(Admiral Elmo “Bud” Zumwalt. Official Navy Photo.)

It is colder than shit outside this morning, bone chilling even in the guest apartment where I stay when I am here in Northern Michigan. The wind is still hammering the side of the building and blowing the lake-effect snow around the driveway. It is time to start back toward Virginia, a long cold road ahead.
 
They all look like that in the dead of winter here, so many pale ghosts of winters past all around in the white and gray and black monochrome.
 
There is color in the warmer climes that never goes away, and I yearn for it, and the smell of life and renewal this morning. Of course, with the smell of life in a warm place there is the odor of what comes after, and the memory of that lingers.
 
It did for Rex, too. He left Hawaii and reported as Assistant Chief of Staff for Intelligence to the Commander, U.S. Naval Forces, Vietnam, in May of 1968. It was five months after Tet, a year of myth and resolve in a land far away.
 
The Viet Cong had resolve, but they were largely blown away in the violent response to their offensive. The North had thrown their cadre in the South away on suicide missions, and militarily, the offensive had been a disaster. That was the start of one myth, that somehow the slaughter had demonstrated the inevitable triumph of the popular will.
 
What had been demonstrated was that at great sacrifice, no place in Vietnam was truly secure, If one was willing to pay the price.
 
I stood in front of the monument to the Viet Cong Sappers who died trying to penetrate the US Embassy perimeter long time ago, after peace had come. My delegation was adamant that the monument had to go.
 
Sic Transit Gloria, I suppose. But myth endures, and at the heart of it is some truth.
 
Walter Cronkeit was a convert, as was the press corps that bunkered in Saigon, and had not seen what was happening in the field, since that is where bad things happened. It was far easier to report from the safety of Tu Do Street, and snipe at the body counts during the Five O’clock Follies at MAC-V headquarters at the Rex Hotel.
 
1968 was the year the Detroit Tigers began winning their first pennant in 23 years in the second game of the season in a ninth-inning comeback that was to become a seasonal trademark for the club led by the never-say-die bats of Willie Horton, pinch hitter Gates Brown, Don Wert, and the pitching prowess of the awesome and tragically flawed hurler Denny McLain.
 
They were my heroes then, and it was the year that I had to start thinking about going down to register for the draft and contemplate for the first time in a visceral way about the nature of what real heroism might be.
 
It would have occurred to the young Lieutenants Junior Grade reporting to their in-country jobs in Vietnam. It was not completely the luck of the draw. If you had been born just a year or two earlier and not gone to college, or been the first of the Boomer generation born when the men came back from overseas, there was little alternative to dealing with the Service somehow.
 
Some fled to Canada, and there was a rising strain in America that standing for conscience was a sort of heroism, too. The split between old and young, white and black, patriotic and radical, was fracturing society in a manner that has not been healed yet by those on both sides of the social ramparts.
 
Myth won. Contrary to the popular myth, most of the men and nearly all of the women who went to SE Asia were volunteers of one stripe or another. The draft resulted in the enlistment and commissioning of many young men who otherwise might have been subject to the maw of the Green Machine, and hence, regular officers like Rex saw some astonishingly talented young men who otherwise might have done something else bedsides go to war, just as they do today in a world without conscription, when the vast majority of Americans marvel at the sacrifice of so few.
 
There is absolutely no question that Tet had changed everything. A new strategy was required. The best and brightest were summoned to see if they could turn things around, even as Robert McNamara began to have his doubts. He continued to hide behind his bastion of process, even as the Army called on Creighton Abrams to restore light to the end of the tunnel that had been extinguished with such surprise.
 
The Navy’s answer was the assignment of a newly-promoted Vice Admiral named Elmo “Bud” Zumwalt as Commander, Naval Forces Vietnam.
 
The callsign of his headquarters was “RAINY DAY,” and transmissions flagged with that origination would naturally command attention. If it was the Admiral himself on the radio, the callsign became “RAINY DAY ACTUAL” and with the introduction of the helicopter it meant that God himself could fall from the sky right there.
 
He arrived in Saigon in September, by which time Rex was becoming an old hand about to learn new tricks.
 
Bud Zumwalt is not “old school,” unless you reach back to Francis Drake. Look at the wolfish smile and see. He was a swashbuckler. Like Rex, he came to the Pacific war late in the struggle, and stayed on through 1946 to be the prize crew commander of HIMJS Ataka, a 1,200-ton Japanese river gunboat, which he took up the Huangpu River to Shanghai to resptore order in and disarm the Japanese troops who remained after the sudden and violent peace.
 
While there, he met and married Mouza Coutelais-du-Roche, whose French-Russian family had survived the occupation. He had served with distinction afloat and ashore in the years after, rising to be the Executive Assistant and Senior Aide to Paul Nitze, Secretary of the Navy.
 
Zumwalt’s new command was not a blue-water unit, like the Seventh Fleet; it was a brown-water unit: he commanded the flotilla of Swift Boats that patrolled the coasts, harbors, and rivers of Vietnam. RAINY DAY ACTUAL is chartered with driving the fight to the enemy, and he had the authority to do what needs to be done to safeguard the men who served under his command.
 
One of the tools is a new herbicide called Agent Orange, which can be sprayed by Ranch Hand aircraft on the foliage to remove the cover that the Viet Cong have used so effectively against the small boats of the brown-water Navy. The manufacturers, Dow and Monsanto, of Midland Michigan, guarantee the capability and safety of their product.
 
Imagine yourself stepping off the MATS charter at Ton San Nhut airbase that had just made the stomach-churning steep decent into the landing pattern to avoid VC gunners.
 
Stepping down the disembarkation ladder, the smell of Vietnam strikes the nose: the air is moist, and the familiar smell of partly-burned diesel fuel, fried food, dung and decay hang in the air.
 
You are met by a yeoman from the naval forces HQ and put on a bus with a dozen other reporting personnel to be distributed to billeting. The next morning you are to report, as the orders direct, to the senior Naval Intelligence Officer in Vietnam.
 
Rex’s office was in the low beige building on the compound that served as Saigon’s Pentagon. The operating forces rely on COMNAVFORV’s intelligence organization, which is also responsible for fulfilling intelligence requirements of higher headquarters and the Defense Intelligence Agency.

Each commander subordinate to COMNAVFORV is responsible for maintaining an intelligence collection organization, and Naval Intelligence personnel were stationed throughout the RVN, which is divided into including Coastal Zone and Riverine Areas populated by Coastal Surveillance Centers, some PBR bases, Sector Operations and Intelligence Centers.
 
An intelligence officer is assigned to the staff of each of the three Navy task forces.
 
In addition, an intelligence advisor and a counterintelligence advisor were assigned to the Vietnamese Navy to collect and provide intelligence on two dozen towns and villages in the coastal and Mekong Delta provinces.

There is a breakfast you can barely taste that sits like lead in your stomach. There is an endless wait in an outer office. The Yeoman summons you for the brief in-call, looking at you like a side of beef going bad. “Duties as assigned” will be revealed. What is written on the papers in the fatigue pocket are quite irrelevant now.
 
Rex looks up at you from behind the desk. He looks tired and the battered aluminum butt-it on his desk is full. He is wearing crisp green fatigues that are already starting to wil.
 
“Welcome aboard, NILO,” he says. “Welcome to SEALORDS.”
 
Copyright 2009 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
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