedly at me, but I assured them that it had nothing to do with me since I was in the midst of a three-year “stabilized tour” at Air University, Maxwell Air Force Base, Alabama.

When Cameron and I returned to Montgomery three days later, I learned there was an urgent order reassigning me to Headquarters, U.S. Military Assistance Command Viet Nam (HQ USMACV) in Saigon. The requirement was for an USAF major who was a command and staff college graduate with a special operations specialty code, airborne qualified, speaking French and who held a Top Secret Special Intelligence security clearance.

From 1951 to 1953 during the Korean War, I had served in intelligence and psychological warfare in the USAF’s first Unconventional Warfare organization, the Air Resupply and Communications Service.

In January 1963 I was one of five founders of the USAF Counterinsurgency Course at Maxwell. As host officer I had learned much from distinguished guest lecturers such as Dr. Bernard Fall, author of “Street Without Joy” that chronicled the French Indochina War; and the legendary Maj. Gen. Edward G. Lansdale, a hero of Lederer and Burdick’s “The Ugly American.” Now my chickens had come to roost.

After Cameron’s and my wedding at St. John’s Episcopal Church in Montgomery and our honeymoon in San Juan and the Virgin Islands, I left from California on October 27. After a brief layover in the Philippines, I arrived at Saigon’s Tan Son Nhut Airport on the 31st. My assignment was to the hush hush Studies and Observations Group, a thinly disguised euphemism for Special Operations Group whose chief was a grizzled veteran of World War II airborne operations in the Philippines, Col. Clyde Russell.

In 1961, President John F. Kennedy had pressed the doctrine of counter-surgency upon the Department of Defense to bypass the nuclear stalemate of the Eisenhower years just as Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev was doing with his espousal of “wars of national liberation.”

The conventionally-minded U.S. armed forces dragged their heels, wanting to prepare for wars that they knew — tank battles on the European plain, reducing the U.S.S.R. to nuclear rubble, destroying non-existent enemy fleets in the Pacific, or launching now-infeasible amphibious landings. Grudgingly, the Army increased its Special Forces, the Green Berets, the Navy increased their SEAL (Sea-Air_land) teams, and the Air Force organized the Air Commandos, successors to the disbanded ARCS.

The government of South Viet Nam faced collapse after the assassination of its president, Ngo Dinh Diem on November 2, 1963, three weeks before Kennedy’s assassination, and Viet Cong insurgency that threatened to destroy its armed forces. The U.S. tried to stem the tide by increasing its advisors from 12,000 in January 1964 to 23,000 10 months later when I arrived.

Another fateful response of the U.S. Government in January was the decision to mount a campaign of clandestine operations against North Viet Nam to discourage its support for the VC in the South.

Under a top secret operation plan, 34A/Tiger, the Department of Defense and CIA began a pinprick offensive. There were Marine operations, Marops, out of Da Nang using fast Norwegian patrol boats, nicknamed Swifts and Fasties, and skippered by Norse captains, to raid North Viet Nam ports and fishermen.

Airborne operations, Airops, used Chinese Nationalist aircrews flying unmarked C-47s and C-123s to train the Vietnamese Air Force airmen and lead in dropping South Vietnamese agents inside of North Viet Nam. Agent training was at Loc Thang, east of Saigon.

A black propaganda radio station pretended to be a dissident run by North Vietnamese officers inside the North — the National Sacred Sword Patriot’s League (SSPL) to sow confusion and suspicion.

Another effort was clandestine cross-border raids into neutral Laos, Operation Shining Brass, where the Studies and Observation Group (SOG) special forces would lead teams of tough ethnic Chinese mercenaries, Nungs called Mike Forces, to disrupt north Vietnamese supplies headed south down the Ho Chi Minh Trail. I was suppose to join SOG as it took over from the CIA in a place called Switchback.

Alas, while I was en route, my billet was switched to that for an Army major and I learned that I had no job. Talk about an unhappy camper. As my War of 1812 ancestor John S. Napier put it earlier “... torn from the arms of a young and beautiful wife,” who was 8000 miles away, I generously offered to return to my previous assignment, but that would have exposed Personnel’s snafu.

This was on a Saturday afternoon and as nothing could be done over the weekend, I checked into the requisitioned Majestic Hotel at the riverfront.

What a weekend!

Sunday morning I headed down the old metal cage elevator only to see an Air Force medic in a blood-stained white hospital uniform rushing up to find his doctor.

That night the Viet Cong had mortared the Bien Hoa airbase, 12 miles north of Saigon, destroying six B-57s just flown over from Clark Air Force Base in the Philippines. They also damaged 20 others, killed five Americans and wounded 100 others.

Then as I stepped out onto the main drag, Tu Do, which is still called Rue Catinat, a mob of demonstrators approached, shouting and waving banners. Prudently I retreated to the Majestic’s rooftop restaurant for post-breakfast coffee and to mull the series of events all over.

As a student of COIN, I had learned that where there was neither physical — military — security or political stability, a society could not stand. On my first day in a country I decided that South Viet Nam was a lost cause, but unfortunately, I had 364 days to go.



Look for Part II of Napier’s story on Sunday, October 4.