♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ Mike Rowe: 1967 in the heart of Vietnam's Mekong Delta, a tangled maze of waterways and jungle, the US needed a new kind of warrior, one who could fight in two worlds, land and water, a war fought in the shadows where the rivers ran dark and the enemy moved unseen.

They called them the Mobile Riverine Force.

The US Navy River Rats delivered them to battle.

The US Army Old Reliables took the fight ashore, a seamless partnership, a relentless assault.

Swift boats sealed off the coast and PBRs dominated the rivers.

Task Force 117, the Mobile Riverine Force, hunted the enemy where they lived.

They didn't just patrol, they pursued.

Five thousand soldiers and sailors pushed deep into the delta, a true search and destroy mission where survival meant victory.

They'd become the highest decorated joint unit of the Vietnam War, but almost no one knew they existed, and history has all but forgotten them.

Fifty years later, this is their story.

Gerald Burleigh: Mobile Riverine Force was one of the most highly decorated outfits over there, and nobody knew about us.

Dale Jones: There's no way you could tell anybody what you've been through that would understand that.

Michael Bowling: Friends would ask me or people that didn't know me, asked me, and I said, "I just got back from Vietnam," and they say, "What branch were you in?"

You said you were in the Navy, and they'd go, "Well, you didn't do anything."

Ralph Christopher: The 9th infantry.

These guys are warriors, you know.

Why haven't I heard anything?

Dan Arden: Everybody thinks you say, oh, that you're in the Brown-water Navy.

They think of the PBRs, which you've seen in the movie like "Apocalypse Now."

Our stuff wasn't.

They're the slow moving heavies.

Terry DeGelder: The soldiers over there, they were just remarkably good guys.

They were fighting for their country and were willing to die for it.

Dennis Polisano: We were drafted in '66 as a cohesive unit where we stayed together and fought together and went overseas together as a division.

Peter Bernier: I've talked to Army generals who--about the Mobile Riverine Force.

They did not know about the Mobile Riverine Force.

I talked to three Navy vice admirals.

These were active duty Navy people.

They never heard of it.

Now, this was--as far as we were concerned, this was a big thing because that was our life.

Mike: We often think of soldiers and sailors as men hardened by experience and duty.

But when we look closer, we realize the truth, many were just boys when they volunteered to serve or were drafted and sent to war.

You faces filled with hope and fear thrust into the unimaginable.

Their innocence lost in the chaos of battle.

It was their youth forever shaped by the experience of war.

Ralph Boblitt: I was 19.

Dennis Matheson: I was 19.

Paul Eramus: I was 18.

James Keller: I was 18.

Ron Wallace: Yeah, I was 21.

James Delletro: I was 20 years old.

Steven Hopper: I was all of 19 years old.

♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ Mike: During the Civil War, the Army and Navy forged an unbreakable alliance, turning rivers into battlegrounds.

Ironclads and infantry crushed the enemy, controlling the mighty Mississippi.

But after the Civil War, the Mobile Riverine Force would disappear, its legacy dormant until the lessons of the past were resurrected decades later, and they would join forces once again in the Mekong Delta.

Ralph: During the American Civil War, the Union especially fought on the Cumberland and Mississippi River.

And they landed soldiers from boats.

Phil Garn: The Mississippi River was the main artery for the South.

Soon they were building very specialized monitors that were able to support operations as the Union proceeded up the river.

The big Gibraltar of the Mississippi was Vicksburg and that divided the Confederacy into two and greatly weakened it.

So, that's where our experience with a lot of riverine operations started.

Harry Hahn: There was a task force that was initiated by the then Department of Defense.

They needed Army to fight inland and they need the Navy to transport the Army guys.

So, that was the--really the first Mobile Riverine if you want to call it that.

Phil: In 1963, Admiral Felt, who was a Chief of the 7th Fleet and Vietnam was part of his territory, was getting conflicting reports.

Military Assistance Command was telling him everything was great and they were still asking for more people and for more equipment.

So, he set up a group which was originally headed by Admiral Savage and then later Captain Phil Bucklew took over to investigate what was really happening in Vietnam.

Mike: February 1965, US forces uncover a North Vietnamese trawler smuggling weapons into Vung Ro Bay.

Intelligence leads to a breakthrough.

Enemy supply routes through the Cambodian border.

Dutch Kramer of SACO alongside Phil Bucklew proposes a bold plan.

Specialized border patrol units and a US Navy blockade using the 7th Fleet.

His strategy, the Bucklew Report, gains momentum just as the Tonkin Gulf incident ignites US escalation in Vietnam.

As America ramps up, so do China and Russia, fueling the enemy's war machine.

Phil: North Vietnamese are using modified trawlers to slip into South Vietnam with equipment.

That's when Task Force 115, or Market Time is established.

Ralph: The force was divided up in three groups: Task Force 115, 116, and 117.

You know, there was about a thousand boats in the water over there.

Mike: December 8, 1965, the US Navy forms Task Force 116 to patrol the Mekong Delta and cut enemy supply lines.

PBRs, later made famous by the movie, "Apocalypse Now," joined Navy SEALs and the HA(L)-3 Seawolves.

The Seawolves would provide close air support for the boats and take out the enemy with heavy firepower from above.

Phil: But the big artery is really the Ho Chi Minh Trail.

Edward Castellano: There were atrocities going on and they had the Ho Chi Minh Trail bringing down all the ammunition and everything from the north.

Mike: To stop the flow of weapons coming in through the Ho Chi Minh Trail, the Brown-water Navy needed support.

There was a need for boots on the ground.

That's when Task Force 117 was born.

Phil: The next element is Task Force 117, which really should have been the first element, and that is the Mobile River Reinforce, and it's also got the helicopter element.

Ralph: They were making landings very much like you would have seen in World War II like Iwo Jima or Tarawa, even Normandy.

They came in with 25 boats, and each boat carried 40 guys, and they ran up to the jungle.

And they were being used for Viet Cong battalion strength.

Intel was saying, "Okay, there's over 20 battalions in the Mekong Delta alone of hardcore Viet Cong mainline people."

So, the 9th was--and the Mobile Riverine was designed to go in and take on these battalions.

And slowly through the years they cut them to pieces, but they did lose 2,500 men doing it.

Ten thousand guys were put in the 9th Infantry and sent to the Megan Delta.

And they were scattered all over at little bases and all, but only a couple thousand were assigned to work as the Riverine Force and what they called the Second Brigade.

And these guys were trained to attack from the water on boats and come in and make landings.

You can drop all the bombs you want, but these guys hid in holes and would come back out later.

Mike: General Westmoreland, a tactician and visionary, called on the Army and Navy to collaborate once again.

On September 1, 1966, the first administrative unit would be established in Coronado, California, initially named the Mekong Delta Mobile Afloat Force, then Riverines.

This new Army-Navy unit would be officially designated Task Force 117, code name, the Mobile Riverine Force.

Terry Sater: First time since the Civil War that the Navy fought on rivers.

Bob Pries: There hadn't been since the Civil War and that small little unit they had.

A joint unit of Navy and Army working together on a common mission, common goals.

That's pretty unique in our history.

Phil: And I think you have to add river warfare.

In World War II, we were using coastal and riverine operations on the Burmese coast with the OSS.

Jim Eubank, who developed most of San Marcos, was a maritime unit swimmer operative, what we would call a Navy SEAL, and he was on operations in these chongs along the Burmese coast.

But everything was top secret and it had all been forgotten about.

Harry: The next time that the Department of Defense put together such a task force was for Vietnam.

And the reason they put it together for Vietnam was that they found out that the Army could not get around the Mekong Delta.

The Army with their amphibious vehicles and their tanks could not move because any tracked vehicle would get mired down in the mud.

Ralph: I mean, we were all operating on what was called Operation Sealords, Southeast Asia Lake, Ocean, River, Delta Strategy.

Mike: Beginning in October of 1966, the sailors of River Assault Squadrons 9, 11, 13, and 15 trained in boat handling, gunnery, and survival at Coronado and Mare Island Shipyard.

In Fort Riley, Kansas, the soldiers of the 2nd Brigade trained for a war with no front lines, drilled in jungle warfare, infantry tactics, and artillery preparing for the fight ahead.

Two branches, two missions, but on the rivers of Vietnam they would stand together, reawakening a legacy forged a century before.

Ralph: One day the chief operating officer come up and patted me on the back and told me I got the best orders a sailor could ask for.

And he said, "You're going to the Brown-water Navy," and I said, "What's that, sir?"

He said, "You'll soon find out."

Christian Bachofer: We went to Vallejo, California, where they had a boat training session where we use the Suisun sloughs where we learned to practice how to use the boats.

We had a gunfire range practice.

Frank Jones: We were there 3 months in the like sloughs off of San Francisco Bay because the tide was similar to Vietnam.

Terry: It was very unique.

We went through training on how to survive on the seaside and how to find things to eat like crabs and things like that.

Chris Young: We went to weapons training in Camp Pendleton.

Thomas Breidel: I get orders to go to the school, boat school, ended up being SERE school in San Diego.

Terry: We were put into an area where they had small little boxes and then they would close the lid on top of us.

And they would leave us in that for a long time.

I heard one guy in one of the little boxes outside screaming to be let out.

Said he was getting cramps on his legs and you know, "Please let me out, please let me out.

I'm getting cramps.

Please let me out."

And they said, "Will you sign?"

And he said, "Yes, I'll sign.

I'll do anything, let me out."

So, I heard 'em open the box and he stood up and they said, "Now sign the paper."

And he told them something that indicated that he was not going to sign the paper.

And I heard him beating him up and shoving him back in the box.

Jaime Garcia: The training was very realistic, but it wasn't the same thing.

Combat, real combat is a little different.

Don Blankenship: Everybody who comes to Vietnam in the Navy goes through the Annapolis Hotel, which is in Saigon.

Ron: They reactivated the 9th Infantry Division in '66.

David Todd: One of the things that was really important about the way we went over is that we all trained as a unit.

We had 6 months plus to get to know each other.

Dale: From basic training in Fort Lewis, I went to medical training close to San Antonio.

George Fearnow: They took us to a train station in Richmond and we had to get on the train and go to Fort Benning, Georgia.

They take us to this room and they call it amnesty.

And he said anybody's got weapons to put them on the table.

I said, you know, "Nobody's going to have weapons."

And I couldn't believe all the weapons that came out on this table, you know.

Michael Tuttle: Went to Fort Bliss, Texas for a week, then went to Fort Riley.

Milford Traber: And then we came back to Fort Riley.

We boarded a plane and we were supposed to fly out to Suisun Bay, out to Oakland.

Ron: Roughly the 2nd of January we shipped to the West Coast, and put on a troop ship, and sent to Vietnam.

US General John Pope was the name of it.

Milford: And we did 18 days actually at sea.

Ron: And we arrived in Vung-Tau and went up the Bearcat, then down to the delta.

Mike: With the Marines, the natural infantry raider component for the Navy already committed to I Corps and II Corps, they selected the 2nd Brigade of the 9th Infantry Division and later elements of the 3rd Brigade.

This would be a joint Army-Navy operation.

The Navy would be in command when transporting the troops, and after they disembarked, the Army would then assume command.

On January 7, 1967, the first elements of the Mobile Riverine Force reached Vietnam on the USS Whitfield County in Vung-Tau.

From June of 1967 to July 1968, the Mobile Riverine Force would conduct a series of 11 operations called Operation Coronado.

They began with modified World War II landing craft, adding firepower, but the US enhanced the force with air support and more advanced, faster, and heavily armed boats.

Colonel William Fulton led the Army's 2nd Brigade, 9th Infantry Division, while Captain Wade C. Wells commanded River Assault Flotilla 1.

The Mobile Riverine Force fought from a fleet of heavily armed Brown-water Navy craft built for the shallow, unforgiving waters of the Mekong Delta.

With artillery, machine guns, and helicopters, they held the firepower advantage.

But the Viet Cong and NVA, masters of guerrilla warfare, struck from hidden river banks, vanishing into the jungle.

Every mission was a deadly game of survival where one wrong move could mean death.

Harry: You know, when the Navy was enlisted to provide the service, then what the Navy did was actually take what they called MIC-6 boats.

These boats were--they were all modifications of old landing craft, LCM6 landing craft, mechanized.

They would hit the beach and the ramp went down.

I could walk up a river alongside the boat faster than the boat could go if the current was coming down.

Tom Matyn: Heavy and slow.

Ask anyone, we're weren't getting anywhere fast.

Peter: When we got ambushed, we just shot back and we called in the artillery.

We had no mobility.

All we had was a lot of protection because they were also very heavily armored.

Johnny Ledbetter: We would load up 25 Army guys, 9th division.

We had like a pallet of sea rats and we had a pallet of ammunition.

And we'd leave at 2 or 3 o'clock in the morning, go surround some island, and let the Army off.

And they would go out and do a search and destroy mission.

William Halloran: Normal operation usually, we call them search and destroy missions.

We usually operated about three days or so.

They would take them up into the stream, provide fire support as they dropped them off.

Peter: When they got close to the beach, that ramp would go down, and then they would go off the boat to shore, and go do their mission.

William: They would stay there and maintain fire support or if it was not possible they'd come out and then they'd go back and pick them up.

Mike: On June 2, 1967, the Mobile Riverine Force comprising the 2nd Brigade, 9th Infantry Division, and the US Navy River Assault Squadrons 9 and 11 began using the base at Dong Tam established under the directive of General Westmoreland to assert control over the Upper Mekong Delta region.

Westmoreland personally oversaw the site's selection, choosing the name Dong Tam, which translates to united hearts and minds in Vietnamese.

The Army and Navy would dredge the river to create solid ground.

Dong Tam would become home for US military and allied forces.

speaker: And they came in a Bearcat and later they were at Kento, but Dong Tam was one of these very famous places.

Charlie Ardinger: We had Rivron 9, 11, 13, and 15.

Thomas G. Kelley: Because it was so narrow over there--the rivers and the canals, you had to go in a column.

You couldn't go side by side.

Steven Gustuson: Well, they'd all follow in line, one behind the other and given a little space.

Mike Harris: We had the assault support patrol boat which was the only boat that was built from scratch and not off the LCM(6) hull.

It was designed for mine sweeping.

Steven: But that's pretty much the formation.

Two alpha boats on the right and left because we had automatic sweep gear.

Mike: The ASPB, as it was called, or alpha boat, put out the sweep gear and you'd have two of them leading the column of boats down the river sweeping the river banks for man detonated mines.

The sweep gear was designed to rip the cable before the rest of the boats got there.

Then we had the monitor boat.

Dennis: Which was very similar to what they had in the Civil War.

Big howitzer in the front.

Mike: The originals had a 40 millimeter cannon on the bow, and they had 20 millimeter cannons as well.

And then the Program 5 monitors when they came in country, they changed the 40 millimeter mount out and they had 105 howitzer, which is a pretty good weapon to sit on the bow and shoot.

Robert Millican: Behind that would come the troop boats.

And the troop boats were an armored LCM medium sized landing craft from World War II.

Charlie Ardinger: Mine was 151 and then we had 152.

Each one had 13 tango boats of troop carriers.

Mike: The originals didn't have a miniature flight deck on it.

They just kind of had a ragtop, so we called them ragtops to keep the monsoon rains off.

Then the Program 5 tangos came in country, and they all--they had iron flight decks.

I was on a Program 5, we had 20 millimeters on the top two turrets, and then the very top turret had a Mark 19 grenade launcher that shot something like 200 rounds a minute.

In the well deck, we had 430 caliber machine guns and 250 caliber machine guns.

Ralph: And they welded rebar to intercept the rockets, the RPG rockets they were shooting at them.

And I mean they made a little tank--what I called a tank boat.

Michael: Then the command boat with all the communications and the officers in charge.

It was the only boat that had any air conditioning on it, and the Army officers, and the Navy officers would be inside of this commanding the operation.

You could tell it because it had all kinds of antennas.

Mike: William: Basic duty for an intel officer for the Navy section of Mobile Riverine Force was locate the enemy, what were his strengths and weaknesses, what kind of weapons did they have?

And then they have certain kind of modus operanda.

James: Then there was another monitor that was the zippo which had napalm on board.

And then Romeo boat, which is a refueler.

We made napalm and then we would refuel the zippos.

David Jones: Now, once the troops disembark, you know, we'll stick around and support in case they get hit right away.

Then we can help them within a hundred yards, 200 yards or get them back out of there.

We'll come back in a couple of days later and pick them back up again.

Chris: They finally got a water cannon called Irma La Douce.

And it had a V12 diesel engine pumping water and it would wash them mud deals down.

And it was it--it'd take a tree down.

They shot so hard, they had a big old metal hose.

Mike: River support squadron 7 would include four self-propelled barracks ships.

With USS Benawah as the flagship, two tugboats, six landing craft, repair ships, and 38 landing ship tanks.

Tom: He called my name after a week or so and said, "You're going to the Sphinx," which is a repair ship.

Flew into Tan Son Nhut, and went to Annapolis hotel, and then they took me out on a riverboat ride out to the ship.

Basically we're a floating factory for the river boats.

Frank Springer: The repair ship of Askari was the main repair ship that we were referred to in our group.

And they were the--they were one of the best.

Anything I needed done, they took care of right away.

Dennis Dyer: My unit was a special unit, Army unit with LCM-8s, which were 76 foot landing crafts.

And our job primarily was to move artillery barges that belonged to the third and 34th artillery battalion, but we were attached to the ninth Infantry division, but we were not actually part of the 9th Infantry division per se.

Mike: Mobile Riverine Base Alpha stationed near Dong Tam supported the 9th Infantry and River Assault Squadrons 9 and 11.

MRB Bravo supported River Assault Squadron 13 and 15, which operated out of Combat Base 480 in the Ca Mau Peninsula.

They operated with Vietnamese Marines, Vietnamese Army, and regional popular forces.

The structure of the Army can be a bit confusing to the average person.

General George Crocker breaks it down for us.

George Crocker: The squad is about ten men.

Fire team leader A and B was a sergeant E5, and the squad leaders is an E6.

And there are three squads.

And a weapons squad and a rifle platoon.

I was a rifle platoon leader and you have a platoon sergeant, who's an E7.

And then the senior NCO, who's the weapons squad leader.

And that's it, that's the fighting people who'd pull the trigger and throw the hand grenades and shoot the enemy.

Gerald Hahn: The Army and Navy worked together a lot better than anybody in the upper echelons ever thought they could.

We moved around pretty well for a bun--just a bunch of guys that never met each other before, never had any specific training along in life.

Dave Hanna: Us Army guys really appreciated coming back from being out in the mud.

Coming back and getting hosed down, you know, before we could get in the ship.

Dennis: They wouldn't let us get back on the ship until they hosed us off.

So, they had these like these great big like fire hoses and they would just hose you off from stem to stern.

Dave: Because the Navy wouldn't allow us on the ship all muddy, right?

So, we had to take all our gear off, and our clothes, and throw them in a dirty pile, and then get hosed down with a fire hose before you were allowed to go up into the ship.

And then--but then you get a hot shower and we get steak and potatoes, and you know--I mean, they--you know, they took care of us real good.

Mike: November 1, 1968, the Westchester County is about to get hit with a surprise attack in what would become a significant loss in the Vietnam War.

Patrick Haggerty: I had been on the USS Westchester County for a year and a half beginning December '66 until June of '68.

The Westchester County was to resupply LST, but we had plenty of room for Army in the below decks.

We had a large troop compartment area.

So, we were kind of like the spare storage area for both personnel and supplies.

Robert Coombs: We received a radio message that our sister ship, Westchester had been mined 1167.

We were 1166 on Washington while attached to the Riverine Forest near Dong Tam.

The first day of November '68, the first night.

And there was a great loss of life and that happened right around My Tho.

So, it didn't matter where you were, you weren't safe.

Ralph: It's hard to explain it to people, the size of that hole.

It was quite large.

Patrick: It was about 3:15 a.m. November 1, the night of Johnson's bombing halt, I remember that was the the news of the day.

And I was on the 03 level, so I just knocked out of my rack.

Mike: Two mines go off, hitting the Westchester County on the side.

Now everyone is scrambling to their positions.

Patrick: There were two 20 by 20 holes, and how they kept the ship afloat was unbelievable.

Ralph: To see that one go off and the damage it did, was just amazing.

I mean, I never thought I'd see anything like that in my life.

Patrick: And LST is a series of voids underneath.

And between the captain and one of the fellows in the back part of--I think it was called aft carry or something, they kept the ship from actually capsizing, which was incredible.

Paul: Without the repair ships, the ARLs there, they did the main thing of repairing that ship right away.

Because the Westchester County had to get on its way right away and beach itself against the shore because if not, it would have sank into the rivers.

Mike: No one knows exactly how the mines were placed on the side of the Westchester County.

One theory suggests that enemy sappers swam down to attach them, a nearly impossible task with the crew relentlessly dropping concussion grenades to deter any underwater attack.

Patrick: The river, as I mentioned, had incredible current because it's going up and down 12 feet twice a day.

We had maybe five ships in this area plus the boats.

How they actually floated down without being seen--the river at that time was between one and two miles wide.

How they got underneath or in between the pontoons and the ship, these two bombs had to kind of go under and then up against--in between the pontoon and the ship.

We were in the process of turning our boats over to the Vietnamese.

And so, we would take a crewman and then maybe later on we take a second crewman.

If that could have been a VC trained in explosives, we had a lot of ammunition in the well deck of the LST.

In the sleeping quarters we have bunks, maybe three tier.

And that explosion crushed people as well as the metal.

A great group of guys and I knew 16 of them, I--that had been part of my ship's company when I left in June of '68.

David Jones: But there were a lot of people inside the barracks--got inside the ship where the water rushed in and that's where most the deaths come from.

Patrick: I was on the 03 level.

I was just knocked out of my rack, you know, around 3, and I knew obviously something happened.

And I went up on the bridge and Dave Fisher was there and there were two mines right at the waterline.

One was for the ops and the other was first class department.

So, these were the senior enlisted guys on the ship.

David came up from the ops area and he gets covered in diesel.

He said, "There's a helicopter in my compartment," because no one knew what happened.

David: I was sleeping when it hit.

I remember that part.

I just--I remember the boom and a bang.

Tom: The Westchester County, which was an LST, exploded, took out the-- sorry, took out 26 guys at one time.

Mike: Doc Sullivan, Navy corpsman, and others did their best to rescue the wounded men.

Bob Coombs of the Washtenaw County faced the toughest task, recovering the injured and removing the KIAs.

Robert: So, we had to go relieve her, we did, and that was pretty gruesome.

There were two mine holes, two huge holes you could drive a semi into it.

We pulled around the other side of the ship and offloaded all our ammo and everything onto our ship.

And they went back to Japan to--for repairs.

Patrick: It didn't really sink in until years later as you realize how their lives were cut short.

It was horrible.

Mike: Both the Army and the Navy suffered devastating losses.

Twenty-five total were killed, including eighteen sailors, five soldiers, and two South Vietnamese.

It would be the greatest loss of life in a single incident for the Navy during the entire Vietnam War.

Westchester County played a big part in the war and would be decommissioned on August 27, 1974.

For the Mobile Riverine Force, the enemy wasn't just the Viet Cong.

It was the Mekong Delta itself.

Scorching heat, monsoon rains, dense jungle, relentless disease all pushed them to their brink.

Malaria, dysentery, fungal infections, deadly insects, and venomous snakes were constant threats against an unforgiving land.

Bill Reynolds: To my knowledge, the 9th Infantry Division was primarily deactivated after World War II, and it's a a famous outfit.

So, we were pretty proud to be part of the 9th Infantry Division known as the Old Reliables, which when we realized we were the Old Reliables, we thought that was pretty cool.

They needed a unit in the Mekong Delta.

The Viet Cong were in charge of the Mekong Delta.

And they brutalized the people.

Stole from the population, took their young to be Viet Cong soldiers.

Steven: We wanted them to trust us, the locals to trust the Army guys when we were in their neighborhoods, you know, going through their villages, and spending time with their children.

And if the Viet Cong saw that, they pay dearly for it.

Bill: So, we trained specifically to be part of the troops to fight in the Mekong Delta.

Sometime in the spring of '67, we became part of the Mobile Riverine Force.

And so, we started living on barrack ships for a couple of months at a time.

And they'd take us out on these patrols with the landing craft.

And I always remember thinking, "It's really great living with the Navy, but boy they sure take us to some rotten places."

When we were patrolling around Camp Bearcat, it was relatively safe.

Steven: We kind of went out on small patrols.

We kind of got used to the terrain.

It was kinda a little bit of training.

Bill: But by the time we got down into the Mekong Delta, that's where the real deal was.

Bobby Good: The area we operated in had to be one of the most difficult areas--and I'm not taking away from anybody anywhere in terms of combat.

It was an area called the Rung Sat.

And the Rung Sat was in a mangrove area with a tide probably 4, 5, 6 feet.

Every day would come up and down.

And as a result of that, the trees, the mangroves would grow their roots about, you know, 3 or 4 feet up the tree before they came out.

And we operated this area because this was a huge area for the Viet Cong to bring supplies in.

James: Mud was anywhere from ankle deep to chest deep.

David Todd: The first time that we dropped the ramp and tried to go to shore, it took us an hour to cover about 60 feet.

Dave Rodarte: I mean, if you jumped, you don't know how far you were gonna go down.

And once you got stuck, if you didn't have your buddies there to help you get out, you'd stay there.

At night, of course, you couldn't see very much.

You couldn't see your hand in front of your face.

James: Lots of leeches.

Terry: The leeches that have lunch on you.

James: Other kind of creepy crawlies.

Dennis: If the enemy was trying to kill you, everything else was trying to kill you too.

Jaime: Viet Cong, they could get in there and their feet be all wet, maybe a week, 2 weeks, and they don't get hurt, but our soldiers when going there, the more they last in there was about 3 days.

Before the skin started falling off the bottom of the feet.

Randy Peat: Well, that's all these people have ever done.

Yeah, they know every blade of grass, and every hole, and pothole, and they just, you know, they grew up there, really wide feet, you know, from all that mud.

They understood their terrain very well.

Lloyd Anderson: If you had a chance, you got rid of your boots.

And that was one of the first things you did, anytime you come back, or anytime you got a chance because your feet were just rotten.

Bobby: And I can just describe to you--I mean, I can feel it in my bones talking to you right now how miserable it was.

Randolf Torres: You couldn't stand if you stood, you just sink sink right down.

Bobby: We had so much trouble moving--making any distance in a day because you had to chop these mangrove roots out of your way.

You'd be hacking your way through then all of a sudden one of these red ant little pods would come down and these red ants would take a grown man.

I don't care if you were in a firefight with the Viet Cong or not, you'd be stripping your clothes off.

Clifford Roberts: And some of the canals we went down were very, very narrow in the big canal where the ships were.

And we told him not to go there because the sandbar's there.

Well, he went there anyhow and we ran ground.

And we had to sit there all night.

And we were a sitting duck.

Patrick: And I think a number of these guys drowned.

Milford: You can't see them 'cause they're in the ground.

And you're standing knee deep in mud, sometimes in water halfway up your legs, you know, doing... through this hot sun and stuff.

Terry: You never get a chance to dry out, even in a dry season.

Mike: Bob: There's canals, there's rivers, there's streams that are all impacted by the tides.

And it's so blooming hot you're soaking wet with perspiration.

Milford: No place to hide.

There's really no cover.

Bob: There were no high ground, low ground.

It was just plain flat.

You're a wide open target.

speaker: Part everybody worried about were the sea snakes.

I mean, you're worried about getting shot when you're in the river, worry about the sea snakes when you have to get in the water.

Gerald: You never had a safe place over there.

Anywhere, anytime you could have been hit.

On the main rivers, you had a little better chance, but we operated mainly 90 foot canals and stuff.

Bobby: Let's be honest, they're a great big monster, slow moving boats up and down the Mekong River, and they could be sniped at or rocketed, and a lot of them were.

Mike: In one month alone, River Assault Squadron 9 would receive 97 Purple Hearts.

Christian: The French built these canals.

And they are long, and narrow, and straight.

Gerald: And you were up close and personal with the river banks or canal banks if you got in a firefight.

Bobby: And they had these little snakes and they were about--oh, maybe like a good size nightcrawler that you fish with.

And these little little guys were called two-step snakes and why they were called two steps is basically because they could only bite you in like soft, fleshy areas of your body, but if they did get you, you were--you got two steps and you're done.

Bob: Learning how to make yourself as comfortable as possible and try to get some sleep required a degree of innovative engineering every day.

Richard Jenkins: Trying to sleep on a narrow dyke during the night, every so often you hear a splash and somebody then starts cursing, you know, quietly cursing, but-- Somehow get some sleep.

Raymond Bohn: When I got there in May of 1969, I was the FNK on the boat.

And it was hot.

A hundred and twenty degrees is a hundred and twenty degrees.

And I see these guys and they're guys from North Carolina, Alabama.

And they all got tans and they're running around in flip flops.

I said, "Well, I can do what they do."

But in a day, my feet looked like lobsters.

So, the boat captain, Tommy Redden, he said, "Don't go aboard ship because that's a court martial offense, a sunburn."

And it is because you can't do your job if you're sunburned.

Terry: In 1952, the French--when the French were fighting, they dropped 500 paratroopers into the Yen Forest and they never saw one of them again.

That's where VC went for their R&R.

That's--that was a stronghold for them but we fought there.

Christian: One of the interesting things we did since we were going out at night.

We developed light signals so you can make 18 hour, 19 hour transit and just by blinking lights letting the boats know how fast they should be going.

Steven: All the boats when they went down the river at night had their own colors.

There was a post right off--top of our boat, and they have amber, blue, and red.

And what they do is you put them in a certain order so if you looked at a boat at night, you knew exactly which boat it was.

Harry: In Operation BARRIER REEF, there were two rivers that went up north.

They were the Vam Co Tay and the Vam Co Dong rivers.

Don Blankenship: The Vam Co River was the bottom of an operation called Giant Slingshot.

Giant Slingshot was the Vam Co Dong River to the right and the Vam Co Tay River to the left.

And that formed a slingshot around what's a piece of land called a parrot's beak, which is Cambodia basically.

Harry: And this was primarily a PBR Task Force 116 operation.

But in BARRIER REEF it was joined with the heavies, the Task Force 117 boats because the operations that we ran was that the PBRs would go into ambush on the river banks and we would patrol behind them so that we could give them supporting fire at night.

Everything happened at nighttime, very few crossings, you know, took place on that river during the daytime.

Everything at nighttime was fair game.

Mike: While the Mobile Riverine Forest was battling some tough situations, they did manage to have some fun times as well.

James: We were always joking around just--it helps relieve the tension.

Mike: Mike: A buddy in another tango boat, he was--there was a little exchange there where you bought incidentals and things like that.

He was going in and there was a cardboard foldout thing of a lady in a bathing suit and she was selling a camera, I think it was Kodak camera.

So, he went in, he come back out, he looked around, he folded up the lady and took her over to the 9th Infantry club, the bar, and set her up at a table and guys started buying her drinks.

And when he first told me this story, I'm thinking, "Larry, this is not--this has never happened."

And he sent me a picture of the cardboard lady.

He and the cardboard lady, had his arm around her.

And you know she got a lot of drinks and I must admit some guys feelled her up a little bit too.

Frank: We did kill a water buffalo and that was a big no no because that was those people's money.

And so, I forgot how much the US government had to pay the family for us killing their water buffalo.

And I felt bad about it but the steaks weren't bad.

We got--I'm sorry, we got them to butcher it and we got steaks.

Terry: And we'd go into a little dirt floor bar there and go in and drink beer.

One time we went in and they had sweet and sour shrimp cocktail.

It was really good but afterwards all of us became deathly ill.

The whole crew, we had ringworm lice and dysentery.

So, on the way back we were pulling up near Ho Chi Inn, and we looked out and there was a little pier coming out that had little shacks on it that was latrines.

And we passed that and then downstream from that we saw women on the riverbank cleaning the fish and everything.

We never ate the shrimp again.

Paul: On the barges we would have a beer party.

We would have steaks and we would have the old 55 barrels cut in half.

Well, one time I had a mission to go ashore to get 350 cases of Falstaff.

And one of my buddies said, "We should save some of this beer for us."

So, I broke about a case inside the bilges.

I said, "Ah."

I said, "We got a good idea."

Our machine room always restoring our CO2 fire extinguishers, we can freeze these things and have beer.

And they would always ask me, "What Jesus--you're going through a lot of fire extinguish."

I said, "Well, we have a lot of rats in our bilges, our boats.

We have to freeze them, kill them to get out of it."

Terry: We're the firefighters, the guy gets up, GI gets up and he just runs right toward the enemy.

Blast a bunch of them and the fight's over and I go, "John, why did you do that?"

He goes, "I was running the wrong way."

Mike: June 15, 1969, Lieutenant Thomas G. Kelley, commanding officer of River Assault Division 152, responsible for a column of eight river assault craft, approached a dangerous enemy stronghold at the junction of Ong Muong Canal and Ben Tre River.

When the mission took a disastrous turn, Kelley, gravely wounded, refused to falter.

Pushing through severe head injuries, he remained in command and led his boats to safety.

Thomas: When I first went over there in August of 1968, I was assigned to river assault Squadron 9, I was the chief staff officer, and we had two divisions, 91 and 92, each of them commanded by a lieutenant 03.

And I was kind of stuck on the flagship and I didn't go on too many operations for the first several months I was over there.

My squadron, River Assault Squadron 9 that turned over to the Vietnamese Navy in--I think it was around April--March or April of 1969.

And we spent a lot of time getting the boats ready for turnover and training the Vietnamese Navy people who will be taking our place.

I got reassigned to River Assault Squadron 15.

And put in charge of River Assault Division 152.

And that's where I was when I finished my tour.

Mike: Tom Kelley and crew were soon called on a mission deep in enemy territory, a Viet Cong stronghold known as Rocket Alley.

What laid ahead would change Kelley's life forever.

Thomas: Soldiers got on board the boats.

We took off about 6 a.m. or so.

We went to about three or four different spots during the day, dropping the troops off, picking them up, taking them to a new location.

During the day, we had fire support Navy helicopters and we were in range of Army artillery too, so that was helpful if we needed that.

We went to pick up our last contingent of troops from a canal bank.

And one of the boats had a problem with its ramp.

It couldn't raise its ramp.

It had to be done manually, which is kind of laborious.

Mike: I was personally involved with Thomas G. Kelley, who earned the Medal of Honor.

We were on an operation on June 15, 1969 and Tom was our lieutenant commanding officer.

We were in an area that was known to be very bad.

We were gonna pick up some troops and my boat captain ordered the ramp down.

I was in the well deck by myself and I heard the ramp just kind of do a jerk and a thump.

It just fell onto the riverbank and I knew we were in trouble right there because the cable broke that raised the ramp up and down.

The enemy ambushed us at that same very time.

Mike: Kelley would have to react quickly as his fellow sailors came under fire.

Ralph: They hit it with several rockets and he took his boat out and intercepted it.

Mike: He brought his boat over and fired three 105 rounds in front of our boat to thwart the enemy from coming on the--you know, at us.

And then he moved across the river.

Thomas: And about that time the Viet Cong across the canal bank opened fire on us.

Since boat had the most armaments, we headed over to where the fire was coming from and tried to suppress it and had the other boats form a cordon around the crippled boat.

So, they were trying to raise the ramp and all of a sudden a rocket propelled grenade came in and hit my boat.

It detonated on a stanchion about 6 inches from my head.

And you know, sprayed shrapnel all over the place and knocked me down.

Mike: They took a recoilless rifle round which was shot from probably 400 yards or something and it hit right beside Tom and knocked him down into the bottom of the boat.

Ralph: And just messed him up.

But even after he got hit, he got up and got back on the phones and was directing fire.

Mike: And he had a fractured skull, his eye was blown out, and he was in terrible shape, but he kept--he was conscious the whole time, and he kept directing the--to get us out of that situation, and his other crewmen followed his orders, and we were able to get out.

I was able to mechanically bring up the ramp myself with a come along, which is just a ratchet thing.

And the enemy was was attacking.

Thomas: So, we kept on going, and Navy Corpsman came and saved my life, and we got the ramp fixed and got out of there.

Mike: Mike Harris would receive a Bronze Star for his actions.

Lieutenant Kelley would receive a Medal of Honor for his selfless devotion to duty and courage under fire.

For their extraordinary heroism and service beyond the call of duty, the 2nd Brigade of the 9th Infantry Division were awarded ten Medals of Honor, a testament to their unwavering courage in battle.

Mike: June 19, 1967, the MRF faced one of its toughest battles.

It would be known as Operation Concordia near Ap Bac.

Army and Navy forces were locked into a brutal fight.

The Navy had many men injured, but for the Army, it was sheer devastation.

Alpha Company marched into an ambush and was decimated and Charlie Company would suffer heavy losses as well.

Edward: June 19, 1967.

J.R. Johnson: June 19.

Dalton Tom: June the 19.

Jim Miller: June 19th.

Raymond Johnson: My longest day of my life.

Bobby: The most significant one was a battle that we had on on June 19, 1967 in the Ap Bac area in Vietnam.

We're down in the delta.

We got a lot of rivers around, a lot of rice paddies, a lot of villages.

And we're on a battalion size operation, which means all three of our companies, the A Company, B Company, and C Company were operating in that area and each company is supposed to have a couple of hundred guys, but, you know, we had been in Vietnam for a while, and we had a lot of injuries, a lot of people.

So, we were operating way below what we should have been in terms of people for a company.

Michael: Three days previous to that, we were out there looking for the fifth VC battalion trying to get a handle on where they were at because of the impending operation.

Ralph: All these places right around Saigon, the VC were just infested.

The middle of June, intel had said the fifth bay, they have a major base.

It's only 15 miles south of Saigon.

By this time, all the boats had showed up.

So, we had 50 boats, American boats.

In the early part we were using the Vietnamese boats which I call hog boats and were just awful.

When the American boats showed up with American sailors, they had staged this first battle.

And they were circling this area, sweeping in.

Charlie and Alpha the, 4th-- 447th walked right up on them within feet.

And then a thousand guys rose up with 200 bunkers and let loose.

Bobby: A company came over the radio screaming.

And you could hear the shots being fired.

Well, what had happened was A company had deployed off of a river boat, off one of the ATCs, onto the shore, and then spread out, worked into the rice paddy, and they got ambushed.

George: The company commander came on.

He said, "I don't know, we're all dying.

It's just," blah blah.

Colonel Guy I. Tutwiler was a battalion commander, and he said, "Whoa, whoa, who is this?

What are you talking about?"

He said, "This is A company," identified his call sign.

Said, "We're all hit and we're getting murdered here.

We dead, we need help, we need help, we're all shot down."

He said, "I could see everybody around me is dead or dying and there are about 12 people that are still alive."

He said, "What?

What?"

So, I switched off immediately to this platoon leader that was my classmate.

So, "What's going on, man?"

He said, "Oh God, we're all pinned down here."

He said, "We're a lot--most of us are hit really badly."

He said, "Me included, we gotta get help in here as soon as possible."

Bill: Our Charlie Company was caught out in the open.

We were able to get behind a berm next to this little canal and the enemy was in reinforced bunkers straight across the other side of this small narrow canal.

Jim: We were approaching from several hundred meters out.

We heard them on the air.

They were getting hit hard.

They were losing.

So, we started moving towards them to render assistance.

David Todd: We had just gotten off the boats off to the west maybe a mile and a half or 2 miles.

We started getting stray bullets coming over us that far away.

It wasn't very long, maybe 2-3 hours, we lost radio contact with Alpha Company, and it was more high tide when we were moving and we kept getting sniper fire.

So, they kept delaying us.

And we'd flank the snipers, get them to move back, and then we'd move forward again.

It must have taken us three or more hours to move in to where we were.

Edward: So, everybody was down on their stomachs.

And I'm looking around.

Zimmer was my squad leader.

He was behind me.

All a sudden, my radio started jerking, and I'm just like--just going like, "What is going on?

All hell broke loose.

Ritz Zimmer yelled, "Sonny," and I turned my head.

It's a 51 caliber went through my helmet, grooved me, and it went out the back of the helmet.

I was out like a light.

He said he saw the--my--the blood splatter, my helmet go flying.

So they thought I was dead.

Mike: Charlie Company is still pinned down and needing help.

Bill: They had us pinned down something fierce and there had to have been a sniper off to our rear who was picking off some of our guys.

Our platoon leader, RTO Bob French, got hit.

He's carrying a radio and the bullet hit him right under his back.

Never forget he let out a bloodcurdling scream when he got hit and we thought, "Oh my God, he's dead."

But he wasn't.

And our medic, Bill Geyer come rushing up and and bandaged him and then bam, our machine gunner, Ronnie Bryan got hit in the buttocks.

Ralph: Both companies were pinned immediately.

Alpha was cut down like weeds.

Milford: And I think in less than 30 seconds there were only eight of them that came out of there alive that I know of.

Bobby: The North Vietnamese allowed them to get pretty close to the bunkers before they opened up.

Ralph: They came down the river with about 25 tangos, all of them carrying 40 infantry soldiers.

They also had monitors, they had a refueler boat, they had a CCB command communication boat.

I mean, it was 30 or so boats.

After they dropped the troops off, then they backed up and set up what they call like firing positions so nobody would escape.

They were involved in the fight.

They were shooting at these guys too.

Bill: My platoon leader was yelling out to me to get some grenades out there.

I had an M79 grenade launcher that was attached to my M16.

We called it an over under.

That means I gotta figure out where the enemy is, I gotta lean up, and look over there, and above this berm, and I wasn't too excited about that because bullets are flying all over the place, but I did.

And I fired off several grenades.

And as I was reloading on my third or fourth round, a bullet blasted right through the grenade launcher's barrel right in front of my face and man, that shook me up.

Ralph: One of the bunkers was hurting Charlie Company real bad.

Commander Dusty Rhodes came up in his monitor, and one of the Army guys went out, and directed him, and said, "The bunker's right up here."

And he went up there.

And he was standing on the top of the boats with monoculars directing fire and they knocked out this bunker.

Mike: General George Crocker is still communicating with companies on the ground who are in critical need of help.

George: Thirty minutes later I called him back and he said, "Well, we haven't got any help in here.

We need it now because we're all bleeding out and me included."

The enemy was entrenched in a L-shape, 3000 meter open rice paddy.

And they were all in bunkers, but you couldn't see the bunkers, but they were in them.

So, the artillery didn't do anything to a big bunker 'cause it had double stacked trees on top of it, and just mud-mud-mud on top of it.

So, artillery didn't do anything to it.

Airstrike had to strike right on top of it to take it out.

Mike: Alpha and Charlie Companies are still pinned down and needing assistance.

Now Bravo Company is coming in to help.

Bobby: 'Cause we're, you know, several hundred meters away from them operating in a different area.

And as we're pulling up to the battle site, the Viet Cong have got 51 caliber machine guns, and they're dug in, these bunkers are incredible.

Ralph: Tutwiler, the commanding officer, was flying over in the helo overside just screaming, "Get to 'em, get to 'em, get to 'em."

And so, every company was pushing in trying to relieve the two that were pinned down.

David: I was traveling with the company commander.

I heard him take the order from battalion to line up the troops and prepare for an assault to the east.

When I heard the order, I looked out there and there was about 300 yards of rice paddies with no cover.

There was like a mud football field with mud up to boot tops.

We stepped out into the open and started moving forward.

In the first hundred yards, we didn't take much fire.

Then it started, you know, during the second hundred yards and the guys are responding in kind.

They're moving forward, and firing, and kept doing that until we got probably within 50 yards of their lines.

They opened up, just cut us to pieces.

Dalton: Just started firing.

We heard it and then all of a sudden, you know, our two leader or lieutenant, you know, he told us that we go ahead and helped them guys out, you know, help A company out.

Bobby: They got ambushed, we heard the screaming on the radios, we're pulling up, we're moving as fast as we can to get up to them, and they're just wiping everything around us out.

Dalton: We started walking down and all of a sudden, there was this--it's called a dragon.

It's a big airplane that's way up there, dragon, and it was shooting 50 rounds like that coming on down and it's almost like you can hear that thing when it hit the mud, bam, bam, bam!

You know, and then all of a sudden, "Man," I said, "I hope them guys up there know where the heck they're going to shoot at," but what they were trying to do is get that tree line up there.

We was crawling up and while A Company was getting, you know, mutilated and we went into one of the ravines up there.

Bobby: And of course we're scared to death, we're moving up.

And so, we get relatively close and there is machine gun rounds going everywhere at us.

Dalton: They were still firing at the ATCs.

They were firing too also and you had the gunships coming in and throwing a lot of gunfire right there on the tree lines.

I think we stayed there all afternoon because they were still active in firing.

Bobby: One of the American's artillery rounds are short.

And it landed right in the middle of one of our squads and I was in an area where I could get at them.

I took a couple of volunteers, we ran across the rice paddy.

Two of my guys got shot.

We wanted to get those guys and get them out, get them to a helicopter to dust them off, to get them some emergency care.

And this story is about Sergeant Jones Tornado.

He was the platoon sergeant for A company, and he's the guy that took that round the worst.

Jim: Bob Good and I and a guy by the name of Jerry Matthias and Ernie Slavick and a sergeant by the name of Jack Kessler, and he was our platoon sergeant.

We went out in an attempt to render assistance to the first platoon.

We knew there were several people hit.

We could hear them.

The people we could medevac out we brought back behind the lines and we had a medic with us.

And there was a Sergeant Jones who'd been with us all the way through basic training.

And he was hit and half his head was blown away.

I'll never forget this.

Bobby: We ended up putting him in a poncho to carry him and I thought he was--frankly, I thought he was dead.

I thought he lost both legs and an arm.

And so, we threw him into the poncho, took him back, got him back far enough.

Jim: We were carrying Jones and he was in so much pain, he was crying, "Please, please give me something."

Mike: The medic kept talking to him and he wouldn't let him pass out.

I mean, he just--and it was the most amazing thing to this day I've ever seen.

And he kept him alive and we brought him back, medevaced him out of there along with several other guys.

I remember seeing him take off and I just--he can't possibly make it.

Bobby: I never saw Sergeant Jones again after that day.

We made it back, the guys and of course, a couple of my guys, they had to get dusted off as well because they both got shot doing that.

Milford: They had three snipers out there.

And they're all shooting at me.

And finally they had one there, one in the middle and one over there, and finally the guy over there got one that came to the machine gun and hit me right here.

It took--you could see the bone from there to there.

It took that whole section of my hand out.

There's just this little scar now.

And I can't hold the gun anymore.

Mike: Ronnie Bryan is still in pain from being shot and needing help.

Bill: Ronnie Bryan was calling for more morphine.

Our medic Bill Geier went back to him and was giving him some more morphine.

And then all of a sudden Bill got hit under his armpit.

The bullet penetrated--went right through his torso, penetrating both lungs.

So, I went to him and I bandaged him.

Meanwhile, we're all yelling for medic.

We needed another medic.

Maybe the third platoon medic could come up, a guy named Elijah Taylor.

And he did, he finally came up.

And it took a lot of bravery to come up there.

Bobby: Firefight went on all day long.

Air strikes we--artillery coming in and that--and we were close enough to see all this.

And there was a napalm run after napalm run, there was artillery, and there was the jets, there was the helicopters.

Bill: And we had a helicopter come in and land right on that berm.

I could not believe the bravery of this helicopter pilot.

And so, we loaded two of the guys on that chopper and just as he was about to lift off, I could see a bullet blast through the windshield of the Huey.

And he grabbed his shoulder and the helicopter just slammed right back down on the ground and the rear rotor and--turned to the side.

And the two guys that we had laying on there were slung out onto the ground.

Ralph: They had snipers in the trees and these guys were down on the ground trying to hide behind 4 inches of dirt.

There was nothing, just a rice paddy.

And so, they're actually packing up mud trying to keep from getting hit.

Within a short time, you know, 120 men were on the ground and wounded, bleeding, slowly dying.

Milford: And I turned around, I looked, and there's people behind me, and people behind me this way, and a lot of guys are on the ground, and a lot of dead people.

Ralph: One of the 9th infantry officers that started off, he yelled over the mic, "I'm hit, I'm hit.

My guys are hit."

By that afternoon he was babbling.

George: And so, about an hour after that I called him and he was just... And he bled to death on the battlefield.

Mike: With bullets flying everywhere and total chaos happening, Randy Torres is trying to set up a claymore when he was suddenly hit.

Randolf Torres: So, then I got one stick in about 10 feet away from it and it went off.

And I don't remember too much more after that.

I was knocked out for a while.

When I woke up, I could hear Richard Valdespino screaming my name.

I didn't know which direction to go but once I heard him screaming my name, I just crawled towards that direction.

I don't know what it was, either a mortar round came in or a sniper shot it.

So, that was my night.

Mike: Now with gunfire all around them, the brave dust off pilots are trying to land to medevac the wounded.

Bill: We had a chopper land about--I don't know, I'm gonna say a hundred yards behind us.

And I look back, I remember looking back and seeing some of our walking wounded go--get on the chopper and it lifted off.

He got up about a hundred feet and that chopper was hit.

And it started jerking around in the sky trying to go and we're all yelling, "Go, go, go," and damn, if that thing didn't kind of roll over on its side and come straight down, Forrest Ramos fell out of that helicopter as it was coming down, and it landed on him, and he was killed.

And some of the other people on that helicopter were killed as well.

Bobby: I saw five helicopters get shot down that day trying to trying to move in and help and get these wounded soldiers dusted off back to medical care.

So--I mean, that carries on in my heart.

I mean, it was so sad to watch that.

I mean, they would load up the wounded, put them on a helicopter, the helicopter tried to take off, they get shot down.

And I mean, that's just devastating.

Just one thing after another, nothing seemed to go right that day.

It was horrible, we lost so many good people.

Dennis: These chopper pilots, you know, these guys were the real heroes because in that June 19 battle, the enemy had 50 caliber machine guns emplacements, and they were shooting down helicopters.

Fifty caliber machine gun, a killing radius on a 50 caliber machine gun is 5 miles.

Mike: The battle continued but the men were summoned back to the boat.

Bill Reynolds, Jimmie Salazar, and Mario Lopez gathered ponchos full of weapons, dragging them back to where the men were assembling.

Bill: I said to this first soldier I walked up to with his back turned to me.

I said, "Thank God we're going back to the barrack ship."

And this guy turned to me and he was our company commander, Herb Lynn, who I didn't even know him.

He had just arrived about two weeks prior to Charlie Company.

And Herb says, "We're assaulting the other side of the river."

And I thought, "Man, after everything that's happened already, I'll be lucky if I live this day."

Mike: With Alpha Company annihilated and Charlie Company trapped and half decimated, things were almost looking hopeless when an unlikely hero arose.

Ralph: About that time, a tango boat which was called the medical boat came around the bend of the river and docked.

And one of our heroes was a guy named Padre Johnson.

And Padre saw this one wounded radioman trying to get back.

And he saw this guy cringe when he took a second round.

And Padre ran out, and grabbed him, and brought him back.

And this guy said, "Everybody's down, all our medics are dead, our officers are all pinned all over this field."

Rounds are just flying from both sides, you know, the boats were opening up with everything they had.

They basically took wood and palm trees and made these bunkers.

It was very hard to penetrate them.

Mike: After Padre rescued the radio man, he asked for volunteers to help him rescue more.

Boatswain's mate Swede Johnson and engineman Dolezal stepped up.

The three men rushed out, sometimes crawling to help Padre bring back the wounded.

Chet Stanley: Padre Johnson left the medical aid boat, which he was there.

He was just like a corpsman taking care of wounded and everything.

He'd leave that boat in one particular fight, the men were pinned down, they were trapped in a rice paddy where we could not give them good gun fire support.

Padre: It was one of those long days.

My longest day of my life.

Mike: James Henke recalls seeing the medical boat approach the beach.

Its ramp lowering as three men ran out carrying a stretcher.

Unknown to him but determined to protect them, he laid down cover fire to protect his comrades.

James Henke: We fought that afternoon and no--it was to no avail and our guys were dying in vain out there, bleeding out and screaming out for help, and we couldn't get to them.

Padre Ray Johnson, he was the senior corpsman on that boat, and two volunteers came out.

We gave them all the cover we could from the few that were left.

Padre: I watched most of them cut down just like you cut down and scissor weeds.

I saw this one radio man make a run toward our medical facility and he was hit again.

He probably weighed with the radio equipment to 230 pounds at least, and it felt like 50 pounds.

There was so much adrenaline flowing through.

James: He found our medics dead, and took their supplies, and administered them to all our guys out there.

Padre: Most of the high ranking officers or the ranking officers and the high ranking enlisted men and medics had been killed, wounded, or disabled in some form.

And so, I instructed the two corpsmen, and the medic to take care of the medical facility on the shore, and I moved out.

Mike: Padre made several runs that day, rescuing more wounded, including his good friend, Noel West.

Padre: I crawled along the dyke and West had taken an entry right near the aorta.

And there was no way that I could bring him around.

And it's a strange thing, I never felt guilty if I couldn't bring a man through because I gave my very best.

I sat with him for a period of time.

He talked to his mother as so many of the men talked to their mother, like going back to the womb of protection before they departed and crossed the bridge from this life into the hands of the Creator that created that beautiful individual fingerprint.

He passed in my hands, West, and I turned his face toward the heavens, and I said, like I always did, "Into your hands I commend his spirit."

Mike: Padre wasn't sure he'd survive the fray, but in the stillness of a desperate prayer, his eyes caught something, a lotus flower.

To Padre, it was a sign.

As gunner Stanley witnessed, strength surged through him.

He would make it.

And every time he returned to the boat, battered but alive, Ray Riesco was there with a knowing grin, "You must have two angels watching over you."

Chet: Padre Johnson went out, started carrying him in back to the medical aid boat, wounded himself.

Mike: Padre had been struck twice, once in the leg and the second in his chest.

The second one might have killed him, but there in his pocket lay a Bible from the prayer service he gave that morning, the book of James, absorbing the deadly blow.

What should have killed him was stopped by faith, a small act of devotion that became a shield.

In that moment, the power of belief turned destruction into a miracle.

speaker: Padre Johnson, I never saw a man lace up a pair of boots, especially that day, and had the gumption to run out there in the guts to save so many lives.

That's a hero.

Mike: Dalton Tom remembers hearing the men of Alpha Company moaning in the night, laying in the rice paddies, hoping to be rescued.

Dalton: That night one of the sergeants or lieutenant asked, "We need volunteers to go out there and get them the bodies that were still moaning, that were still alive."

And I think Sergeant Good was one of them that went out there and they came back with bodies.

Bobby: We were able to drag back five or six of those guys back.

And we brought them back to where we were, which was in a ravine that had filled with water because the tide had come in.

And then we worked as a team with the rest of the troops to put them on air mattresses, and float them down a river, and take them to get medical care.

Milford: I had the machine gun at this time and I said, "You know, what the hell?

You know, win, lose, or draw."

I literally ran down that path and everybody came down behind me was actually stepping in my footprints.

We got out there, jumped in the mud, and they ordered what they call a final assault.

Mike: The recon platoon was urgently deployed from the USS Benewah to the Ap Bac area to provide help.

J.R: We were actually there that night.

Our recon platoon was there.

We were there in support.

We got called out about 2 o'clock in the morning.

Now do you thi--we were on the pontoon at the Benewah getting ready, and getting our ammo, and getting everything ready.

We knew that a lot of activity was going on out there.

We knew that it was bad.

We could see the shelling, the bombing.

We could see it from the deck of the ship.

So, at 2 o'clock in the morning, if you didn't believe--so there was a lot of praying.

And they dropped us in there to support and thank God we didn't have to get in the middle of the fray.

We were--we supported the CP, the command post.

We secured it to make sure it didn't get overrun or something happened there.

We got through that June 19.

And you know, the rest of the tour almost seemed doable.

Padre: I was given the privilege of being the last one to say a word of hope and encouragement.

And I would usually even though I knew the odds were 10 to 1 maybe against their survival, I would say, "Terry,"--I would talk right to them.

I said, "We're gonna win this baby.

You stay with me, you keep your mind working with my hands, and you're gonna make it."

I know there were times when I checked out with Elohim.

I said, "Elohim, I'm gonna have to lie."

"Go right ahead."

He said, "Go right ahead.

You have my absolution in advance," he said, you know, because--and I was the last person to talk with them.

And so, they would look at me sometimes, they would say, "Doc, am I going to die?"

I says, "No!"

I said, "You're gonna live."

And that--when I said that you're going to live, that means you may cross the bridge to live even a more fruitful new beginning with the heavenly Father.

Chet: And to this day, everybody in the Mobile Riverine Force knows Padre Johnson for what he done.

He was awarded the Silver Star for it.

He needs a Medal of Honor.

Mike: After days of brutal battle, the night was filled with haunting cries, men moaning, yelling for help in the darkness.

By morning, the order came, "From a line, head to the bunkers, and prepare to fire."

The tension was thick, the air heavy with dread, but as they advanced, they discovered the VC had slipped away under the cover of night, leaving over 200 enemy dead.

The silence that followed was deafening, a grim reminder of the cost of war.

All the men were heroes that day.

The Battle of Concordia at Ap Bac would leave 47 men dead and over 150 injured, both from Army and Navy.

♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ Mike: When our troops came home from the Vietnam War, they were not met with gratitude but with hostility, spat on, called names, and treated horribly, not feeling welcome in their own country.

For many, war didn't end when they left the battlefield, it simply became a burden they carried alone, never speaking of it again.

Chris: Oh, that's a lot different when we came home.

When I came home--I think we flew into Travis Air Force Base.

It's one river by LA.

They told us to get civilian clothes before we went down to LA to fly home.

It's so bad that--and even when I was in the Navy, on the other ships before I went to 'nam, you know, you had to--first thing you did is go to the locker room and get out of uniform.

And now, the guys are in uniform and these guys coming back from Afghanistan.

You know, everybody's thanking them and all that.

They didn't do them like they did us.

Dennis: Plane took off and it was dead silence, there was not a word, there was nothing being said.

And I'll never forget, I sat there and to myself I said it out loud.

I said, "God," I said, "I feel so naked."

And the kid next to me goes, "Yeah," he goes, "the first time when, you know, in time, in country without a weapon, you know.

So, you were naked immediately without a weapon."

So, the plane took off and it started climbing, and climbing, and climbing.

And I don't know how long it took, but all of a sudden--and none of us were really expecting it.

But the captain of the plane came on the intercom.

I don't know why--wow!

And what he said was he was--I don't know if he even introduced himself.

I think he maybe he did, but he said, "We have just passed through 27,000 feet, he goes, "we are no longer in Vietnamese airspace."

So, we were clear.

Whoa, that plane just erupted.

It was like this awareness of being out of Vietnam was just amazing, you know.

Floyd Kelly: In my first counseling, I had a counselor says, "Well, thank you for your service."

I said, "What?"

He says, "Thank you for your service."

It made me cry because that was the first person that had ever said it to me, "Thank you for your service."

Robert Millican: The people that I served with who were so incredible that if my orders had read to go back to that--go back to the Mobile Riverine Force or any of the swift boats, or the PBRs, or anything like that, I'd have done that in a heartbeat, you know.

Because there's something about the experience that melds you together with your brothers in arms in such a thing that you put their life before yours.

Thomas: The brotherhood is sacred to me, yes.

Steven: So, it's like a camaraderie of people that never had anything to do with each other in Vietnam but have all grouped together a band of brothers.

Mike: These guys, they didn't die in vain.

Terry: When some guy said he'll die for you, there's no greater love than a person who's willing to lay down their life for-- Mike: On the brown waters and in the unforgiving lands of the Mekong Delta, 5000 sailors and soldiers of the Mobile Riverine Force fought deep into the heart of enemy territory against ambushes, mines, and an enemy that knew no rules.

They were determined and devoted to duty.

It was a legacy first written in the Civil War.

In the Mekong Delta, they proved, once again, that the Army and the Navy side-by-side could dominate the waterways.

Their strategies and tactical innovation would live on in our modern riverine warfare.

They showed the world what could be accomplished when two forces became one.

Disrupt and destroy Viet Cong's strongholds and establish security and stability for the South Vietnamese people.

Eleven Medal of Honor recipients, countless commendations, awards, and decorations.

The highest decorated joint unit of the Vietnam War.

But their greatest honor will always be the brotherhood they forged and the legacy they left behind: 2,746 of their own paid the ultimate sacrifice, their names forever etched on the wall.

Their stories are no longer lost to time.

The extraordinary courage and contributions of the sailors of Task Force 117 and the soldiers of the 2nd Brigade, 9th Infantry Division are now proudly etched in the annals of military history forever.

announcer: Major funding for this program was provided by KPBS Explore, the Johnson Family Fund, the Mobile Riverine Force Association.

For a complete list of financial contributors, please visit www.themrfdocumentary.com.

To purchase the extended version of "The Mobile Riverine Force," please visit www.themrfdocumentary.com.