The River Rats of Vietnam (Paperback)

Reviews

Reviewed by Bernie W. - 1 February 2011

Review Written by Bernie Weisz vietnam War Historian Contact E Mail: BernWei1@aol.com January 16, 2011 Pembroke Pines, Florida, USA Title of Review: "On The Rivers Of Vietnam: Could I Actually Take A Human Life? What If I Froze In Combat?" These were questions Mark Purdy, at the tender age of twenty one, was forced to ask himself. This book took many years for the author to write, as Vietnam was a subject he considered taboo and avoided at all costs. Was it burying the forty one year past? Mark Purdy is not sure himself. However, with the skillful assistance of his wife, Christine, the two of them were finally able to sit down and come up with the story of what Mark deemed "the most horrendous period of my life." After you read "The River Rats of Vietnam," not only will you empathize with the aforementioned statement, you wouldn't wish what Purdy went through on your worst enemy. It is a miracle that this book has even seen the light of day. I have read hundreds of memoirs of combat far less gruesome, and those writers were left severely traumatized. Continue reading this review, and you will understand why Purdy would make the following comment: "Whenever we had downtime, I could not help but let my mind drift back to what my life was like before I came to this indescribable mind, altering prison of hopelessness." This whole Vietnam scenario started so innocently. Purdy states at the beginning: "In my high school years, I can remember President John F. Kennedy explaining through several news casts that we as a nation would not enter the conflict in Vietnam. That all changed with three shots on November 22, 1963. Despite the aftermath of the "Bay of Pigs" incident and subsequent brink of nuclear war between the U.S. and Soviet Union following the "Cuban Missile Crisis," in 1962, John F. Kennedy signed NSAM 263, on October 2, 1963. This was an executive order for the immediate withdrawal of 1,000 military advisors and of all military personnel, including CIA operatives. The reason for JFK's decision is more than intriguing, and some conspiracy theorists believe that was part of the reason behind J.F.K's assassination. The tide of events were dizzying. On November 22, 1963, President Kennedy was assassinated as he traveled in an open top car in a motorcade in Dallas, Texas at 12:30 PM. Texas Governor John Connally was also injured. Within two hours, Lee Harvey Oswald was arrested for the murder of Dallas policeman J.D. Tippit and arraigned that evening. At 1:35 AM Saturday, Oswald was arraigned for murdering the President. At 11:21 AM, Sunday, November 24, 1963, nightclub owner Jack Ruby shot and killed Oswald as he was being transferred to the county jail. In 1964, the Warren Commission concluded that there was no persuasive evidence that Oswald was involved in a conspiracy to assassinate the President, and stated their belief that he acted alone. Critics, even before the Warren commission, suggested a conspiracy was behind the assassination. There are also many conspiracy theories regarding the assassination, such as a criminal conspiracy involving parties as varied as the CIA, the KGB, the American Mafia, the Israeli government, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, sitting Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson, Cuban president Fidel Castro, anti-Castro Cuban exile groups, the Federal Reserve, and the Military Industrial Complex, which stood the most to lose from pulling out of a long and costly war in Vietnam, or some combination of the aforementioned. It is a moot point, as shortly after Lyndon B. Johnson took office, he immediately announced his reversal of J.F.K's abandonment of Vietnam. Purdy commented: "I knew L.B.J. sealed my fate when he announced his intentions of sending as many troops as needed to help train the South Vietnamese in defense tactics as to protect themselves against the more powerful North Vietnamese. An oceanic incident was about to occur that would change the lives of 2,709,908 Americans that would serve in Vietnam, Mark Purdy included. The Gulf of Tonkin is a body of water that lies on the East Coast of North Vietnam and the West Coast of the island Hainan. This was the waters for the staging area of the U.S. Seventh Fleet, which included the American destroyers U.S.S. Maddox and C. Turner Joy and the American aircraft carrier U.S.S. Ticonderoga, and would eventually lead to the escalation and U.S. involvement in this war. On August 2, 1964, the Maddox was conducting a "DeSoto patrol", which unofficially was a spying mission. The purpose was to collect intelligence on radar of the coastal defenses of North Vietnam. It was on this day that the North Vietnamese launched torpedo patrol boats and attacked the Maddox. The U.S.S. Ticonderoga sent aircraft to repel the North Vietnamese attackers and sunk one boat while damaging other Communist vessels. To provoke and bait the North Vietnamese into an engagement, both the Maddox and the C. Turner Joy returned to the Gulf two days later, on August 4. The captain of the Maddox had misread his ship's instruments as claiming that the ship was under attack or had been attacked and began an immediate retaliatory strike into the night. The two ships began firing into the night rapidly with American air power supporting the barrage. Suspiciously, the captain had concluded hours later that there might not have been an actual attack. James B. Stockdale, who would later author four post war books, including "A Vietnam Experience: Ten Years of Reflection'" was a pilot of a Crusader jet, undertook a reconnaissance flight over the waters that evening. When questioned if he had witnessed any North Vietnamese attack vessels, he replied: "Not a one. No boats, no wakes, no ricochets off boats, no boat impacts, no torpedo wakes-nothing but black sea and American firepower." The significance of this mid summer skirmish was that it was intentionally misconstrued when presented to Congress and the public by L.B.J. and his administration, and on August 7, the "Tonkin Gulf Resolution" passed, 416 to 0 by the House and 88 to 2 by the Senate. This resolution declared that the President of the United States could "take all necessary measures to repel armed attack against the forces of the United States and to prevent further aggression." This led to the escalation of U.S. involvement in Vietnam and became the point where the U.S., by July of 1965 had 80,000 troops mobilized and operating in South Vietnam. This opened the door to the eventual peak of some 543,000 troops by early 1969, Mark Purdy being one of them. However, the author noticed something strange, as in media vacillation. Noting this, he commented the following: "By 1966, the reports of action in the country of Vietnam were getting worse by the day. The subject was covered by all forms of the media, and one could not help but notice the contradictions from one broadcast to the next. For example, one news report would tell of how our servicemen and women were fighting communism in order to help the general public of South Vietnam. Another would report of how we were not achieving any strategic objective, be it political or otherwise, and how we should bring our troops home before any more lives were lost. This yellow journalism would continue all the way to the January 31st, 1968 Tet Offensive, where the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong forces violated a cease fire agreement and launched a surprise attack on provincial headquarters, political and military targets throughout South Vietnam. Suffering a military trouncing,the Communists were severely vanquished in every single engagement of Tet. However, it was reported as a U.S. military defeat domestically, a fact Flint Whitlock in his book "Internal Conflicts explained as such "One reason was because many of the liberal news directors and newspaper editors hated Johnson. They were so in love with J.F.K., that Ivy League intellectual with whom they could all identify, that they couldn't stand the thought of some uncouth, Southern bumpkin in the White House. J.F.K. was planning to disengage the U.S. from Vietnam and L.B.J. turned around and escalated the war in order to win it, which the pacifist, liberal editors and news directors found unfathomable. They were out to do everything in their power to discredit the president, telling their reporters to focus on the few bad things our soldiers were doing instead of all the good. The "Tet Offensive" was perfect for their purposes-to show it as an example of how, in their opinion, L.B.J's Vietnam policy had failed. Mark Purdy showed his ambivalence by writing that while he advocated stopping the spread of communism, he lamented: "I was scared to death to go thousands of miles from home to fight a battle I really didn't understand." In his last year of high school, the subject of Vietnam was omnipresent. The compelling force for Purdy to make a move came in the form of a "draft card" from Uncle Sam with a low number. Purdy's reaction: "It was now more a matter of "how" I would serve my country that cluttered my typical teenage mind. I guess you could say that if I was going to be forced into all of this, then at least I was going to say how and where I was going to serve." It is a fact that military recruiters have lied to get one to join, promising anything, yet delivering little. James Daly, a Jehovah's Witness, who joined under the pledge from a recruiter that he would only be a cook, had his military occupational specialty changed once in Vietnam to an infantryman, with the 196th Light Infantry Brigade. Daly was captured and spent over five years as a prisoner of war, as detailed in his book "Black Prisoner of War." Conversely, Purdy was promised by a naval recruiter, that large battleships were not used much for combat during the Vietnam conflict. Choosing to enlist in the Navy, this turned out to be another deception, as described in Ray Kopp's book "Thunder in the Night." However, it is important to mention a significant observation Purdy, a Wisconsin native, noticed while he was deciding to enlist or not. Expressing himself, Purdy wrote: "What made these decisions harder was the fact that we all knew someone who did not make it back. Or, when they did make it back, even when they came back in one piece, they suffered from the mental anguishes from what they experienced in a strange land filled with people they did not understand. But the biggest complaint a returning soldier most often had, even worse than their Vietnam experiences, were the verbal outcries from their fellow Americans once they came home. Some soldiers could not understand why they were hated so much by people who could not possibly understand the ordeal that serviceman/women were subjected to in this foreign land. After all, many of them did not volunteer to go over there. They were forced by their government to fight a battle they did not want to fight. So why were they being held accountable for something they had no control over? Some veterans even went so far as deny even going over there just so they didn't have to endure the humiliation that others had to deal with." This is a recurring theme I have come across in virtually every single Vietnam memoir I have encountered. Mark Purdy should have paid attention to these portentous laments. It was only in basic training at Mare Island, California, that Purdy found out that his promise of being on a big destroyer safe out at sea was an illusion. One of the greatest and most hotly contested areas of South Vietnam, which was riddled with Viet Cong, was the waterways of the Mekong Delta. The U.S. had two types of boats patrolling these narrow waterways and tributaries, one being a river patrol boat, or "PBR" and the other was an Armored Troop Carrier, or "ATC." The 30 by 60 foot, 90 ton ATC's were sturdier and much larger than the PBR's, which was advantageous in open waterways. The PBR was a converted fiberglass pleasure boat reconfigured as a River Patrol Boat, powered by jacuzzi jet pumps designed to rapidly land and extricate soldiers in and out of Delta combat areas as expediently as possible. However, the PBR's were mostly used in open waters because of their speed (up to 30 knots almost instantly), while the ATC's were used on the more narrow rivers. With the frequent enemy fire from along the Mekong inlets, their heavy metal frames gave them the protection they would need. Mark Purdy, to his incredulity being assigned to one, would disastrously find out this protection would prove to be insufficient. Most accounts of troop transport to Vietnam were on commercial aircrafts. Possibly because in 1969 replacement troops were needed so badly that not only was his training rushed, but he was flown to Vietnam via what he called a "flying boxcar." Purdy described this as follows: "Just as the name suggests, it was pretty much a flying box. If you were lucky you were able to sit on some of the straps that were attached to the walls. Otherwise you sat on the hard floor the entire turbulent way!" Flying this contraption to Vietnam, his comments of Saigon were of a city of total chaos. With a one night stay there, the next morning he boarded the omnipresent military bus with wire mesh windows back to the airport for a flight to his final destination, Dong Tam. Interestingly, when this transport plane landed at Dong Tam, he was told to jump out of the moving aircraft as it was still taxing down the runway, so the plane could immediately take off after it discharged it's human cargo. That second night in Vietnam, his bunker came under V.C. mortar attack. Seeing bloody casualties everywhere, he quipped: "I didn't know what would lie ahead for me, but I knew that whatever life was going to bring me from this day forward would forever change me." Seeing one of his buddies killed, another mortally wounded, he reacted as such: "Why them? Why did I survive relatively unharmed while all these men around me didn't? I couldn't take the guilt I was feeling." Assigned as a crewman aboard an ATC, he remarked about the cramped sleeping quarters and the horrible sea ration food. For the sleeping quarters problem, he solved that by picking up a medical stretcher and made himself a "hanging bunk." The food was from the Korean War, so horrible a sailor could not even chew it let alone swallow it. Clothes were another issue. He went several months without getting replacement naval wardrobe whereupon his mother had to call Wisconsin Senator William Proxmire before something was finally done. The expression, "One man's garbage is another's gold" was described by Purdy as follows: "The South Vietnamese had everything from clothes, to food, to luxury items like radios and cameras. With the help of my shipmates, I learned that sea rations were as good as gold to the Vietnamese black market." Mark Purdy's descriptions of patrolling the waterways take up the majority of this memoir. A daily occurrence aboard the ATC was every morning upon waking, the deck would be littered with brown or black sea snakes, drawn on board from the heat of the metal. Called "pest control," Purdy learned to take a machete, whack off the snakes' head, and throw the remains over. Aside from delivering troops, the ATC had to do "mine control," dislodging and detonating crudely made mines V.C. swimmers would strategically place within the Delta's waterways. They would be command detonated by VC troops hidden in the shoreline. By the A.T.C's dragging chains under the boat and among the waterways, the fuse lines of these bombs would get snared and break away from it's bombs, thus rendering them useless. In addition, every half hour, Purdy and his crew mates would throw percussion grenades (equivalent to 2 1/2 sticks of dynamite) into the river, which when exploded would kill anything within 100 yards of the boat. Purdy commented: "It was not unusual for us to churn up V.C. bodies the morning after our deterrent runs." His description of the Mekong is quite telling: I was surprised to how narrow the Mekong Delta actually was. In some places it couldn't be more than fifty yards wide, yet in others it could be more than a mile. But no matter where you went the water was so murky and brown that seeing anything underwater was impossible." Raised religiously in a Christian home, Purdy was assigned as a gunner. There is a very interesting passage here which no 21 year old should ever have to find himself in: I loaded the ammo and looked up and down the shoreline for any movement and psychologically prepared myself for the possibility of taking another human life. How did I get to this point? Could I actually take a human life? What if I froze at the wrong time? What if the gun jams? What if they kill me before I can fire my first shot? What if I miss? All the training in the world never prepares you for shooting at another person. I am a child of the Lord. I was raised to respect the rights and feelings of others, not to destroy them, I suddenly found myself praying. Not only for myself, but for a country torn apart by war. I prayed that He would give me strength to do what I had to do and forgive me for whatever sins I had to commit to come out of this alive. Mark Purdy would need that strength, because he was about to witness most of his crew get wiped out in a few minutes right before his eyes. He was also to witness American atrocities that never made any official reports or where the guilty was convicted. The aforementioned is mentioned in this book in gruesome detail and is not printable in this review. Mark Purdy was not prepared to hold a dying man in his arms nor kill someone else, no less woman or children. All of this would happen and change himself forever. Seeing and being a participant in this wanton, ruthless circle of carnage, Purdy wrote: "I tried to remind myself just why we were here. Surely there had to be a better reason than killing people, that, from what I can see, didn't have much to fight for anyway. And why was this war taking so long? The Americans had all the modern warfare equipment money could buy. Surely we could take this ill-equipped country with our eyes closed." In patrolling the Delta, Purdy found out that the Viet Cong cowardly used women and children as "human shields" against American gunners, which he described as follows: "The V.C. would overcome villages along the Delta, inhabited with innocent women and children, which the V.C. had learned to use to their advantage. The V.C. would overcome these villages, and line up the women and children in front of their troops along the banks of the river. This way when you were firing at what you thought were just V.C. troops, you also knew you were firing at innocent women and children as well." Even during the Allied bombing of Axis cities during W.W. II, collateral damage of civilians occurred, but this shocking act of cowardice is treacherously unpardonable. ATC's were used during the Vietnam war to stop sampans and check for contraband. All operators of pulled over sampans had to have their government issued paperwork of what they were doing on the Delta in order, or their boat and cargo confiscated and the occupant's interrogated. If they were V.C., the occupants would be taken to the nearest prison facility. If everything checked out to be just indigenous locals on the Delta, they would be released and their cargo returned to them. However, between the sea battles, the shootings, the dying, and the trading with the black market everything from prostitutes and French bread to ice, Purdy put things in perspective: "Here we are in the middle of a war zone, in unbelievable heat, NVA and VC shooting at us whenever they got the urge, yet we were able to get cold Pepsi and beer. How cool is that? War forces you to make decisions that you would normally never make." Not only did Mark Purdy have to face a despicable enemy with barbaric methods of combat, he also had to contend with deplorable conditions as well. Remarking on that, Purdy wrote: Sometimes we would go weeks without a shower. We learned to scrounge for whatever we needed to survive, and we committed horrific acts of self-preservation, some horrible to mention even today." Some of those acts are mentioned in this book, and only readers with a hardened stomach might want to consider reading this account. Seizing any boat that looked suspicious on the Mekong, almost like the ancient pirates of yesteryear, not to mention the physical condition of these sailors with abhorrent living conditions, the men of the ATC's were thus dubbed "Rats." Purdy clarified it: "I guess one of the biggest reasons we were called "Rats" was because everyone knew we were just going to take whatever we wanted whether they liked it or not." In December of 1965, the "Mobile Riverine Force" (MRF), with the moniker the "Brown River Navy" was established to monitor the traffic on the Mekong Delta. A secondary function was to escort any branch of service, i.e., Army Rangers, Navy Seals or Marines, etc. into hot landing zones for both pickup and extraction while they "took care of business." Bitter because of lack of recognition, Purdy wrote his indignation as follows: "We were the grunts behind the scenes, but that doesn't mean we didn't see our fair share of action. If a mission went well it was because the Seals or Army did a fantastic job. What about the guys who themselves had to enter a firefight of their own, just to get the troops where they needed to be?" This umbrage extends to the history books and memoirs: "Whenever you see any books written about Vietnam, there are pages and pages of the other military outfits, while you would be hard pressed to find even a paragraph written about us. Even then it is usually about the swift boats or PBR's. It seems we men on the ATC's were insignificant in the scheme of things." A final manifestation of Vietnam, common to all memoirs, are marriages and relationships interrupted, broken up and destroyed. Mark Purdy was not immune to this condition, detailing his antipathy for his wife's infidelity and his feelings upon the discovery of this. While this is a self published book and might be hard to find in the future, Mark Purdy's memoir is indispensable in gaining a true understand of what occurred in the Vietnam War. A must read!