-
derivative filename/jpeg
-
363-01457 to 363-01362.pdf
-
Digital Object Identifier
-
363-01457 to 363-01362
-
Title
-
Letter to Sam Schreiner detailing "River Warfare" articles
-
Description
-
Letter to Sam Schreiner of The Reader's Digest from Keever detailing "River Warfare" articles
-
AI Usage Disclosure
-
Draft transcripts were automatically generated via Google Document AI and are currently under review. Please report significant errors to Archives & Special Collections at archives@unl.edu.
-
Transcript
-
--------------------
- Page 1
--------------------
Mr. S. A. Schreiner, Jr.
The Reader's Digest
Pleasantville, New York
Saigon, Vietnam
August 25, 1967
Doar Sama
Please excuse my tardiness in getting off to you thi
outline on riverine warfare; I've been up to my ears in Vietnamese
politics and election coverage since my return.
For this outline, I prefer not to give an order
in which the piece would be put together because, beginning
in September, when the rains indulate the Mekong Delta, a sckies
of large-scale, river-borne operations will be mounted. A number
of different kinds of units will be involved-U. S.-Vietnamese
Special Forces, the U. S. Mobile Riverine Force, the U. S.
Navy coast guard cutters, the Vietnamese naval units carrying
regular ARVN troops and paramilitary units. Probably but
not for sure--the Hovercraft "flying boats" will also be backi
in Vietnam by that time, and would be included in the operation.
The significance of these operations is to sweep and search
the swampy Plain of Reeds, which outs across the Viet Cong-
controlled portions of several provinces along the Cambodian
border west of saigon. Hopefully, these operations would
provide at least an action, color lead for the article, if
not a major part of the piece itself. But, of course, they
could also be a giant fizzle and worth not more than two lines.
I would hope, however, to spend quite a bit of time covering
these actions for the article.
Aside from the lack of chronology for the outline,
this is what I judge to be the significance of the article:
1. The inland water operations by U. S. units
have been fairly successful. This is the assessment of the
U. S. command here. The trouble is, however, the officials
can not articulate or prove it in clear-cut terms. They
have bundles of statistics of sampans searched, persons detained
and so on;
but it's difficult to weigh these, since obviously
they don't know how many Viet Cong are getting through their
river screens and blockades.
--------------------
- Page 2
--------------------
Page 2
Hence, I suppose that the success of the whole river
oporation will have to be implied in the writing by the
accumulation of a number of isolated incidents and actions,
rather than Delta-wide generalizations. In short, much
like Andy Jones handled his SEAL's article.
2. The U. S. Movile Riverine Force represents a
But
new kind of tactical mobility for the U. S. command hore.
Before, helicopters provided the chief means of moving
troops into battle. Now, the riverine units usher in a new
kind of aqua-borne mobility for U. S. forces. In mangroves and
river swamplands, this has the advantage of moving the
troops along the flooded water level. The Special Forces
commander gave the example that to fly over the flooded
terrain in a helicopter one could not see the enemy.
from the boats, one could see the Viet Cong houses in
the tops of the trees from which they moved to and fro and
stocked their weapons and ammunition. The U. S. commanders
are still experimenting with new tactics for their wide
variety of vessels. Up to now, they have used the
heavily armored gunboats on the water much like they would
employ heavy tanks on land; smaller armed vessels are
used like light tanks and the troop-carrying vessels like
trucks.
3. The operations represent the first time since
the U. S. Civil War--and the second time in its history-
that the American military establishment has engaged in
warfare on rivers and inland bodies of water on a sustained
basis. This should bo sort of a thread for the article,
as well as a major point of emphasis, I believe. Fortunately,
one of the U. S. Naval officers in the Delta is a Civil War
buff; his grandfather was a Union commander, and somehow
with quotes and analogies, I think this can be spun through
the piece.
According to the U. S. Navy here, the birth of the
U. S. river assault force was in May, 1861, when General
George McClellan suggested to General-in-Chief Winfield
Scott that Federal troops stationed in Cairo, Illinois,
needed river gunboats. After the Civil War, the force
was disbanded and the U. s. did not have an assault force
specifically designed for a riverine environment until
September 1, 1966, when the U. S. flotilla for Vietnam
was commissioned.
--------------------
- Page 3
--------------------
Page 3
4. hile for tho U. S. this new type of warfare means
returning to our Civil War days, river operations in Vietnam
are not now. The Vietnamese Navy has been doing them for years.
As background, rather than as a major portion of the article,
I suggest including a bit about the Vietnamese River Assault
Groups (RAG's). Like the U. S. Mobile Riverine Force, the
RAG's are a mini-armada of LCM's, which one U. S. officer
explained this way: "You remember the pictures of Iwo Jima
with the big boats steaming in the distance and the little
boats carrying troops from the big boats to the beaches.
Well, here we're fighting with only those little boats."
Each RAG can carry a battalion of Vietnamese troops into
battle and support it with gunfire; in effect, this
is World War II amphibious warfare on a Tom Thumb scale.
We should include the Vietnamese because they do
an important part of the river operation--and it's only
fair to give them some credit--but also because they
provide an interesting twist to the whole article. From
them, the U. S. river-borne units were copied and Vietnamese
Naval advisors were assigned to teach the U. S, Riverine Force
while it was in training in California and on its trial
operations in Vietnam.
Briefly, the story of the whole riverine concept is
this: after World War II, the U. S. gave alot of LCM's to
the French, who brought them to Vietnam to fight, mostly
in the Red River Delta of North Vietnam. The French
converted, some of these LCM's into command ships and into
gunboats to protect the other troop-carrying ones. They
called these mini-battleships Monitors--no one here knows
if they were named after the U. S. Civil War vessels or not.
Then, when the French pulled out, they turned over their
river fleet to the Vietnamese Navy. When American Naval
advisors came in the early '60's, they carried the idea
back to the U. S. and from these the U. S. riverine units
were formed. The U. S. Naval advisors are very humble
about admitting that the Vietnamese have taught them more
than they taught them in this whole area of operation.
--------------------
- Page 4
--------------------
Page 4
One of the complications of this article is that aside
from the naval units, the ground forces they carry into bettle
can alter from Special Forces to U. S. Army to Vietnemeso
irregulars. So, to limit this, I'd suggest focusing on
these two ground components on the American side:
1. The U.
Mobile Riverine Force. This would be a
major part of the article, since the two U. S. Army battalions
are already integrated with the U. S. Naval River Assault Flotilla.
Those Army-Navy toons live together on air-conditioned floating
barracks. Aqua-borne pads for helicopters have been built for
emergencies. To get the quotes and color necessary to make
this unit come alive, I'd plan to spend about a wook with them,
or maybe more if they fit into the lead about the Plain of
Reeds operation. I do not, however, think this unit is
spectacular enough to sustain the whole piece. They haven't
been that successful. On their first operation, which received
little press coverage, the ground units walked into a Viet
Cong ambush end were "clobbezed", as the officials here say softly.
2. The U. S.-Vietnamese Special Forces. They are
assault troops which use the naval craft to get into battle.
But, more then that, I think we could use them in the story
to paint a picutre of what the Delta is like at flood-time.
It's really beyond the imagination or experience of any
American who hasn't seen it. The floods came up to the tops
of the trees last year and the Special Forces camps virtually
floated away. (The Viet Cong were flooded out too). SO,
this year the Special Forces hope to make the water work for
thom. They have constructed the floating baso comps Andy
Jones mentioned. These are not floating bases which carry
them into battle; this is where they live once returning
from operations. A description of them would itself show
the tactical difficulties of operating militarily in this area.
The camps are floated on empty oil drums and thousands
of them have been dumped from low-flying aircraft into their
perimeters. In some camps, the Special Forces operations
buildings and barracks float, no that as the water rises,
so does the building. But this takes too many oil drums.
SO,
now they're constructing their buildings so that only the floors
float when the waters rise, Their, mortars need more stable platforms,
so they have placed these inside giant coment cylinders.
--------------------
- Page 5
--------------------
Page 5
so that
The floods create bundles of other humorous, human problems
too. The American Special Forces decided to build two-story thatch
homes for the depondents of their Vietnamese irregulars,
when the floods came they wouldn't stream into their camp. But,
because Vietnamese babies don't wear diapers, the families living
on the first floor were getting increasingly damp and furious. SO,
the Americans built more houses, letting one family live on the
first floor most of the year, but moving them up to the second floor
when the floods arrived.
There's so many other stories like this that the Special
Forces base camps in the Delta may be more colorful than the
Riverine Force. If the Plain of Reeds operation fizzles as a
lead, we might use the Special Forces as the lead to describe
the life and difficulties in the Delta--and then roll into the
new type of U. S. river operations.
This is already a complex piece, but there are several
other interesting points that might be mentioned. One is the
American inter-service rivalry. The U. S. Marines are furious
at the Army for taking over this type of amphibious warfare
operation. They view this as part of a long-standing plot
by the
Army to take over the Marines' functions
rid of the Marines altogether.
and then to get
There's also the Mekong River, which by agreement is
an international waterway. This means foreign ships can travel the
river through South Vietnam to Cambodia, under escort of the
Vietnamese Navy. These ships in the past have included Polish,
French, British, Panamanian, including some who called in North
Vietnam enroute to Cambodia. The Vietnamese government, which
does not inspect the ship's cargo, charges that these crews are
dropping parcels of weapons and ammunition overboard as they move
upstream. More than that, once they get right across the South
Vietnamese border into Cambodia, they stop and unload their
cargoes onto sampans and then at night float them back into South
Vietnam. There's a Special Forces border camp where one can watch
this.
If you'd like me to spend more time on the article,
might well be worth waiting to see first-hand.
this
--------------------
- Page 6
--------------------
Paro 6
These would be the main points that I think should be
investigatod, although we'd have to prune out alot of the
material.
I hope to hear from you soon. If you're interested in
this piece, I'd want to spend alot of timo on the Delte operation
which begins in September.
My thanks for considering this.
Please give my best
regards to Andy Jones and David Rood, if you should see them.
Sincerely yours,
(Miss) Beverly Deepe
-
Date
-
1967, Aug. 25
-
Subject
-
Vietnam War, 1961-1975; Reader's Digest; Newspaper editors; Journalism--Editing; Schreiner, Samuel A., Jr., 1921-2020; Keever, Beverly Deepe; Correspondence
-
Location
-
Saigon, South Vietnam
-
Coordinates
-
10.8231; 106.6297
-
Size
-
21 x 27 cm
-
Container
-
B15, F5
-
Format
-
letters (correspondence)
-
Collection Number
-
MS 363
-
Collection Title
-
Beverly Deepe Keever, Journalism Papers
-
Creator
-
Keever, Beverly Deepe
-
Collector
-
Keever, Beverly Deepe
-
Copyright Information
-
These images are for educational use only. To inquire about usage or publication, please contact Archives & Special Collections.
-
Publisher
-
Archives & Special Collections
-
Language
-
English
