I first came across Robert Scott’s manuscript at a reunion of Vietnam veterans. After reading the draft chapters of his time in Vietnam, I became intrigued for two reasons. First, there is very little written about the Army’s navy during the Vietnam War and second, Scott’s gift for writing.
The Army’s navy is like that estranged uncle everyone has but does not like to talk about. The Army has had a navy even before Congress authorized the US Navy. Even then the US Navy did not want to have anything to do with hauling men and material up and down rivers. The US Navy only wanted to fight naval battles. The dividing line between the US Army and the US Navy became brown water and blue water. Where it came to water, the Army would have to rely on its own navy for support. For this reason, the United States has always maintained two navies.
The US Navy did offer to lend their expertise at naval warfare by assuming operational control over the Army’s vast Mississippi River (brown water) fleet, complete with the first ironclad warships. The US Navy realized that there were not going to be too many blue water naval battles and taking control of the Army’s navy was one of the few ways they were going to see some action. The Army’s navy crossed over into the deep blue during the Spanish-American War in preparation for the invasion of Cuba. As it turned out, the real division between the Army and the Navy was not brown or blue water but whether the vessels had guns on them. MG William Shafter’s V Corps needed 32 sea-going transports to deliver it to Cuba in 1898 and the Navy did not want to buy or lease them. From then on the US Army maintained an ocean going fleet. Few people realized that that vast fleet of Liberty and Victory ships during World War II belonged to the Army Transportation Service created after the Spanish-American War. Even the vast majority of landing craft during World War II belonged to the Army. From then on the Army’s watercraft fleet kept getting larger and by the time it took over the ground war in Vietnam, the Army had LCM-8s and the larger LCU-1466 series.
Just like during the Civil War, the US Navy wanted to steal the thunder from the Army by building its fleet of monitors to fight in the rivers and canals of the Mekong Delta. And again they left the hauling of freight to the Army. LCMs and LCUs plowed through the rivers and along the coastline of Vietnam unguarded. This duty was unceremoniously routine except on a few occasions when the enemy did not want the cargo to get through, such as during the Tet Offensive of 1968.
I had heard stories of the LCUs fighting their way up and down the Qua Viet and Perfume Rivers in order to resupply the Marines battling to retake Hue. It is the only time that an LCU was sunk due to enemy action and an LCU is very hard to sink. Robert Scott was one of the Army’s sailors aboard an LCU during that struggle to keep the lifeline open. The men who supplied the troops in battle often went unmentioned by writers who instead prefer to focus on the fighting men at the front. Most combat soldiers care to know nothing about logistics until they run out.
As the Transportation Corps Historian, I have struggled to understand the nature of Army sailors. I tell by the look in their eyes when they talk that there is something special about what they do and I guess you just have to go to sea with them to understand it. I believe the secret to the Army’s navy is that the Army does not trust a commissioned officer to skipper a vessel. Regardless of the size of the vessel in the Army, it is skippered by a warrant officer or NCO. In other words, enlisted soldiers are skippered by former enlisted soldiers. The best way to describe them is pirates. Few Army mariners have disagreed with me on that.
This is where Robert Scott’s gift at writing comes into play. He has that incredible gift to place the reader behind a stack of melting sandbags on the deck of an LCU running the gauntlet of enemy fire. Rarely do we have works by enlisted men who describe with great honesty the seedier side of life in the service. I admire him and call him my friend but he is not the kind of guy I would want my daughter to go out with. His life combined the biker culture with that of an Army sailor and his recounting of his time in the Army reads like the novel, From Here To Eternity. Through his writing we are offered that rare glimpse of life in one of the oddest professions, the Army’s navy.
Richard Killblane
