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Front Cover: The Tay Ninh Provincial Reconnais-sance Unit near Nui Ba Den Mountain in 1969.Then-Captain Andrew R. Finlayson, the author ofthis book, is on the bottom left.

Back Cover: The logotype reproduced on theback cover has as its major element the oldestmilitary insignia in continuous use in the UnitedStates. It first appeared, as shown here, on MarineCorps buttons adopted in 1804. With the starschanged to five points, the device has continuedon Marine Corps buttons to the present day.

VN Advisors Covers 1-4:Layout 1 3/31/09 7:55 AM Page 2

MARINE ADVISORSWITHTHE VIETNAMESE PROVINCIALRECONNAISSANCE UNITS, 1966-1970

by

Colonel Andrew R. Finlayson

U.S.Marine Corps (Retired)

Occasional Paper

HISTORY DIVISION

UNITED STATES MARINE CORPS

QUANTICO,VIRGINIA

2009Third Printing

ii

Other Publications in the Occasional Papers Series

Vietnam Histories Workshop: Plenary Session. Jack Shulimson, editor. 9 May1983. 31 pp.

Vietnam Revisited; Conversation with William D. Broyles, Jr. Colonel John G. Miller, USMC, editor. 11December 1984. 48 pp.

Bibliography on Khe Sanh USMC Participation. Commander Ray W. Strubbe, CHC, USNR (Ret), com-piler. April 1985. 54 pp.

Alligators, Buffaloes, and Bushmasters: The History of the Development of the LVT Through World WarII. Major Alfred Dunlop Bailey, USMC (Ret). 1986. 272 pp.

Leadership Lessons and Remembrances from Vietnam. Lieutenant General Herman Nickerson, Jr.,USMC (Ret). 1988. 93 pp.

The Problems of U.S. Marine Corps Prisoners of War in Korea. James Angus MacDonald, Jr. 1988.

295 pp.

John Archer Lejeune, 1869-1942, Register of His Personal Papers. Lieutenant Colonel Merrill L. Bartlett,USMC (Ret). 1988. 123 pp.

To Wake Island and Beyond: Reminiscences. Brigadier General Woodrow M. Kessler, USMC (Ret).1988. 145 pp.

Thomas Holcomb, 1879-1965, Register of His Personal Papers. Gibson B. Smith. 1988. 229 pp.

Curriculum Evolution, Marine Corps Command and Staff College, 1920-1988. Lieutenant ColonelDonald F. Bittner, USMCR. 1988. 112 pp.

Herringbone Cloak-GI Dagger, Marines of the OSS. Major Robert E. Mattingly, USMC. 1989. 315 pp.

The Journals of Marine Second Lieutenant Henry Bulls Watson, 1845-1848. Charles R. Smith, editor.1990. 420 pp.

When the Russians Blinked: The U.S. Maritime Response to the Cuban Missile Crisis. Major John M.Young, USMCR. 1990. 246 pp.

Marines in the Mexican War. Gabrielle M. Neufeld Santelli. Edited by Charles R. Smith. 1991. 63 pp.

The Development of Amphibious Tactics in the U.S. Navy. General Holland M. Smith, USMC (Ret).1992. 89 pp.

James Guthrie Harbord, 1866-1947, Register of His Personal Papers. Lieutenant Colonel Merrill L.Bartlett, USMC. 1995. 47 pp.

The Impact of Project 100,000 on the Marine Corps. Captain David A. Dawson, USMC. 1995. 247 pp.

Marine Corps Aircraft: 1913-2000. Major John M. Elliot, USMC (Ret). 2002. 126 pp.

Thomas Holcomb and the Advent of the Marine Corps Defense Battalion, 1936-1941. David J. Ulbrich.2004. 78 pp.

Marine History Operations in Iraq, Operation Iraq Freedom I, A Catalog of Interviews and Recordings.LtCol Nathan S. Lowrey, USMCR. 2005. 254 pp.

With the 1st Marine Division in Iraq, 2003. No Greater Friend, No Worse Enemy.LtCol Michael S. Groen, USMC, 2006. 413 pp.

Occasional Papers

The History Division has undertaken the publication for limited distribution of various studies, theses,compilations, bibliographies, monographs, and memoirs, as well as proceedings at selected workshops,seminars, symposia, and similar colloquia, which it considers to be of significant value for audiences in-terested in Marine Corps history. These “Occasional Papers,” which are chosen for their intrinsic worth,must reflect structured research, present a contribution to historical knowledge not readily available in pub-lished sources, and reflect original content on the part of the author, compiler, or editor. It is the intent ofthe Division that these occasional papers be distributed to selected institutions, such as service schools,official Department of Defense historical agencies, and directly concerned Marine Corps organizations, sothe information contained therein will be available for study and exploitation.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Preface .............................................................................................................................v

Acknowledgments .........................................................................................................vii

Introduction.....................................................................................................................1

The Beginning..................................................................................................................3

PRU Organization,Recruitment, Equipment, and Command and Control ......................8

Sergeant Paul C.Whitlock: One of the First and Best, 1966-67 .....................................14

Sergeant Ronald J. Lauzon: Hue City, 1967 ....................................................................16

Staff Sergeant Wayne W. Thompson: Leadership Challenges and Spies, 1967-68..........20

First Lieutenant Joel R.Gardner: A Marine in II Corps, 1967-68....................................22

Lieutenant ColonelTerence M.Allen: The Perspective from Saigon, 1968-70 ...............27

Death at the Embassy House: Tet, 1968.........................................................................29

Sergeant Rodney H.Pupuhi: I Corps, Post-Tet 1968......................................................40

First Lieutenant Douglas P.Ryan: I Corps, 1968-69........................................................43

Capt Frederick J.Vogel: I Corps, 1969 ...........................................................................45

ATypical Operational Scenario: Tay Ninh, 1970............................................................47

Conclusions ...................................................................................................................52

Lessons Learned.............................................................................................................55

Sources...........................................................................................................................61

Bibliography...................................................................................................................63

Appendix: U.S.Marine Provincial Reconnaissance Unit Advisors.................................65

Endnotes ........................................................................................................................69

iii

iv

Preface

U.S.Marines as advisors have a long history, from Presley O’Bannon atTripoli through Iraq andAfghanistan via Haiti, Dominican Republic, Nicaragua, China, South Korea,Taiwan, Philippines,andVietnam. While most Marines think of theVietnamese Marine Corps as the primary advisoryexperience during that conflict, others served with various other advisory programs with theU.S.Army,U.S.Navy,U.S.Joint Special Operations,and U.S.Civil Operations and Rural DevelopmentSupport. One of these is the subject of this study: Marine advisors with the Vietnamese Provin-cial Reconnaissance Units (PRUs). This narrative is a combination of experience, research, andreflection. While other journalistic or academic accounts have been published,this is a narrativeof participants.

Many historians consider the two most effective counterinsurgency organizations employedduring the Vietnam War to have been the PRU and USMC Combined Action Platoons (CAP). Inboth cases,U.S.Marines played a significant role in the success of these innovative programs. Itshould be pointed out,however, that the number of U.S.Marines assigned to these programs wassmall and the bulk of the forces were locally recruited fighters. Both programs used a small cadreof Marines providing leadership, training, and combat support for large numbers of indigenoustroops, and in so doing, capitalized on the inherent strengths of each.

The author believes that both of these programs have applicability in any counterinsurgencywhere U.S. forces are called upon to assist a host government. Obviously, adjustments to theseprograms would have to be made to take into account local conditions,but the core concept ofproviding U.S.Marines to command or advise local militia and special police units is one that hasgreat promise for success. With a clear understanding of why the PRUs and CAPs worked, andwith the necessary adjustments to take into account local conditions,similar units can be createdto defeat future insurgencies. With this in mind,the author hopes that this work will provide U.S.military planners with insights into creating and managing units capable of defeating a well-or-ganized and highly motivated insurgent political infrastructure.

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Acknowledgments

I would like to thank several people who were instrumental in the creation of this work andwhose assistance allowed me to overcome many obstacles to acquiring firsthand accounts ofU.S. Marines who served as advisors with the Provincial Reconnaissance Unit (PRU) program.First, I would like to thank General James N.Mattis for suggesting that I write this work. GeneralMattis felt that this book would serve as a means of capturing important counterinsurgency“lessons learned”during the Vietnam War, and in so doing, provide valuable insights for present-day Marines as they fight other insurgencies in other lands.

Second, I wish to express my deep gratitude to Dr.Mark Moyar, the author of the most objec-tive and accurate book concerning the Phoenix program, Phoenix and the Birds of Prey. Dr.Moyar was the first historian of note to do the kind of thorough research into the Phoenix pro-gram needed to strip away the misunderstandings surrounding this counterinsurgency program.I am indebted to him for his support and insights during the creation of this work.

One individual, Lieutenant Colonel (Ret) George W.T.“Digger”O’Dell, provided invaluable as-sistance to me by putting me in touch with former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) officerswho had been involved with the PRU and could provide information on how the CIA viewed thecontribution of the military assignees to the program.Lieutenant Colonel O’Dell served in the Ma-rine Corps from 1965 to 1968, and then left the Marine Corps to join the CIA as a paramilitaryofficer in Laos and the Middle East from 1969 to 1975, before returning to the Marine Corps tofinish his career in 1992 as one of the Corps’ few experts in the area of special warfare. He wastireless in his efforts to introduce me to his many friends in the CIA who had knowledge of thePRU Program.

I was ably assisted with the editing and formatting of this work by two longtime friends andcolleagues, Hildegard Bachman and Mary Davisson. They provided many professional and valu-able suggestions on how to improve the content and appearance.

I would like to thank several former CIA officers who provided valuable background materialon the Phoenix program, the PRUs, and contact information on the Marines who served as advi-sors. They are Rudy Enders,Ray Lau,Hank Ryan,Warren H.Milberg,William Cervenak,and CharlesO. Stainback. These patriots served their country in silence, often in extremely dangerous as-signments, and I am both indebted to them for their assistance with this paper and for their un-sung service to our nation.

At the History Division,Chief Historian Charles D.Melson provided project guidance,with ed-iting by Kenneth H.Williams and layout and design by W. Stephen Hill.

I also thank Studies in Intelligence for permission to reprint the map of Tay Ninh from my2007 article.

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viii

Introduction

During the latter stages of the Vietnam War, small teams of dedicated and courageous Viet-namese special police, led byAmerican military and Central IntelligenceAgency (CIA) personnel,fought a largely unsung war against the political leadership of the Communist insurgency. Thesespecial police units were called Provincial Reconnaissance Units (PRUs), and they conductedsome of the most dangerous and difficult operations of the Vietnam War. Because these unitswere created, trained, equipped, and managed by the CIA, they worked in secret, a status thatoften led to myths and falsehoods about their activities. So pervasive are these myths and false-hoods that many historians often take them at face value without subjecting them to the samescrutiny as other historical aspects of theVietnamWar. This lack of understanding is further com-plicated because of the political divisiveness within the United States surrounding the VietnamWar, which led some opponents of U.S. involvement in that war to accept the most perniciousand false claims made against the entire pacification effort conducted by theAmerican and SouthVietnamese governments.

The passage of time and the work of some historians have helped to lift the shroud of secrecyaround the PRU and their battle against the Viet Cong.1 This book relates the story of how asmall group of U.S. Marines assigned to this program contributed to the program’s success andto identify, using official records, personal interviews, and other unclassified sources the factorsthat contributed to that success.2 In so doing, I hope to inform the reader about why the PRUProgram was so successful in destroying the Viet Cong Infrastructure (VCI) despite many obsta-cles placed in its way by both the South Vietnamese and United States governments.

1

2

The BeginningThe Vietnam War was really two wars. One

was the purely military war pursued by theNorthVietnameseArmy (NVA) against the mili-tary forces of the government of SouthVietnam(GVN) and the United States of America. Theother war was the insurgency waged by theVietCong political apparatus, an extension of theLao Dong Party in SouthVietnam,using local po-litical cadre and guerrillas. These two warswere part of an overall strategy of the NorthVietnamese Lao Dong Party to overthrow theGVN and unite all of Indochina, including Laosand Cambodia, under their control. This dual-track strategy by the North Vietnamese Com-munists modulated between an emphasis onclassic Maoist revolutionary war from 1956 to1968 to a predominantly conventional war strat-egy from 1968 until the fall of Saigon in 1975.

The scope of this work does not allow for ananalysis of the dual-track strategic approach bythe NorthVietnamese,but an understanding ofit is necessary for the reader to comprehendhow both sides fought the war. I leave it to thereader to refer to several excellent books on thissubject, such as Mark Moyar’s Triumph For-saken, Lewis Sorley’s A Better War, and HarrySummers’s On Strategy, for analyses of how thisstrategy was applied during the war. The au-thor’s 1988 Marine Corps Gazette article mayalso prove helpful.3

This work examines one aspect of the coun-terinsurgency war waged in South Vietnamagainst the Communist political leadership(hereafter referred to as the Viet Cong Infra-structure, or VCI) of that insurgency. It dealswith the primary instrument used by the U.S.Central IntelligenceAgency (CIA) to attack anddefeat theVCI—the Provincial ReconnaissanceUnit (PRU) Program.

Rudy Enders, the legendary chief of opera-tions for the CIA and one of the CIA’s most orig-inal and effective organizers of paramilitaryoperations, explains below the origins of thePhoenix program in SouthVietnam and the rolethe PRUs played in the early years of its exis-tence. We pick up his story, in his own words,in 1966:

As Agency-supported programs matured,the volume of intelligence at province levelbecame overwhelming. Some of it was tacti-cal, but most pertained to the VCI. As onewould expect, the collector seldom shared ex-ploitable intelligence with anyone. With spieseverywhere, who could be trusted? Whyshould you pass hot information and let oth-ers take credit for the operation? This couldbe said of the National Police, SpecialBranch, Rural Development Cadre, PRU, Mil-itary Security Service, and Sector and Sub-sector G-2s. In late 1966, they were allrunning operations against theVCI, but therewas little coordination or cooperation. Be-sides, delays in reaching province often ren-dered information totally useless. Obviously,something had to be done. The answer wasto design a mechanism to ensure coopera-tion amongst all existing South Vietnameseorganizations operating against theVCI, andthat this be done at the district as well as theprovince levels.

The CIA’s Region One ROIC [Regional Of-ficer in Charge] and his deputy grabbed thebull by the horns. They decided to run a pilotprogram in Quang Nam Province’s five dis-tricts, starting with Dien Ban District. Visitsto these districts revealed few had 1:50,000scale maps of their area, a war room, or anyfiles onVCI cadre. It was shocking. Most dis-trict compounds had barely enough room forthe subsector staff and advisors. Accordingly,the ROIC asked General [Lewis W.] Walt, thecommander of the Marines in I Corps, forsupplies to build five A-frame-type woodenDistrict Intelligence and Operation Coordi-nating Centers (DIOCC). The centers wouldbe staffed by representatives from the CIA’sCensus Grievance, PRU, Rural Development,and Police Special Branch, along with theSouth Vietnamese National Police and Mili-tary Security Service. They would be run bythe district chief’s S-2 and advised by anAmerican officer. The ROIC explained his ini-tiative to John Hart, the CIA’s Saigon stationchief at the time, and he used the term Intel-ligence Coordination and Exploitation(ICEX) as a way to describe the concept.

3

CIA felt ICEX was too much of a mouthfuland began looking for a symbolic alternativeby holding a region-wide contest to find anew name for the program. The word waspassed to all I Corps POICs, and the RDC/P(Rural Development Cadre/Programs) offi-cer in Quang Ngai suggested Phuong Hoang,Vietnamese for Phoenix, the mythical birdthat emerges from ashes. He won the contest,and that is how the Phoenix program got itsname.

Phoenix was nothing more than a coordi-nation and exploitation program directedagainst terrorists and those supporting ter-rorists. Organizations which came under thePhoenix umbrella were already workingagainst theVCI. The only difference involvedsitting down at the table to coordinate andexploit relevant, usable intelligence. It was

not some devious, nefarious CIA plot to as-sassinate unarmed civilians. Those whorisked their lives going after armed terroristswere not murderers. They were legitimatemilitary, paramilitary, and lawful policeforces facing terrorists, spies, and nonuni-formed armed insurgents. Blaming PhoenixforVCI deaths is like calling the FBI murder-ers because armed terrorists preferred tofight rather than surrender to lawful au-thority. . . .

After we established the DIOCCs in I Corps,the Phoenix program began to take on a lifeof its own. The clandestine VCI became ourtop priority. As long as it existed, pacificationwas impossible. VC terror tactics were farmore effective in winning over the popula-tion than any “hearts and minds” program.ICEX/Phoenix soon came under the micro-scope of the Saigon Station staff and waseventually scrutinized by the ambassadorand Robert“Blowtorch”Komer. It didn’t takelong for Komer to seize upon Phoenix as away to make his mark in Vietnam. He hadPresident [Lyndon B.] Johnson’s ear and thismade him politically powerful. Anyonestanding in his way would be run over witha bulldozer.

If anyone could move the program for-ward, it was this overbearing, arrogant, mis-sion-driven former CIA analyst. He acted asa ramrod to implement a “rifle shot” ratherthan a“shotgun”approach to theVCI. As thenumber-three man in Saigon, he vetoed var-ious “concept” papers until a “missions andfunctions”paper finally appeared before him,which he accepted.“Anything else,” he said,“would not be understood by the military.”

Although Komer would be the Phoenix“Czar,” he needed someone to actually runthe program. Here he fingered CIA’s EvanParker Jr. of the Parker Pen Company. Hecouldn’t have made a better choice. EvanParker was a first-generation paramilitaryofficer, having served with OSS Detachment101 during World War II as a liaison officerwith Merrill’s Marauders and the British. Hewas a GS-16 at the time, considered highly

4

Photo courtesy of CWO-4 Ronald J. Lauzon

Provincial Reconnaissance Unit operators in ThuaThien Province in 1967. In areas contested or con-trolled by the Vietnamese Communists, they wouldgo on operations dressed to blend in with the VietCong (VC) or North Vietnamese Army (NVA). Theweapon is a Communist bloc AK-47.

intelligent, soft-spoken, well organized, enor-mously respected, and extremely capable. Healso came from my parent Special Opera-tions Division at CIA headquarters and laterbecame its chief, an organization I wouldlater head.

Essentially, those in Saigon institutional-ized what we were already doing in I Corps.By the summer of 1967, MACV agreed to as-sign military intelligence officers to theDIOCCs and PIOCCs throughout the country.The name change to Phoenix (except in ICorps) was in transition; thus, all the earlyprogram guidance written by Parker’s staffwas circulated as ICEX memoranda. All ofthis meant nothing to us in I Corps exceptadded focus and high-level attention to whatwe were doing. Indeed, many of the paperscirculated were simply upgraded versions ofwhat we already had drafted to explain ICEXto Saigon.4

As Enders stated, the Phoenix program wasan effort to unify the disparate counterinsur-gency programs of both the United States andthe GVN so a more effective approach couldbe developed. This widely misunderstood pro-gram was a bureaucratic consolidation of thevarious ongoing intelligence-gathering effortsbeing employed in South Vietnam to fight theCommunist political infrastructure. Becausethe Phoenix program included several CIA-sponsored activities, such as the PRUs, it wasgiven an aura of secrecy that only served toarouse suspicion among many observers andlater among some scholars that the programsomehow involved“illegal”or“criminal”activ-ities.5 In reality, the Phoenix program soughtto organize the fight against theVCI in a moresystematic and effective manner by requiringthe various GVN andAmerican agencies to co-operate and coordinate on a countrywidelevel.

The efficacy of this approach was not loston the Communists, who recognized and ac-knowledged the serious threat Phoenix posedto their plans to subvert the GVN. In fact,thereis no more cogent proof of the fear thatPhoenix instilled in the Communists than the

comments of several North Vietnamese Com-munists who verified the program’s effective-ness after winning the war. Perhaps the mosttelling of these are credited to Mai Chi Tho,who controlled the most famousViet Cong spyof the war, Pham Xuan An, a strategicallyplaced journalist in the Time magazine officein Saigon. He identified An’s “most valuablecontribution” over nearly 25 years of spyingfor the NorthVietnamese as“everything on thepacification program . . . so we could developan ‘anti’ plan to defeat them. . . . I consider thisto be the most important because of its strate-gic scale.”6

Despite having the completeAmerican andSouthVietnamese pacification plans, the Com-munists never were able to defeat the GVNpacification program and, indeed, by early1969, the Communists realized that their planfor a “general uprising” using local Viet Congunits in South Vietnam was doomed to failureand that a purely military solution involvingCommunist forces from North Vietnam invad-ing South Vietnam was the proper strategy topursue. Internal Communist documents andinformation provided by CIA spies within theVCI confirmed that theVCI and theirVC guer-rilla forces were largely defeated by early 1970leaving little option for the northern Commu-nists but to pursue a conventional militarystrategy. For an insight into this changed strat-egy from the enemy’s side, see Truong NhuTang’s Viet Cong Memoir, which details theenemy’s analysis of the military and politicalsituation in South Vietnam during the crucialyear of 1970.

To understand the PRU Program and how itwas used to attack the VCI, it is helpful to un-derstand how it fit into the overall Phoenixprogram, in theory and practice. Before 1967,the PRU teams were under the control of CIAofficers in many ofVietnam’s 44 provinces,butthey had no real national-level coordinationmechanism. It was in 1967 that the PRU finallybecame a national program under CIA officerEvan Parker and was given its national-levelmission of defeating the political infrastructureof the Viet Cong.7 The ICEX Program evolvedinto the Phoenix program, but the PRU mis-

5

sion remained the same despite this organiza-tional change.

The Phoenix program as it emerged at theend of 1967 had organizational structures atevery level of administration in SouthVietnam.At the national level, the Phoenix Committeewas chaired by the minister of interior, withthe director general of the National Police asthe vice chairman. Other members of the na-tional-level Phoenix Committee were the min-ister of defense, the J-2 and J-3 of the JointGeneral Staff,and representatives from the Na-tional Police Field Force (NPFF), the PoliceSpecial Branch (PSB), the Revolutionary De-velopment (RD) Ministry, and the Chieu HoiMinistry.

At the national level, one of the key CIA as-sistants to the CIA’s chief of station on the PRUProgram was the legendary Tucker Gougle-mann, a former Marine who was severelywounded during the battle for Guadalcanal.He was medically discharged from the MarineCorps after World War II and joined the CIA.The author had several conversations with Mr.Gouglemann in the Duc Hotel in Saigon in1969 and found him to be a highly intelligentand engaging man who could best be de-scribed as a brilliant and profane curmudgeonwho possessed an intense love for his job andthe Vietnamese. He also had an almost patho-logical hatred of bureaucracy and bureaucrats,whom he felt had little understanding of Viet-nam or how the war should be fought. Sadly,Gouglemann was captured in Saigon after theCommunist victory in 1975 and died under-going interrogation by the North Vietnamese.His body was released to the American gov-ernment two years after his capture andshowed clear signs of torture.8

The senior U.S. Marine officer assigned tothe PRU was then-Lieutenant ColonelTerenceM.Allen, a combat veteran of the Korean andVietnam wars who spent nearly three years inVietnam running the Department of Defense(DoD) side of the PRU program. He was tire-less in his efforts to mold the PRU into an ef-fective counter-VCI organization, a task thatwas often complicated and frustrated by what

he described as “the obstruction of the U.S.State Department and the naïve and false re-porting of U.S. journalists who had no valid un-derstanding of the PRU.”9 Major, later Colonel,Nguyen Van Lang was the senior Vietnameseassigned to the PRU headquarters in Saigon.Later, Major Lang became the director of thePRU when control of the PRU passed from theCIA to the South Vietnamese National Police.From 1968 until 1970, Colonel Allen’s job in-volved providing advice and assistance toMajor Lang on the national administration ofthe program.

At the regional level, the Phoenix Commit-tee was chaired by the region’s military com-mander, and the deputy chair was the region’sNational Police commander. The remainder ofthe committee was made up of representativesfrom the same ministries found on the nationalcommittee.

The provincial Phoenix Committee differedfrom the national and regional Phoenix com-mittees in one very significant way. The na-tional and regional Phoenix committees werelargely administrative entities that providedguidance and advice to the seniorVietnamesepolitical leaders and set counterinsurgencypolicy. The provincial Phoenix committeeswere actively engaged in the collection of in-telligence on,and the targeting of,theVCI. Theprovincial Phoenix committees were chairedby the province chief, normally an ARVNcolonel or lieutenant colonel,with the provin-cial police chief as the deputy-chairman, al-though in some provinces the cochair was theprovincial intelligence officer. Representativesof the G-2, the G-3, the Rural Development(RD) program,the Police Special Branch (PSB),Census Grievance (CG), the National PoliceField Force (NPFF),and the Chieu Hoi programmade up the rest of the committee,along withintelligence officers from the military units inthe province. The provincial Phoenix com-mittees were required to meet at least once aweek, but they often met far more frequently,sometimes daily. They operated 24 hours aday, every day, collecting and discussing intel-ligence on the VCI, maintaining extensiverecords on the progress of the anti-VCI effort

6

in their province,and issuing arrest orders forVCI suspects.

Below the provincial Phoenix committeeswere the DIOCCs. These were the district-level Phoenix Committees, and they served asthe front-line units in the war on theVCI. TheDIOCC was organized along the same lines asthe Provincial Phoenix Committee, and likethe Provincial Phoenix Committee, it operated24 hours a day, seven days a week. In additionto its intelligence-gathering and VCI-targetingduties, it also provided intelligence for theAmerican and Vietnamese military units sta-tioned in the district. Each DIOCC had foursections: administrative, military intelligence,police intelligence, and operations. In manyDIOCCs, the PRU was represented, but nor-mally they had no representation on theDIOCC. Instead, the PRU provided its intelli-gence input to the police intelligence repre-sentative in the DIOCC and received missionsdirectly from the district chief.10

The DIOCCs created dossiers on VCI per-sonnel and coordinated the efforts to arrest

VCI and bring them to justice. They also main-tained a list of all VCI positions in the districtand attempted to identify the individuals inthese positions. While many organizationswere given the mission of defeating the VCI,such as the National Police,the National PoliceSpecial Branch, and the armed forces of theUnited States and GVN, the principal actionarm of the Phoenix committees was the CIA-organized, -funded, and -controlled PRU.

In theory, the DIOCC system provided theinfrastructure needed to collect intelligenceon the VCI and to coordinate operationsagainst it. In practice, the DIOCC system didnot always work as it was intended. Accord-ing to the U.S. Marine PRU advisors inter-viewed by the author, the DIOCC systemworked very well in the provinces where therepresentatives of the Vietnamese and Ameri-can agencies on the various regional, provin-cial, and district Phoenix committees workedwell together and cooperated in the genera-tion of operational leads.

However, several of the Marine PRU advi-

7

Chart re-created from Andradé, Ashes to Ashes, p.291

sors interviewed for this paper stated that thesystem in their province did not meet the stan-dards necessary to fully exploit the DIOCC sys-tem. They attributed this situation to severalfactors, but the primary one was bureaucraticjealousy on the part of the agencies repre-sented on the provincial and district-levelPhoenix committees. They also identified a re-luctance to share operational leads since theagencies involved were afraid they would notreceive the credit (and the budget allocations)they deserved if another agency acted on theintelligence they gathered. Petty personalityconflicts also militated against the smoothfunctioning of many DIOCCs. They stressedthat where the provincial and district chiefshad strong leadership skills and where Ameri-can advisors to the representatives on theDIOCCs enjoyed the confidence and respectof theirVietnamese counterparts, the DIOCCsfunctioned effectively.

Once the Phoenix program became a na-tionwide program with an organizationalstructure that ran from Saigon to each districtin the country, the CIA soon realized it did notpossess the personnel needed to provide therequired advisors for the PRU Program. In-deed, it was having great difficulty finding ad-equate numbers of CIA case officers for othertasks in SouthVietnam,especially case officerswith any experience in paramilitary activitiessuch as were required to advise the PRU. Sinceevery province in South Vietnam needed aPRU advisor and in some cases two, the CIAneeded at least 44American provincial PRU ad-visors and 30 regional and Saigon-based head-quarters staff. With a very limited number ofCIA paramilitary officers available worldwide,it was readily apparent that the CIA would notbe able to provide these PRU advisors usingtheir own personnel.

This serious shortcoming needed to besolved if effective control of the PRU was tobe established and maintained by the CIA. Thesolution to this problem came in the form ofassigning U.S. military personnel to the PRUProgram using cover orders assigning them tothe Combined Studies Division (CSD) of theMilitary Assistance Command, Vietnam

(MACV). Ideally, these DoD assignees were tobe skilled in the special warfare tasks neededby a PRU advisor. With this in mind, the bulkof the PRU advisors came from the U.S.Army’sSpecial Forces, the Navy’s Seals, and the U.S.Marine Corps’ Force Reconnaissance Compa-nies.

Since it was envisioned that the PRU wouldhave to coordinate closely with and supportU.S. forces, it was decided to assign PRU advi-sors to the four military regions based uponservice affiliation. For instance,since the bulkof U.S. forces in I Corps were U.S.Marines, theCIA tried to assign Marine PRU advisors to thatmilitary region. The U.S.Army was heavily rep-resented in II Corps and III Corps, so the CIAassigned U.S. Army Special Forces and U.S.Army Military Intelligence PRU advisors tothose two military regions. U.S. Navy Sealswere assigned as PRU advisors to the south-ernmost military region, IV Corps. The firstlarge contingent of U.S. military advisors wasassigned to the PRU in 1967. However, someU.S. military personnel had been assigned tothe PRU in very small numbers before 1967when the PRU Program was not organizedcountrywide. Most of these early U.S.militaryPRU advisors were assigned to I Corps.11

PRU Organization, Recruitment,Equipment, and Command and

ControlBefore 1967,the PRUs existed at the provin-

cial level,and less than half of the provinces inSouthVietnam had such units. They ranged insize from 30 to 300 men, depending on thesize of the province and the need for theirservices by the provincial chiefs and the CIA.Many of the early PRU units were organizedalong strictly military lines since they wereoften employed in military operations againstmain force VC units. In 1967, when Civil Op-erations and Rural Development Support(CORDS) took over operation of the PRU Pro-gram, the CIA decided to give the PRU a coun-trywide presence and a standard table oforganization for a PRU team. For reasons thatare not known, it was decided that each PRUteam would consist of 18 men broken down

8

into three six-man squads. The senior squadleader in each team became the team leader.The idea was to assign an 18-man PRU team toeach district so the team could react quicklyto any targets identified by the DIOCC in thatdistrict. In theory, each province would begiven enough PRU teams for one to be as-signed to each DIOCC. This new organizationwent into effect in late 1967 and was main-tained until the PRUs were integrated into theGVN National Police in 1973. This new na-tional-level PRU organization resulted in mostdistricts receiving an 18-man PRU team,whichmeant that small provinces with only a few dis-tricts or no districts had fewer than 50 PRUmembers assigned while larger, more popu-lous provinces with many districts had asmany as 300 PRU members assigned. In total,4,000 to 6,000 Vietnamese PRU personnelwere assigned countrywide to the programduring the years 1967 to 1975.12

A typical post-1967 provincial PRU organi-zation was the one found inTay Ninh Provincein South Vietnam’s III Corps. In this organiza-tion, each of the four districts in Tay NinhProvince was assigned an 18-man PRU teamand an additional 18-man team was assignedto the capital of the province as a “city team”that could mount operations in the densely

populated Tay Ninh City or be used to rein-force one or more of the district teams. A verysmall headquarters cell consisting of the SouthVietnamese PRU commander;his deputy,whowas also the leader of the Tay Ninh City PRUteam; and an operations/intelligence officerprovided the staff planning and interagencycoordination for the province. According tothe Marines assigned to the PRU, this form oforganizational structure worked well despitethe paucity of personnel assigned to staff du-ties.

The recruitment of PRU personnel variedfrom province to province. Many PRU mem-bers were formerVC or formerARVN soldiers.Some were former South Vietnamese SpecialForces soldiers or former members of a Citi-zen Irregular Defense Group (CIDG), while afew were simply local youths who did notwant to join the regular ARVN forces and pre-ferred to serve their country in their ownhome province. In a few provinces, someparoled criminals were allowed to join thePRU, but the number of such people was fewand greatly reduced after 1968. Some hadstrong religious and community affiliationsthat made them natural enemies of the Com-munists, such as Catholics, Cao Dai, Hoa Hao,and Montagnard tribesmen. Most PRU mem-

9

bers were strongly motivated by their hatredof theVCI.13 Since there were many people inevery province who had a grudge against theVCI, there were many South Vietnamese whowere eager to join the PRU. The fact that mostPRU hated theVCI made them a very formida-ble force and one that made it very difficult forthe Communists to infiltrate or proselytize.14

According to ColonelTerence M.Allen,the sen-ior military advisor to the PRU Program inSaigon from 1968 to 1970, the most effectivePRU teams were those who were recruitedamong the Cao Dai and Catholic religious com-munities and the Montagnard tribes sincethese groups had a visceral hatred of the VietCong and a vested interest in protecting theircommunities from the ravages inflicted onthem by the VCI terrorist cells.

The Marine PRU advisors interviewed bythe author expressed confidence in the re-cruiting methods used to obtain PRU membersand felt the men assigned to their units were,on balance, extremely competent and experi-enced. However,there were some notable ex-ceptions. This was especially true in the earlyphases of the PRU program when MACV firstbegan to assign its personnel in I Corps. Thesenior CIA officer in Quang Tri Province in1967, Warren H. Milberg, explained oneprovince’s recruiting problem this way:

Quang Tri was a relatively sparsely popu-lated province. By mid-1967, the war washeating up at all levels. Young men of mili-tary age and qualification were either in theARVN, the CIDG, or were engaged in farmingin the districts. PRU recruitment became aproblem of demographics: there was just nota large pool of physically and mentally qual-ified young men to choose from. It was prettywell known in the province what the PRU didand what their mission was so that eventhose who may have otherwise qualifiedwere too risk-averse to want to join. The peo-ple we did manage to recruit all came withtheir own set of “issues.” For the most part,this was not a problem, although we didhave some exceptions here and there. In theend, they became a great group of bravefighters, but they were not unlike a pack of

pit bulls: training, discipline, leadership andfocus were needed all the time.15

The experience of PRU advisor SergeantRodney H. Pupuhi in 1968 illustrates the re-cruiting challenges faced by the PRU in ICorps. When he reported to his PRU unit inHoi An, Quang Nam Province, in March 1968shortly after the Tet Offensive, he was not en-couraged by what he found. The Quang NamPRU was in the midst of being disbanded, andonly seven PRU members remained out of theoriginal pre-Tet force of more than 100 men.Like any good Marine noncommissioned offi-cer, Sergeant Pupuhi immediately took chargeof the situation, held a formation of his re-maining seven-man PRU force, made themsquad leaders,and sent them to their home vil-lages to recruit replacements for each squad.As he put it,“I gave these men strict guidelineson recruiting and a deadline of two weeks toreturn with enough recruits to fill the sevensquads. Slowly, these men came back with‘family within family’ recruits—that is, broth-ers recruited other brothers and nephews re-cruited cousins until we had the necessarynumbers to fill the squads.”

Pupuhi arranged with the CIA to give therecruits’ families advance pay and to have AirAmerica fly the recruits to Hoi An. In shortorder,Pupuhi had resurrected the HoiAn PRUwith reliable men and had embarked on a rig-orous training program to prepare his new re-cruits for their demanding and dangerousmissions. Within six weeks of his arrival in HoiAn,he had recruited,trained,and equipped hisnew unit and began conducting counter-VCIoperations.16

PRU teams were equipped with an assort-ment of uniforms, weapons, and equipment.Most PRU members dressed in the black paja-mas worn by Vietnam’s peasants or tiger-striped camouflage uniforms when they wentto the field, but some units actually usedVC/NVA grey or light green uniforms whensuch uniforms gave them a tactical advantage.In garrison, most PRU members wore eithercivilian clothes or the standard PRU tiger-striped camouflage uniform. This wide variety

10

of uniforms made it difficult for both theenemy and friendly units to identify them.Therefore, it was essential that the U.S.PRU ad-visors coordinate closely with friendly units ifthe PRU were to operate in areas where U.S.andARVN units were located. The Marine PRUadvisors normally wore black pajamas or tiger-striped camouflage uniforms in the field andcivilian clothes while in garrison. Some advi-sors even wore civilian clothes on PRU opera-tions but this was rare.

Weapons consisted primarily of M-16 rifles,45-caliber pistols,M-79 grenade launchers,andM-60 machine guns. However,many PRU unitsmaintained extensive armories of captured

weapons, and they often used these in opera-tions against the VCI. The PRUs found it con-venient to equip some of their men withCommunist-made AK-47 rifles and RPGgrenade launchers, so any VCI encounteredduring an operation in enemy territory wouldinitially think they were fellow VC. This gavethe PRUs a distinct tactical advantage in anyengagement.17

This ploy of using enemy weapons becamedangerous after late 1967 when the CIA beganplanting doctoredAK-47 and other enemy am-munition in enemy stockpiles. These doctoredrounds would explode when fired,causing se-rious, often fatal, wounds to those firing

11

Photo courtesy of GySgt Rodney H. Pupuhi

A more typical Provincial Reconnaissance Unit operation showing uniforms and equipment as worn bythe Vietnamese and Americans. This was more characteristic than the VC or NVA uniforms shown before.

them.18 Still, despite this serious risk, manyPRUs continued to use enemy weapons andammunition after 1967 when they thought therisk was worth it. Other weapons that wereemployed by PRU members and their advisorswere Browning 9-mm automatic pistols,38-cal-iber Colt Cobra revolvers,Browning automaticrifles (BAR), M-2 carbines, Swedish K subma-chine guns, and British Bren guns. This wideassortment of weapons posed a logistical chal-lenge to some PRU teams, but in most casesthere were never any serious shortages of am-munition. Captured enemy ammunition wasreadily available, and the CIA supply systemworked wonders in obtaining just about anyammunition required for operational use. Am-munition for the PRU was often stored inConEx boxes within the CIA“embassy house”compounds or in the various PRU armoriesthroughout the provinces so it could be rap-idly issued.

For communications, the PRUs wereequipped with the PRC-25 FM radio and its an-cillary equipment. A few PRU units maintainedsome high frequency radios for long-rangecommunications, but such radios were notstandard issue, and most PRUs needed to es-tablish temporary radio relay sites on moun-taintops to support their long-range missions.This was especially true in the mountainousareas of I Corps.The PRUs were given theirown frequencies for tactical communications.They were wary of the enemy interceptingtheir radio communications, so they seldomused their radios for the transmission of oper-ational details while they were in garrison,choosing instead to use their radios sparinglyand primarily during field operations. ThePRUs had neither encrypted communicationsequipment nor code pads,so communicationssecurity was often nonexistent,ad hoc,or rudi-mentary. One of many valuable assets anAmerican PRU advisor brought with himwhenever he accompanied a PRU team to thefield was the ability to encode communica-tions; however, the use of encoding materialswas not frequently employed during most PRUoperations,even those that were accompaniedby U.S. PRU advisors. Some PRUs did not use

radios on their operations,preferring to main-tain complete silence until the mission wascompleted.

PRU forces were equipped with groundtransport in the form of commercial lighttrucks and motorcycles, which were pur-chased by the CIA. These trucks and motor-cycles were typical of the trucks andmotorcycles used by Vietnamese civilians, sotheir use did not arouse suspicion or draw un-wanted attention to them when they were em-ployed by the PRU. It also made repair of thesetransport assets easy since parts, automotivesupplies,and repairs could be readily obtainedlocally. When major repairs were needed,PRUvehicles were taken to the CIA’s automotiverepair facility in Saigon.

Unfortunately, the trucks and motorcycleswere never provided in the numbers neededby the PRU. Often, only two to three truckswere given to each province, thus they had tobe shared by each district team or kept atprovince level for use as needed. Most PRUteams suffered because of the lack of organictransport. As a result, the PRUs also used pub-lic transportation,such as cyclos and buses,orprivately owned motorcycles or bicycles to in-sert themselves into operational areas.Dressed in civilian clothes and posing as civil-ian travelers, they were able to blend in withthe locals using these modes of transportationuntil they were near their operational area andready to engage their targets.19

Although most PRU operations did not re-quire U.S. military or ARVN transportation as-sets, the PRUs did avail themselves of suchtransport when it was provided to them, usu-ally through the good offices of the Viet-namese province chief, a district U.S. militaryadvisor,or the U.S.PRU advisor. For operationsover long distances and in mountainous ter-rain, the PRUs would rely primarily on U.S.hel-icopters for insertion and extraction. Most U.S.PRU advisors felt the PRUs would have beeneven more effective had they possessed addi-tional organic transportation assets, such asthree-quarter-ton trucks and motorcycles, anda dedicated helicopter package in each mili-

12

tary region. The U.S. PRU advisors stated thatthey often lost valuable time trying to obtainnonorganic transportation for deep or difficultPRU operations,and these delays often had anadverse impact on the success rate of such op-erations. Since most PRU targets were fleet-ing in nature, a timely response, often within24 hours,was needed to achieve success. Thelack of organic or rapidly available transporta-tion assets often meant that the target wasgone by the time the transportation had beenarranged.

As stated earlier, the PRUs were under theoperational control of the CIA. However,under an agreement between the GVN and theCIA, the Vietnamese province chiefs weregiven some control over how and when thePRUs could be used. In some instances, thisdual-command relationship caused friction be-tween the local CIA leadership in the provinceand the province chiefs. The relationship wascertainly a violation of the unity of commandprinciple. Theoretically, all PRU operations ina province required both the approval of theprovincial officer in charge (POIC), who wasthe senior CIA officer in the province,and theprovince chief. In many provinces, the PRUsfollowed this arrangement, but in someprovinces, the CIA disregarded it.

In the case of the author, he followed thedual command relationship procedures andencountered little problem with it in hisprovince. He had few problems obtaining dualauthorization for a mission, usually obtainingthe approval of both his POIC and provincechief in a matter of a few hours. He did this byhaving his Vietnamese PRU operations officeruse a standard-form arrest order for each VCIsuspect identified, then he would hand carrythe arrest order to the province chief after thePOIC had initialed his concurrence. In somecases, the author was also required to obtainthe signature of the provincial judicial repre-sentative on the Provincial Intelligence Oper-ations Coordination Committee to ensure thatthe arrest order was issued properly and withthe necessary legal safeguards.20

Some PRU advisors simply obtained the per-

mission of the POIC and assumed the POICwould get the province chief’s approval. Asthe program matured,the necessity to fully co-ordinate PRU arrest orders and operationswith the province chiefs became institutional-ized. One positive aspect of this dual approvalsystem was the increased cooperation it gen-erated between theVietnamese andAmericanagencies assigned counter-VCI duties. It alsohelped to break down suspicion among theVietnamese Phoenix agencies that the CIA wasacting alone and without consideration of thesovereignty of the Vietnamese government.

The PRU command and control authorityon the Vietnamese side came down from thepresident through the minister of interior tothe province chiefs and finally down to the dis-trict chiefs, but this was more administrativethan operational since day-to-day operations ofthe PRUs were planned and executed underthe direct supervision of the CIA. In a practi-cal sense, the CIA POICs controlled the PRUsand used theAmerican PRU advisors to ensurethe PRU teams were properly employed oncounter-VCI operations.

A great deal of authority and independenceof action was given to the PRU advisors,oftenamounting to outright autonomy. Since manyPOICs were busy with their primary duties,not the least of which was the collection ofpolitical and strategic intelligence on theenemy’s Central Office South Vietnam(COSVN) and the North Vietnamese govern-ment, they simply did not have the time to mi-cromanage the PRU advisor. Also,many POICslacked military experience or their military ex-perience was dated. This meant that they didnot feel they had the technical expertise toplan and control the types of operations thePRUs were conducting and preferred to leavethe operational details to the initiative of theAmerican PRU advisors.

Because the PRU advisors had a great deal ofcontrol over how and when their PRU teamswere employed,the job required a level of ma-turity and sophistication not commonly foundamong the normal special operations soldier,sailor, or Marine. The American PRU advisors

13

were unanimous in their recommendation thatthe best men for assignment to this form ofduty should be in the age range of 25 to 30years old and should have obtained at leastthe equivalent rank of sergeant (E-5) for en-listed and first lieutenant (O-2) for officers.Ideally, they felt the enlisted advisors shouldbe the equivalent of gunnery sergeants (E-7)and the officers should be captains (0-3). Com-mand and control of PRU-type units requiredobjectivity,maturity, and sound judgment—alltraits that can only be developed with timeand experience. The American PRU advisorswere unanimous in their belief that immatu-rity and emotionalism were two of the mostdestructive and corrosive characteristics a PRUadvisor could possess and,along with a lack ofcultural sensitivity, the root causes of most se-rious problems.

The number of U.S. military PRU advisorswas small;perhaps no more than 400 were as-signed to the program from 1967 to 1971. Ofthat number, the author has been able to iden-tify 51 Marines who served with PRUs as ad-visors. See the Appendix for a list of theseMarine PRU advisors.

The experiences of the PRU advisors variedwith their respective units and the provincesin which they served. As the Phoenix programmatured and the PRU developed into a trulynationwide organization, the Marine PRU ad-visors helped mold and shape this develop-ment. The following firsthand accounts willgive the reader an idea of how the advisory ef-fort progressed from its inception until the lastU.S.military advisors were removed.

Sergeant Paul C. Whitlock: Oneof the First and Best, 1966-1967

Sergeant Whitlock’s outstanding per-formance in Quang Tri led the CIA toask for more such fine men to assist theCIA’s PRU advisory effort. His input isextremely valuable in explaining howhe easily fit in and contributed posi-tively to Agency paramilitary field pro-grams.

Rudy Enders 21

Paul C.Whitlock was a young staff sergeantserving as a reconnaissance team leader in the3d Force Reconnaissance Company in Octo-ber 1966 when he was called into the officeof his commanding officer, Captain KennethJordan, and told he was to report to work inQuangTri City and“form a reconnaissance unitthere” for special police operations. Staff Ser-geant Whitlock asked Captain Jordan why hehad been selected for this assignment,and Jor-dan simply replied,“because you are a Marine.”Whitlock knew better than to ask any morequestions, and besides, he trusted Jordan andknew there must be a good reason why hewanted him to go to QuangTri City. Whitlockwas one of the first Marines assigned to thePRU Program and he remained with theQuang Tri PRU from October 1966 until May1967. The CIA officers who knew Whitlockspoke highly of him and stated that as one ofthe first Marines assigned to the PRU in ICorps, he set the standard for every Marinewho followed.

WhenWhitlock reported to his CIA boss inQuangTri, he found a recently organized PRU,one that had been staffed with former mem-bers of the Counter Terrorist Team (CTT) forQuangTri. His unit consisted of 200 men, ledby a very capable PRU chief and already con-ducting operations against theVCI. He imme-diately struck up a strong professionalrelationship with the PRU chief, and this rela-tionship remained healthy throughout theeight months thatWhitlock was the QuangTriPRU advisor. Whitlock considered the PRUchief to be a strong leader who enjoyed the re-spect of his men and the Americans whoworked with him.

Whitlock also had an excellent relationshipwith the province chief. He stated that he andthe province chief“worked well together,”not-ing that “he helped out when and where hecould.” It was evident from Whitlock’s com-ments to the author that having both a capableand strong PRU chief and a reliable and coop-erative province chief made his job easier andhis work more effective than it would havebeen without these two key men assisting him.Whitlock also had high praise for his boss, the

14

POIC, Thomas D. Harlan. Harlan worked inwhat was labeled the Office of Civil Opera-tions for Quang Tri Province. According toWhitlock, Harlan helped him whenever heneeded help, provided him with many excel-lent operational leads,and backed him up“100percent.”

The QuangTri PRU had two types of opera-tions. They were based upon the geographyof the province. “Deep” missions were thosethat were conducted in the western moun-tains of the province in such areas as the BeiLonValley,Khe Sanh,and the QuangTri and BeiLon rivers. These missions were assigned bythe 3d Marine Amphibious Force (III MAF)headquarters and could best be described aslong-range reconnaissance missions since theirmain purpose was to determine what the NVAunits in those areas were doing. As such, theywere not the classic counter-VCI mission nor-mally assigned to a PRU. These operationswere coordinated with III MAF by the POIC,Tom Harlan, and employed “handpickedteams”of PRU members. The teams were nor-mally inserted and extracted by Marine heli-copters. Prior to insertion on these “deep”missions, the PRU team, which normally con-sisted of five to seven men, was isolated andonly briefed on the location of the mission justprior to departure. This was done to ensureoperational security. Some of these“deep”mis-sions requiredWhitlock to establish radio relaystations on prominent terrain features so theteams would have continuous FM radio con-tact with PRU headquarters.

The second type of mission the Quang TriPRU conducted was the“coastal”mission. Thisentailed operating in the eastern section of theprovince in the populated coastal plain. Theseoperations involved teams of 10 to 15 men.The means of insertion and extraction variedfrom Marine helicopters to commercial boatsand other forms of transportation readily avail-able. The focus of the “coastal” missions wasthe capture of VCI, not reconnaissance. Assuch, they were equipped,dressed,and armedfor raid operations against known or sus-pected VCI targets.

The Quang Tri PRU dressed in tiger-stripedcamouflage uniforms,black pajamas, and NVAlight green uniforms,depending on the condi-tions and the mission. The only civilian clothesthey wore were the ubiquitous black pajamasworn by peasants in the countryside. The unitemployed PRC-25 radios for communications,and they carried an assortment of weapons,which were issued depending on the mission.For instance,“deep” mission teams normallywere armed with M-16 rifles, while “coastal”missions used M-1 and M-14 rifles and M-2 car-bines.

Whitlock described his PRU as “very welltrained.” This was so becauseWhitlock made itso. Like most PRU advisors, he spent a lot oftime in garrison training his troops. Most ofhis training “involved land navigation, radioprocedures, reconnaissance techniques,weapons training and small unit tactics.” Hepossessed well-developed organizational skillsand was able to increase the strength of hisunit from 200 to 300 men, all while maintain-ing a professional force, well trained and wellequipped for their mission.

Whitlock identified the main strength of hisPRU as “the ability to move around when andwhere others could not. . . .They knew the ter-rain and the people.” The one serious problemhe had with his unit was the lack of reliabilityof some of the PRU members to carry out theirmission properly. Specifically, he often couldnot be sure they went where they were in-structed to go or carried out their mission ashe wanted them to unless he went along onthe mission. Later on, he developed a meansfor checking on their veracity when he did notaccompany them on an operation. He did thisby assigning a different insert and extractionlocation for each mission. By doing this, thePRU team had to travel from its insertion loca-tion through the area Whitlock wanted cov-ered in order to reach its extraction location.

The best source of intelligence on the VCIin QuangTri Province was the intelligence gen-erated by the PRU using local people. TheQuang Tri PRU members “had their own sys-tem for gathering intelligence,” according to

15

Whitlock, and it proved to be accurate wheremost other sources were not. Whitlock wouldsend his PRU members and their families outinto their home villages to develop operationalleads. “They were to pay attention to their sur-roundings and report back. . . . Once the PRUand their family members developed enoughinformation on the local VCI, the PRU wouldlaunch an operation.” Whitlock also identifiedprisoner interrogation by the PRU as a valuablesource of exploitable intelligence.

Whitlock offered this advice for futureMarines involved in a counterinsurgency likethe one he fought in during the Vietnam War:“Find an in-country leader who you can trustand communicate with effectively. Also, if youcan’t speak the local language, find a good in-terpreter who will follow your instructionscompletely and will translate exactly what youhave said without embellishment.” 22

CIA officer Rudy Enders,who was the chiefof operations in I Corps when Whitlock wasfirst assigned to the PRU, thought Whitlockpossessed in abundance the qualities neededfor a PRU advisor. He wrote:

There are many qualifications associatedwith being an effective PRU advisor. Let’stake Whitlock as an example. First of all, hewas an experienced, brave combat leaderwho could assess the capabilities and short-comings of the men he advised. If necessary,he could train them in every aspect of smallunit tactics starting with basic shooting, fireand maneuver, scouting and patrolling, mapand compass, etc. . . . I understand he did this.Furthermore, he singled out his PRU com-mander, Do Bach, as a heroic, competentwarrior. To gain PRU confidence, he accom-panied Bach on dangerous missions provinghe was willing to lay his life on the line whilefighting alongside his men. This is what lead-ership is all about.

Secondly, Whitlock was mature. He wasnot some wide-eyed kid looking for adven-ture. Instead, he understood the seriousnessof his position and behaved accordingly. Ican’t overstate the importance of this attrib-ute. PRU advisors performed their jobs with

very little oversight and supervision. This re-quires a high degree of self-discipline andcommitment common to most Marines.

Finally,Whitlock was aggressive. He siftedthrough mountains of intelligence reports tofind the most promising. His PRUs didn’t sitaround in camp waiting for things to hap-pen, they made things happen. They soughtout the enemy, enough so that the NorthViet-namese sent a special sapper unit to destroythe PRU camp. The point is, a single Marine,Whitlock, with CIA help, produced an effec-tive and aggressive South Vietnamese coun-terinsurgency force of over 300 men. 23

Staff Sergeant Whitlock was one of the firstand best U.S. military PRU advisors and, assuch,he became a model for the advisors thatfollowed. His POIC,Thomas Harlan, summedup the contributions ofWhitlock in a letter hewrote to the commanding general, 3d MarineDivision,on 3April 1967 thanking the generalfor sending such a highly trained and capableNCO to the PRU Program. Harlan wrote thatWhitlock“displayed unique dedication, imagi-nation, and knowledge of his job. . . . [T]hePRUs under his guidance have distinguishedthemselves in long range reconnaissance pa-trols and unconventional warfare operations. .. . [H]is methods are being adapted throughoutI Corps with all Provincial ReconnaissanceUnits being patterned after the one in QuangTri Province.”

Whitlock retired from the Marine Corps asa gunnery sergeant in 1974 and then workedfour years with a high school Junior ROTC pro-gram before embarking on a 20-year career asa project manager for a major commercial con-tracting firm.

Sergeant Ronald J. Lauzon:Hue City, 1967

Sergeant Ronald J. (Ron) Lauzon had 12years of military experience—six with the AirForce and six with the Marines—when he wasassigned to the PRU on 8 March 1967. His as-signment took him to Hue City in Thua ThienProvince, and he remained with the PRU inHue City until he was reassigned to the Marine

16

Corps on 8 October 1967. He described thetime he spent as a PRU advisor as “a great ex-perience for an E-5/E-6 during the peak of theprogram,”and one he considered the most re-warding of his Marine Corps career. He retiredfrom the Marine Corps as a chief warrant offi-cer (CWO-4). Lauzon provided the followingselected comments in a paper he submitted tothe author:

I relieved Sergeant Robert B. Bright III asthe PRU advisor for Thua Thien Province. Hehad done an outstanding job of organizing,training, equipping, and establishing coordi-nation for the unit. I inherited a PRU unitof 137 soldiers, but I paired it down to 117,and I lost seven killed in combat during theseven months I was their advisor.

I did not have much bush time with theunit;most of the100 or so operations I spon-sored were small-unit actions aimed at gain-ing or supporting intelligence requested by

the Regional Officer in Charge (ROIC) and,as such, participation on them was restrictedto indigenous personnel. On most of our op-erations, a Caucasian would not have fit in,and the CIA was paranoid about havingsomeone captured by the enemy who pos-sessed internal knowledge of how the CIA op-erated.

I did go on major military operationswhich were requested by MACV, USMC, orARVN units, but these operations were all ul-timate disasters for the PRU since they wereemployed as regular ground forces, and theywere not trained or equipped for such em-ployment. Many times these large-scale mis-sions were misrepresented to CORDS asmissions appropriate for the PRU, but inevery case they turned into standard mili-tary type operations against main force VCor NVA units.

I principally served out of Hue City and

17

Photo courtesy of CWO-4 Ronald J. Lauzon

Sergeant Ronald J. Lauzon on operations with the Thua Thein Provincial Reconnaissance Unit in 1967.Marine advisors wore utility, tiger-stripe, or even black “pajama” uniforms while in the field. Note thelack of distinguishing rank or other insignia.

stayed in the PRU compound, which wasMadame Nhu’s summer home.* This com-pound sat on the northwest corner of theHue perimeter overlooking the Royal Tombs.My area of operations was the entireprovince with the exception of Hue City. Thecity was solely reserved for the CORDS intel-ligence section, which had a number ofUSMC counterintelligence personnel as-signed to it. They worked out of the NationalPolice Intelligence Center, and they reliedheavily on the province’s Police SpecialBranch (PSB), which gathered most of its in-telligence from the province’s interrogationcenter (PIC).

I did not live in an “embassy house,” likemany other PRU advisors. Instead, I lived ina leased house in southern Hue across froma large Roman Catholic cathedral close to thePhu Can Canal along Nguyen Hue Street.This house was where my replacement waskilled and where Ray Lau spent a couple ofdays in a pigsty hiding from the VC duringthe Tet Offensive when the enemy controlledthe city. I rotated where I slept almost nightlyduring my PRU tour, spending some nightsat my house, some at the PRU barracks, someat Ray Lau’s, some at the POIC’s house, andsome at other trusted locations. We wereoften on alert for an attack, and we keptarms and ammunition stored in our housein case we came under attack.

PRU operations varied from province toprovince based upon the enemy situation ineach province and the priorities of the CIAand the province chiefs. In our case, the POICand his assistant strictly wanted the PRU togenerate intelligence and not lose any assets.There was no doubt in anyone’s mind thatassassinations were strictly forbidden. Thiswas stressed by both Colonel Redel,24 whobriefed me in Saigon during my indoctrina-tion, and by my training instructors at theCIA PRU training base at Vung Tau in IIICorps. My PRU teams were strictly focused

on obtaining intelligence about the VCI inmy province and ensuring this intelligencewas put to good use by the various Viet-namese andAmerican units in the province.

Since I had access to all the intelligenceresources in I Corps, I could pick up the lat-est reports from the MACV compound, theSpecial Forces SOG Headquarters, the 3d Ma-rine Division G-2, the 8th Radio Relay Unit(RRU), the Army Side Looking Radar and In-frared Assessments, and the PIC. I wouldread through these reports each night look-ing for any information about the latestmovements of the National Liberation Front(NLF) committee members. This includedtheVC paymasters, recruiters, party organiz-ers, armed propaganda teams, and assassi-nation squads. Once I picked a couple oftargets, I would go to the PRU compoundearly in the morning and brief the PRU Com-mander, Mr.Mau. We would agree on one ortwo missions and assign the missions to theplatoon leader on duty, who would select themen, uniforms, and equipment for the mis-sions. We had two 30-man rifle platoons; a30-man weapons platoon equipped with60mm mortars, RPGs, and crew-served ma-chine guns; and a headquarters section,which included intelligence, logistics, armory,and first-aid personnel.

Once the teams were identified for the mis-sion, they were put into isolation. The PRUintelligence section would brief them on themission and any pertinent information theyhad on the target(s), the supply sectionwould issue them their special equipment(cameras, binoculars, sensors, radios, etc.),and the armory would issue them their am-munition and special weapons (sniper rifles,claymore mines, satchel charges, pistols, etc.).

The majority of the 117 PRU I ultimatelyended up with were holdovers from the pre-vious Counter Terrorist Team (CTT) programin the province. We also had 13 active PRUintelligence agents in the field. We had verylittle turnover, and we were very selective inwhom we chose to join our ranks. A few ofour men were formerVC, and some were for-

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*Madame Nhu was the flamboyant wife of Ngo Dinh Nhu, theyounger brother and chief advisor of Ngo Dinh Diem,who waspresident of SouthVietnam until he and his brother were assas-sinated in 1963.

mer ARVN Rangers and Marines who hadcompleted their military service but wantedto join the PRU in their home province. All ofmy PRU were local people, and they camefrom all eight districts, which meant theyhad firsthand knowledge of the terrain andpeople where they were operating. Most hadserved in the military, eitherVC orARVN, andthey had been trained at the PRU trainingcenter in Vung Tau and at the Reconnais-sance Indoctrination Program (RIP) schoolat the 1st Marine Division at Da Nang. Theywere, in my opinion, well trained and highlyexperienced soldiers. I liked the PRU Iworked with and had complete confidence inthe team leaders and the PRU Commander,Mr.Mau.

All operations in the province were cen-trally planned and controlled out of the PRUcompound in Hue City. To my knowledge, wedid not have active DIOCCs in the eight dis-tricts in our province and, if we did, I had nocontact with them. To be honest, I onlytrusted our own intelligence system, whichwas operated by the RD/PRU/CG/CI intelli-gence center in Hue City.

The operational PRU teams were usuallysmall, four or five men, with one of the menfamiliar with the area of operations and thepeople living there. They would dress eitherin civilian clothes or VC uniforms and beequipped withAK-47 rifles, French pistols, M-1 carbines, and hand grenades. They wouldbe inserted late in the day but before curfewat a neutral point as close to the target areaas possible, either by public transportationor taxicab. Sometimes they went by bicycleor used U.S. Navy swift boats for insertion.We often used U.S. Marine Combined ActionPlatoon (CAP) compounds in the country-side to launch operations, and we consideredthese CAP areas ideal for the insertion of ourteams since they could provide coordinationwith higher headquarters in the 3d MarineDivision and a safe haven once an operationwas completed.

After a team was inserted, I went to theMACV compound and reported the opera-

tional plan. I reported the operation after in-sertion because I did not want any enemyagents in the MACV compound to reveal theoperation to the NLF.

While I was a PRU advisor, I read literallyhundreds of intelligence reports from the U.S.and South Vietnamese military, and not asingle one was either timely or totally accu-rate. The military intelligence reports werewritten with specific times and dates withspecific map coordinates and numbers, but Ifound out from dozens of interrogations thatthe VCI did not read or use map coordi-nates—they just used place names such asCam Lo Bridge or Phouc LyVillage—and theymeasured time by “after a specific event,soon, pretty soon, or now.” The unit descrip-tions used in the military reports meantnothing to me since a“VC squad”could num-ber between 1 and 50 men and a “VC com-pany” could number between a dozen andseveral hundred men.

We mounted over 100 operations duringmy tour with the PRU, and 11 of these were

19

Sergeant Lauzon in garrison with a member of theThua Thein Provincial Reconnaissance Unit in1967. In these circumstances, civilian clothes wereusally worn.

Photo courtesy of CWO-4 Ronald J. Lauzon

successful in capturing or killing VCI. Therewere only two sources for these 11 successfulmissions: the PRU’s organic intelligence sys-tem and Ray Lau’s RD Census Grievance el-ement, which gathered information from theRD team’s travels in the province. We nevergot any operational leads that resulted in asuccessful operation from any other source,including the PIC and the PSB.

These successful missions were either anambush or a raid on a specific house or areathat we knew hadVCI in it. When a missionwas completed, which normally lasted only24 hours, the PRU team would call in by tele-phone, and they would be picked up by aPRU vehicle or an RD vehicle at the nearesthighway. Captured prisoners were broughtback to the PRU compound and interrogatedby Mr. Mau and his PRU intelligence team.After we had them for 24 hours, we were sup-posed to turn them over to the PIC and themilitary interrogation center with the USMCCI representative, but after a visit to these fa-cilities, I never turned any more prisonersover to them. If the prisoners were high value(Category A or B), we shipped them to DaNang City for interrogation by the CIA, but ifthey were low-level cadre, such as a nurse orpaymaster, we often simply interrogatedthem and sent them home, or in the case oftwo individuals, we allowed them to join thePRU.

The only serious trouble we had was theresult of conflicts between U.S. and Viet-namese officials concerning who controlledthe PRU. CORDS paid the bills and ran theoperation, but the province chief believed thePRU was his to use as he saw fit. This conflictoften resulted in the misuse of the PRU andplaced me in the middle of these bureau-cratic and political battles. Cooperation andcoordination were sometimes a problem inmy province because of this ambiguous com-mand relationship.

My boss was the CIA’s POIC. I had twobosses during my tour, one of whom leftshortly after I was assigned. The second POICwas a “CIA paramilitary type” who prohib-

ited me from participating in any PRU oper-ations. He preferred to have onlyVietnameseparticipate in PRU operations. His rationalefor this was his conviction that “native inge-nuity” would find innovative ways for thePRU to accomplish their missions, and“sinceit was going to be a long war, they needed as-sets with experience operating on their own.”My POIC was supportive and gave me agreat deal of latitude in how I should do myjob. I left the PRU just before the 1968 Tet Of-fensive, and my POIC was in Da Nang Citywhen the VC/NVA struck. He was in theprocess of turning his job over to his re-placement, who had just settled into hisquarters in Hue City. The new POIC was cap-tured by the NVA when they invaded HueCity. He spent the rest of the war as a POW.

My replacement as PRU advisor, SergeantHoward Vaughn, reported for duty a fewweeks after I left and was killed defendingthe embassy house during the 1968 Tet Of-fensive.25

Staff Sergeant Wayne W.Thompson: Leadership

Challenges and Spies, 1967–68Staff Sergeant Wayne Thompson was a re-

connaissance team leader with the 1st ForceReconnaissance Company in July 1967 whenhe was told by his commanding officer, Cap-tain King Dixon, that he was to be reassignedto “a classified special project” that neededsomeone with his skills. A few days later, hewas driven to a large villa in Da Nang and in-troduced to a civilian who told him he wasgoing to work with a program run by the CIAin QuangTin Province. He was briefed on thePRU Program and its mission, but he receivedno training for his new job. After in-process-ing, he reported to his new job in Quang Tin.He lived in the embassy house in Tam Ky, theprovincial capital,with three otherAmericanswho were also assigned to the CIA, men heknew as “Richard,” an Army sergeant major;“Harry”; and“Jim.” Together, the four men ranthe CIA operations for QuangTin Province.

Thompsonwas a gifted andhighly experienced

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Marine staff noncommissionedofficer. Hehad ex-tensive experience with reconnaissance opera-tions having served in both the 2d and 1st ForceReconnaissance Companies, including severallong-range reconnaissance patrols in combat inVietnam. He possessed the maturity and the skillsneeded to succeed in his new demanding job. Asit would turn out,he would need those skills andthen some.

Thompson’s first major problem was a veryserious one. His PRU Chief, a Nung and not anativeVietnamese,was“incompetent and lazy”and considered “a thief” by everyone, accord-ing to Thompson. His PRU of approximately50 men did not venture outside of the com-pound, which was located on the perimeterof the provincial compound. His PRU chiefcontended that he was not allowed to leavethe compound because the province chief,anARVN lieutenant colonel, did not want toweaken the provincial compound’s security.

Thompson knew that he would never beable to accomplish his mission of defeatingtheVCI if this situation persisted. He fired thePRU chief 10 days after his arrival in QuangTin, then he went to the province chief towork out the security arrangement that waspreventing his PRU teams from conductingtheir proper mission. The province chief toldhim that the PRUs were the only fighters hecould really rely on to protect the provincialcompound and that he could not allow themto relinquish this essential security mission.Thompson worked out a deal with theprovince chief. In return for using 50 men toguard the provincial compound’s perimeter,he promised to increase the size of the PRUuntil he had enough additional men to con-duct counter-VCI missions. With the CIA’s per-mission, he began recruiting the additionalmen until he had 145 to 155 men on the PRUroles. Some of his best new recruits were VCprisoners held in the provincial prison whowere carefully vetted before they were al-lowed to join the ranks of the PRU.

Next,Thompson addressed the issue of whowould be the replacement for the PRU chiefhe had just fired. The province chief recom-

mended an elderly gentleman who was a po-litical ally of the province chief but clearly aman who lacked the military or leadershipskills needed to command a PRU. Thompsongot around this sensitive problem by convinc-ing the province chief that he would put theelderly gentleman recommended by theprovince chief in charge of the PRU securityforce of 50 men guarding the provincial com-pound and put a more competent and aggres-sive young former ARVN soldier in charge ofthe counter-VCI mission, appointing him asthe “Deputy PRU Chief for Operations.” Theprovince chief found this solution perfectlysuitable since he did not lose face by havinghis choice for PRU chief rejected, he wouldhave someone he trusted in charge of local se-curity around the provincial compound, andThompson would have the combat leader heneeded to root out the VCI. Using tact, goodjudgment,and an innovative approach,Thomp-son was able to overcome daunting problemsearly in his assignment with the Quang TinPRU and to win the respect, cooperation, andsupport of the province chief at the sametime.

During his eight months with the QuangTinPRU,Thompson’s PRU racked up a commend-able record by killing or capturing more than300 VC, NVA, and VCI while losing only ninePRU killed in action. Much of this success wasdue to the intelligence system thatThompsonhelped to develop for the PRU. He knew thathe could not rely on external sources for in-telligence on the VCI, although he did occa-sionally receive actionable intelligence fromthe Census Grievance and Special Branch ad-visors who lived with him in the embassyhouse. He decided that he had to form hisown intelligence organization for Quang TinProvince if he wanted his PRU to be truly ef-fective. He did this by recruiting six to tenagents distributed geographically throughoutthe areas either controlled or contested by theenemy. His agents were nominally paid fortheir information but only received paymentsfor information that was proven to be true orresulted in the capture of VCI.

Late in his tour with the PRU,Thompson’s

21

intelligence system generated accurate intelli-gence concerning a high-rankingVCI living ina house in a contested area west of Tam Ky.This information resulted in a combined forceof 50 PRU soldiers and a battalion of the U.S.1st Cavalry Division making a mechanized as-sault into the village where theVCI cadre washiding. This operation not only bagged theVCItarget but also resulted in the defeat of an NVAbattalion defending the village.

Thompson left the QuangTin PRU in March1968,but he returned toVietnam in 1969,serv-ing again with the 1st Force ReconnaissanceCompany in Quang Nam Province. He was se-riously injured during an emergency helicop-ter extraction using a STABO (Short TacticalAirborne Operation) rig,which resulted in hishospitalization for a year and eventual medicaldischarge from the Marine Corps in 1970. Heleft the Corps with the rank of gunnery ser-geant.26

First Lieutenant Joel R. Gardner:A Marine in II Corps, 1967-68First Lieutenant Joel R. Gardner was bored

with his job of teaching French to officers en-rolled in the Marine Corps’Command and StaffCollege at Quantico,Virginia. So one morningin February 1967 when he saw a messageposted on the school’s bulletin board thatsought volunteers for a special assignment,hesaw a chance to escape from that billet. Themessage was rather cryptic. It simply solicited“volunteers with Vietnam experience for de-tached duty.” Although the message containedno additional details, Lieutenant Gardner sus-pected this duty had something to do with theCentral IntelligenceAgency, and this appealedto his sense of adventure and his desire to re-turn to where the action was—in Vietnam.

Gardner came from a distinguished militaryfamily. He was the son of a retired U.S. Navyadmiral, and he had followed in his father’sfootsteps by graduating from the U.S. NavalAcademy in the class of 1963. After the BasicSchool,he had served as a platoon commanderin A/1/4 before volunteering for duty as a pla-toon commander with Company B,3d Recon-

naissance Battalion. While with 3d Recon Bat-talion, he had made the initial landings at ChuLai and had distinguished himself in combat,earning three Bronze Stars and two PurpleHearts before his tour ended in March 1966.

With hisVietnam experience and his desireto return to the fight,Gardner willingly volun-teered for the“detached duty”without havingany more knowledge of what was expected ofhim. He only knew that if he was accepted forthis new and potentially exciting work, hewould no longer have to teach French. He feltconfident that any new assignment would bemore exciting than his present one. He wasnot disappointed.

Lieutenant Gardner drove to HeadquartersMarine Corps in the Navy Annex in Arlington,Virginia, to formally apply for the new job. Hewas interviewed Colonel Noble Beck in thepersonnel department and, evidently, the in-terview went well because one week later,Gardner received orders “to such place inWashington, D.C., as would be designated inseparate correspondence.” Thus began a two-year sojourn with the Central IntelligenceAgency on independent orders.

What follows is the tale of Lieutenant Gard-ner’s experience in his own words as one ofonly a very few Marines assigned to duty as aPRU advisor in the II Corps of Vietnam:

We started our training/orientation inWashington, D.C., with a group of over 50military officers, mostly U.S. Army officersand only seven Marine officers. The CIA wasin a hurry for us to get to Vietnam sincemany of their career case officers were up forreassignment fromVietnam to jobs for whichthey were more appropriately trained; that is,working against the Soviet Union and itssatellites. These CIA career officers wereneeded for operations against the mainenemy, not for operations in some“side show”likeVietnam. This meant we would receive ashortened case-officer training program sowe could rapidly replace them.

After an initial briefing and psychologicaland “lifestyle” testing, we began our formal

22

training program.Part of the training was ata“remote or southern training facility”wherewe were introduced to the arcane tradecraftof intelligence. I would return later in myMarine Corps career in 1980 to this CIAtraining facility for additional training priorto my assignment as a naval attaché in Paris.We also went through a comprehensive areaand language training course at the State De-partment’s Foreign Service InstituteVietnamTraining Center in Rosslyn, Virginia, wherewe achieved a 3/3 language proficiency rat-ing upon graduation. At the completion ofour training, which took approximately fivemonths, we were given our official passportsand other credentials identifying us as“USAID Rural Development Officers.” I latertold people that I was actually an agricul-tural expert on grasshoppers, but theyseemed incredulous since I carried a SwedishK submachine gun all the time! I assuredthem that the Swedish K was needed becausethere were a lot of grasshoppers that neededto be exterminated, and we classified thesegrasshoppers as “Vermin, Communist Infes-tators,” or VCI.

After relocating my wife and two childrenin Bangkok, Thailand, where they would stayuntil my 18-month tour of duty in Vietnamwith the CIA ended, I flew to Saigon, arriv-ing there inAugust 1967. After checking intothe Duc Hotel, I went to the U.S.Embassy fora briefing on the situation in Vietnam andwhat my future duties might entail. I alsochecked in with USAID since they providedmy cover and they handled my pay. My mil-itary records were maintained by theCSD/MACV unit at Tan Son Nhut Airport.This dual administrative arrangement re-sulted in receiving active-duty time for mymilitary career while receiving civilian pay.It was all very confusing, but with three“masters” in charge of me (CIA, USAID, andDoD), I thought I would be able to fool all ofthem most of the time. Like most CIA per-sonnel, my home while in Saigon was theDuc Hotel. It was my temporary abode dur-ing my initial orientation in Saigon and dur-ing subsequent visits to the capital city.

At the U.S.Embassy, I met Marine ColonelWilliam Redel, who handled all PRU matters.He informed me that despite the Comman-dant’s request to have all Marines assignedto I Corps, he was going to assign me to thecoastal city of Nha Trang in Khanh Hoaprovince in II Corps. His rationale for this as-signment was my recent combat experiencewith 3d Recon Battalion, which he felt wouldbest benefit the program if applied in KhanhHoa province working with the PRU there.

Nha Trang is the largest city in II Corps. Iflew up to my new assignment aboard anAir America plane and reported to my newboss, Ernie Sparks, who was the ROIC for IICorps. Ernie’s initial briefing to me wasshort and sweet since he was a man of fewwords, but his guidance was specific, and hemade me feel welcome and appreciated atour first session together.

Being close to the ROIC HQ was both aproblem and a blessing. The ROIC staff offi-cers were always looking over my shoulder.However, having the regional supply facilityand access to Air America helicopters anddaily Volpar flights more than compensatedfor this inconvenient meddling. There wasalso the problem of visitors who came to theROIC HQ for briefings, like Daniel Ellsberg,who managed to stay with us for three days!I showed him our “A” hamlets where we hadRD cadre teams but kept him well away fromthe PRU and their operations. These visitorsand the time it took to brief them often tookme away from my“real work.”

My time in Nha Trang started out with mybeing placed in charge of the province’s 110-man PRU. The unit seemed well equippedand, supposedly, fully trained at theVung Tautraining facility operated by the CIA. How-ever, I quickly found out that my PRU chiefconsidered me a useless adjunct to his life.He would do the traditional Vietnamesething of listening to my questions and givingme the answers he thought I wanted to hear,not what I needed to hear. He was distant,hard to find at times, and not prone to keepme informed. He was resentful when I said

23

I would be present at payday and I wantedto see everyone on the roles who was receiv-ing pay. Needless to say, we did not get off toa good start.

When I arrived in Nha Trang, two othermilitary officers arrived with me. They wereboth U.S. Army officers. We were to replacetwo CIA officers who were extremely anxiousto leave, so our turnover briefing with themwas rather short, and they were gone beforewe knew it. During this turnover, we wereacutely aware of the difference between theCIA officers and us. It was pretty obviousthat they did not think we were in the sameleague as they were.

One of these departing CIA officers hadbeen in charge of the PRU, the CG, and theRD cadre programs. The other was responsi-ble for the Police Special Branch and the PIC.We found that there were 25 59-man RDteams in the province and about 30 CG per-sonnel conducting census surveys. One of us,anArmy captain, took over the RD Program,and my other colleague, anArmy major, tookover the PSB and the PIC. I was given thePRU and Census Grievance Programs. Un-fortunately, around Thanksgiving 1967, theywere seriously wounded by a claymore mineand had to be evacuated from the country.For a time, I was the only man at the gateuntil an additional CIA officer, a Korean-American named Han Lee, came in and tookthe PSB and PIC off my hands. Still, trying tomanage the PRU and RD Programs at thesame time was a very heavy burden to bear,and I found it difficult to manage both largeprograms effectively. Fortunately, an ArmySpecial Forces NCO, Staff Sergeant Joe Garza,joined us later, and he was placed in chargeof the PRU under my immediate supervision.

After taking over the PRU, I tried to deter-mine how they obtained intelligence for PRUoperations. I was told that some operationswere the result of information obtained fromthe RD cadre who reported on various peoplein certain families that were suspected ofCommunist sympathies. When they reportedthat these people were “out of town” for un-

known reasons, it often meant they wereprobably with theVC.

We also got information from the RDcadre onVCI tax collectors and armed prop-aganda teams, but I also knew the results ofmost of our PRU operations were pitiful.Staff Sergeant Garza and I at first thoughtwe might have a “mole” in the unit givingaway our operational plans to the enemy. Wedecided that we needed to find this mole asquickly as possible, so we devised a plan togive the entire PRU a polygraph examinationin less than 24 hours. One night we securedthe PRU armory and transferred all theweapons to the region’s storage hanger at theNha Trang airfield, and then the next day wehad a polygraph team fly in from Saigon toadminister the tests. The PRU members wereapprehensive about taking a polygraph untilwe explained that they would not be hurt—unless they lied, and then they would be elec-trocuted!

The polygraph tests told us that we hadnot been infiltrated by a “mole,” but the PRUchief and about half the PRU members werein collusion to fake operations. This entailedsimply taking a team out on an “operation”to the edge of town, hiding for a few days,and then returning to base empty-handed.Needless to say, I fired the PRU chief and halfthe PRU immediately and began the processof finding honest replacements.

I found a new PRU chief who was highlyrecommended by the province chief and theprovince intelligence chief, which gave himboth access to, and support from, these twoimportant political leaders in the province.Staff Sergeant Garza and I got along verywell with the new PRU chief, and with hishelp, we began recruiting local men for thePRU and sending them to the PRU trainingfacility at Vung Tau. By Christmas 1967, wewere back to full strength and conducting“real”operations against theVCI.

We concentrated our efforts against theVCI tax collectors since we knew that if wecut off the source of funds for the VC, wewould seriously hurt the VC’s ability to fi-

24

nance both their combat operations and po-litical activities. Armed propaganda teamswere also high on our list of targets, but asthe term “armed’ indicates, we often hadmore serious engagements with these VCIthan with tax collectors. These two groups,the tax collectors and the armed propagandateams, were the most visible to the local vil-lagers, and their neutralization had thegreatest impact on the villagers’ perceptionof the efficiency of the PRU.

When I served in I Corps with a recon-naissance battalion, I had seen how specialtroops, like recon Marines, were inappropri-ately employed in operations they were nei-ther trained nor equipped for, such as flanksecurity for infantry sweeps, command postsecurity, and assaults against fortified ham-lets and villages. Using lightly armed, spe-cially trained troops for missions they are nottrained or equipped for is a foolish waste ofvaluable assets. The PRU teams were nevermeant to be used as infantry, but many U.S.and Vietnamese commanders did not un-derstand the mission or capabilities of thePRU and, as a result, they often tried to usethem on missions they were not suited for,often with disastrous results.

My PRU had an incredible inventory ofweapons and equipment in its armory. Thebasic weapon for a PRU soldier was theSwedish K submachine gun, a heavy, rugged,and very reliable individual weapon. We alsohad sniper rifles (M-1s and Springfield 03s),carbines, LAWs, M-60 machine guns, silenced22 caliber rifles, some British weapons, andenemy AK-47s for “black”operations.

The PRU was a direct support asset con-trolled completely at the provincial level. Wedid not have functioning DIOCCs in ourprovince while I was there; that came muchlater on in the war. Since most of ourprovince was covered in mountainous jun-gle and sparsely populated outside of a fewareas, it made much more sense to use thePRU as a provincial level asset than to haveit dispersed throughout the province. NhaTrang City and Ninh Hoa District north of

the city, along the lines of communicationconnecting the coastal plain with the high-land cities of Dalat and Ben Me Thout, werewhere the population—and the VCI—wereconcentrated, and these areas were the focusof PRU operations.

I did not get along well with the U.S.province senior advisor, a U.S. Army lieu-tenant colonel, because he had some weirdidea that I worked for him and thought Ishould keep him informed about what I wasdoing. I did, however, get along well with thedistrict senior advisor in Ninh Hoa District,an Army major, who was very forward-look-ing and supportive of our capabilities.

As is so often in combat, great plans aredriven by personalities, and this can makethe difference between success and failure.An example of this involved an operationgenerated by cooperation between this sup-portive U.S.district advisor and our PRU. Oneday, he briefed me about aVCI tax team thatwas brazenly stopping traffic on the road be-tween Ban Me Thout and Ninh Hoa on thecoast. We met with the advisor’s Vietnamesecounterparts, and they briefed us on themodus operandi of this tax team. It seemsthe tax team would establish roadblocks atseveral points along the road to collect taxesfrom passing vehicles, and they tended to usesome of these roadblocks regularly. They didnot establish these roadblocks for long, justlong enough to stop enough vehicles so theycould meet their tax quotas for that day andthen disappear back into the thick jungle.

Working with the U.S.advisor and theViet-namese military, we worked on a plan toneutralize this VCI tax team. Staff SergeantGarza, the PRU chief, and 15 PRU teammembers would be used to target one of thefrequently used locations by the tax team. Ihired a covered, civilian truck to transportthis team to its ambush site, and then Ijoined up with the advisory team to the Ko-rean Capitol Division near Ninh Hoa to setup a radio relay site five miles away. Thiswas the first operation I allowed Staff Ser-geant Garza to go on, and I did not want to

25

lose this valuable advisor. I gave him his ownPRC-25 for communications. I also arrangedfor pre-planned artillery concentrations anda reaction force made up of a VietnameseRanger Company in case they were neededby the ambush team. As a rule, the KhanhHoa PRU operated close to the densely popu-lated areas of the province near the coast sothis operation constituted a“deep”operationfor us.

The PRU ambush team set up on a hillsideoverlooking one of the favorite spots on theroad that the VCI tax team used. Aroundnoon on the second day, the PRU team ob-served the enemy tax team set up a collectionpoint on the road 300 meters away. The PRUchief told the team to do nothing, only ob-serve. He told Staff Sergeant Garza to waituntil tomorrow when the tax team would re-turn and the team would be in a better po-sition to attack it. Staff Sergeant Garzaexplained to me the strict discipline of thePRU members as they remained motionlessin their observation position for the next 24hours, not even moving to make a head call.The next day, the VCI tax team returned tothe road and set up their collection point di-rectly under the PRU team’s location. ThePRU opened fire and killed the entire taxteam. I do not think a U.S. unit would havewaited 24 hours to initiate an ambush—Americans like instant gratification—butone cannot argue with the results.

Most of our operations were on a smallscale, generally ambushes or interdictionsbased upon low-level intelligence and set upfor specific targets moving into or betweenhamlets which had minimal or no GVN se-curity forces (PF or RD cadre) in them. Gen-erally, these targets were developed fromleads generated at the local level and fed backthrough the Census Grievance representativesor RD Cadre teams working in the hamletsand villages. We also received leads from in-formants working for the Vietnamese mili-tary S-2s. I do not remember ever generatinga plan or an operation from intelligencefrom a higher echelon, but the Vietnamesedid this on occasion, as it should be.

I do not think it is accurate to say that theAmericans were in command of the PRU inmy province while I was there. We providedsupport: logistical, financial, and training. Iran interference for the PRU when peopletried to misuse them or tried to take themover from us, but I considered the PRU to beunder the command of the PRU chief and histeam leaders, not me. They were, however,definitely under my operational control. Ipassed on intelligence gained by the PRU tothe American side, primarily to First FieldForce Vietnam Headquarters, the U.S. AirForce, and the Special Forces Headquartersat the Nha Trang air base.

We had one extraordinary operation inearly January 1968. We received reports fromeither a CG or RD cadre that a person in oneof the hamlets outside the city was providingfood and other logistical support to an un-known enemy unit. Our suspect was a fe-male who would carry “parcels” out of thehamlet almost daily and return empty-handed. We set up a series of surveillance op-erations over a period of several days, eachone picking up where the previous one lostsight of her on her travels. They had herpretty well triangulated in an area of deepbrush, scraggy trees, and rocky outcroppings.We wanted to use a PRU team to go into thearea, but it was part of the Korean LogisticalCommand’s TAOR, so we held off on the op-eration until we had their permission. Fi-nally after some negotiating, we met with allthe key players at the Korean Field Force HQin Nha Trang and worked out the necessarycoordination to make our operation possi-ble.

Our operation was delayed a day becausea Korean unit was in the area. That unit re-ported the area as empty and that our oper-ation there would be a waste of our time. Wewent anyway, and in less than three hours,we found an occupied cave. The two occu-pants of the cave were killed in a short fire-fight, but the body count was not important.Inside the cave, we found records for the NhaTrang City Party Committee. It was a real in-telligence bonanza and included a complete

26

organizational chart for the party, 110names of party members (AKA’s to be sure),and other valuable documents. After Tet,which was only a few weeks after the opera-tion, we captured enough prisoners so theVietnamese could begin to put real namesagainst the AKA’s on the captured musterrolls. As a result, we were able to roll up al-most the entire city party committee anddeal a blow to the VCI that would set themback years.

This type of operation was the kind thePRU were designed for, and it demonstratesthat one single piece of accurate intelligenceprovided by a local source, and properly ex-ploited by a well-trained special police unit,can cause an entire insurgency infrastruc-ture in a major city to be neutralized.

After my CIA assignment, I was assignedto the FSI Vietnam Training Center to traindistrict and province senior advisors (civil-ian and military). I made regular trips backto SouthVietnam during the period 1969-72and would eventually visit nearly every dis-trict and province where we had advisoryteams. During this time, I witnessed the mat-uration of the DIOCCs and the Phung HoangProgram and saw how Phung Hoang had be-come very effective in nearly all areas, in-flicting serious losses on the VCI. Ho ChiMinh was quoted as saying that he was farmore worried about our success against theVCI than against his regular forces. 27

Lieutenant Colonel Terence M.Allen: The Perspective from

Saigon, 1968-1970When then-Lieutenant Colonel Terence M.

(Terry)Allen reported for duty with the PRU asthe chief advisor for military operations to thePRU commander in 1968,he brought with hima high degree of professional expertise and ex-perience in special warfare. As the senior U.S.military advisor to the PRU in Saigon, he re-ported directly to the CIA’s Tucker Gougle-mann. Along with his able executive officer,Marine Major Kenneth D. Hyslop, they madeup a formidable senior-level advisory team that

managed the U.S.side of the PRU Program dur-ing its most effective years from 1968 until1970.

Prior to his assignment to the CombinedStudies Division of MACV as the chief PRU ad-visor, Colonel Allen had been both the execu-tive officer and commanding officer of the 3dReconnaissance Battalion and the inspectorand instructor for the 5th Force Reconnais-sance Company. This experience gave him ex-tensive firsthand knowledge about, andtraining in, the conduct of missions similar tothose the PRU would routinely perform. Hiscombat experience in Korea and his partici-pation in operations in Lebanon in 1958 gavehim a keen insight into unconventional war-fare as well as a deep appreciation for the con-straints often imposed on U.S. forces bygeopolitical considerations. In short, he wasan ideal choice for the military-political advi-sory role in which he found himself.

Living in an apartment in Saigon and work-ing out of the PRU headquarters in Saigon,Allen ranged across the length and breadth ofSouth Vietnam planning, organizing, and con-ducting various missions for the PRU. Not ad-verse to danger, he routinely accompaniedPRU teams on missions in the provinces, in-cluding several parachute missions. He wasalso responsible for maintaining and analyzingthe monthly reports that came into PRU head-quarters from the U.S. advisors in the 44provinces of SouthVietnam and conducting in-spections of the PRU teams operating through-out the country. As such, he had a uniqueperspective on the strengths and weaknessesof the PRU Program and its overall effective-ness in fighting the VCI. His near-daily inter-face with Nguyen Van Lang, the nationalcommander of the PRU, allowed him to influ-ence as well as assist the South VietnamesePRU leadership in a way that no other Ameri-can could.

ColonelAllen reinforced the widely held be-lief of most U.S.Marine PRU advisors that eachPRU was unique based upon such factors asthe province in which it was deployed,the eth-nic and religious composition of the teams,the

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family and social connections, the military ex-perience, the leadership, and the relationshipwith the CIA POICs and the SouthVietnameseprovince chiefs. He also pointed out that ge-ography often played a role in how the PRUswere employed and how their missionschanged over time as the war progressed. Forinstance,he said that in the mountainous areasof South Vietnam where VCI were scarce, thePRUs often focused on collecting tactical in-telligence rather than counter-VCI operations.In the coastal plains and the Mekong Deltawhere the population was dense, the PRUswere used in a wider array of missions de-pending on the level of pacification in theirprovince.

As the pacification programs associatedwith Phoenix began to succeed after the 1968Tet Offensive, and more and more hamletswere freed fromVC control, the mission of thePRU evolved away from tactical intelligenceand quasi-military operations to strictlycounter-VCI, police-type operations. ColonelAllen also said that PRU teams even conductedseveral classified operations into the borderareas of Cambodia against VCI known to behiding there. These operations, because oftheir sensitivity, were planned and executedby the PRU directorate in Saigon.

In several interviews with the author,Colonel Allen mentioned two serious impedi-ments to the PRU Program in particular andthe Phoenix program in general. The first wasthe “obstruction and lack of cooperation bythe U.S. State Department” when it came toPRU missions. He stated that he found the at-titude of the State Department difficult to com-prehend at times since their officials seemedto hold“the belief that as long as they were incontrol of events, the ambassador was secondonly to the President of the United States,” anattitude that caused them to impose“controlson PRU employment that were both unneces-sary and counterproductive.” Many times theState Department representatives in SouthVietnam dictated to Allen where Phoenix op-erations should be conducted, forcing himoften to agree to these demands in principlebut then to disregard them in practice. This

lack of U.S.State Department cooperation andunderstanding for the PRU mission was a con-stant source of frustration for Allen as heworked diligently to coordinate PRU opera-tions with other U.S. and South Vietnameseagencies.

While the State Department caused ColonelAllen the most concern, he also had difficul-ties with South Vietnamese province chiefswho misunderstood the proper role of thePRU or sought to use their local PRU for mis-sions not related to the elimination of theVCI.He spent a considerable amount of time trav-eling around South Vietnam talking toprovince chiefs about this tendency to misusethe PRUs. His own MACV and Pacific Com-mand intelligence analysts were also a prob-lem at times since despite incontrovertibleevidence, in the form of captured NVA or VCprisoners and enemy documents, they refusedto believe the intelligence reports generatedby the PRUs.

The second concern ColonelAllen had wasthe problems caused by what he described asinaccurate and false reporting by civilian jour-nalists assigned to the Vietnam War. Allen’scover assignment was that of MACV deputy forpublic information. Although his title hadnothing to do with his real job, it did give himaccess to considerable information on thepress corps in South Vietnam. He soon foundout that of the 565 reporters working in SouthVietnam,few had either the background or theexpertise to cover the kind of war beingfought in South Vietnam, and many wereopenly sympathetic to the enemy cause. Healso found that the North Vietnamese Intelli-gence Service, the Cuc Nghien Cuu, had thor-oughly infiltrated the foreign press offices andwere receiving classified information regularlyfrom naïve and careless foreign reporters.

In addition to this classified informationbeing used by the enemy to thwart the pacifi-cation effort, it was also being used by theenemy’s agents within the foreign press corpsto spread disinformation about Phoenix andother programs that were proving to be suc-cessful in hurting the enemy. So much inac-

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curate information about the PRU and the Spe-cial Operations Group (SOG) was being re-ported in the U.S. and foreign press in 1968that Allen found it necessary to go the SouthVietnamese minister for indigenous people,Paul Nur,and secure a promise from him to nolonger refer to the Phoenix program or thePRU in any South Vietnamese press releasesand to use the Vietnamese title of PhungHoang instead. Allen considered the false andinaccurate reporting by journalists in theSaigon press corps to be far more damagingthan anything the enemy did to hurt the PRUbecause these stories caused both the LyndonB. Johnson and Richard M. Nixon administra-tions to overreact and impose restrictions onthe PRU and their advisors that only served tohelp the enemy.

The author asked Colonel Allen severaltimes about the claim that the PRUs engagedin assassinations and deliberately killed inno-cent civilians. He was adamant that the PRUsnever received orders to assassinate anyonewhile he was the senior U.S. advisor to thePRU Program, and he knew of no instancesprior to his assignment where such an orderhad been issued. He stated, just as the U.S.Ma-rine advisors interviewed for this book did,that the PRU were given mission-type ordersthat directed them to conduct reconnaissanceand surveillance operations, night ambushes,and raids on known or suspected VCI targets.He never issued an order to assassinate a VCI,only to capture one. As he stated,“the wholepurpose of our operations was to captureVCIso we could interrogate them and benefit fromthe intelligence they provided. We did notbenefit from killing aVCI since a deadVCI wasof no intelligence value.”28

Death at the Embassy House,Tet 1968

The PRU advisors’ job was a very dangerousone. They lived with their CIA colleagues invillas that were often vulnerable to enemy at-tack, and in many instances they were theonlyAmericans accompanying the PRU teamswhen they went on operations in areas con-trolled by the VC or NVA. The enemy feared

the PRU and considered them and their advi-sors prime targets for elimination. The follow-ing account, written by Raymond R. Lau, whowas a U.S. Marine captain assigned as a RuralDevelopment advisor in Hue City at the timeof the 1968 Tet Offensive, clearly illustrateshow dangerous living in an embassy housecould be. In his account, he tells the story ofthe death of Sergeant Howard G.Vaughn, thePRU advisor forThuaThien Province.

Lau’s commentary begins on the day beforethe Tet Offensive was launched, shortly afterhe had returned to Vietnam from extensionleave. He had volunteered to spend an addi-tional six months inVietnam over his initial 13-month tour so he could continue to work withthe Rural Development Program. His accountis taken from an outline of events he wrote on7 February 1968, the day he ended his har-rowing seven days behind enemy lines.

After the short half-hour flight from DaNang air base aboard an Air America flight,we landed at the small dirt airfield locatedin the northwest corner of the Citadel and Iwas met there by Jim Harris, a young formerSpecial Forces, now with the embassy. We hadbecome good friends in the short time we hadknown each other. We rode back into townin the jeep chatting about what happenedduring the past month, and we stopped at theEmbassy Provincial Headquarters beforegoing to the house where we were both stay-ing. At the American compound, I met TomGompertz, a young FSO (Foreign Service Of-ficer) assigned to Hue. He was the quintes-sential all-American boy, clean cut, goodlooking, with a ready smile that seemed tosay that he was in on some joke. I’d knownTom since coming to Hue. We played socceragainst the Nung guards and talked togetheroften. Tom welcomed me back and saidsomething about getting together soon, nowthat I was back. That was the last time I sawTom until I identified his body some 10 dayslater. I visited his gravesite in 2002, finally“getting together”35 years later.

That night after dinner, Jim and I chattedin the living room of our house while we

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loaded the magazines of the Swedish K sub-machine guns that we had just gotten. Jimhad gotten them that day and had grabbedone for me. It was like a new toy. We admiredthe weapons because of their simple unclut-tered design, the green metal body with itsfolding stock, its wooden pistol grip, and theleather carrying case for the 20-round mag-azines. The Swedish-Ks were different fromthe M-2 carbines, M-3“grease guns,”or AK-47sthat we usually carried. I remember think-ing that the Swedish Ks were a bit too“pretty”for combat, but hell, we hadn’t seen muchcombat during the last year.

Anyway, Jim and I figured there was notmuch sense having the weapons around ifthe magazines weren’t loaded, so we stayedup late that night loading the magazines.When we finally went to bed, boxes of 9mmammunition and tear gas grenades were stillsitting on the living room table. Other thanthat, it was pretty much a normal night. I

felt good being back in Hue. I was backhome.

The next morning, 31 January 1968, thefirst day of Tet, the Year of the Monkey, wewere awakened at about 4:00 a.m. to thesound of gunfire and explosions in the dis-tance. The three of us who shared the houseat No. 6 Nguyen Hue (Jim, Bob Ennis, andmyself) gathered to find out what was hap-pening. According to our Nung guards out-side, the guard camp across the canal at NamGiao was coming under attack, and theywere noticeably concerned. To us, it wasn’tthat unusual because we’d had probing at-tacks every few night in the previous monthsas the Viet Cong probed outlying ARVN andMarine outposts. A couple months previously,the Viet Cong had attacked and overrun aMarine CAP (CombinedAction Platoon) postjust south of Hue. They killed the young Ma-rine CAP unit leader, a corporal, whom I hadjust met a couple weeks before.

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Photo courtesy of Mr. Rudy EndersThe Embassy House in Hue City after the Tet 1968 attack. At right is the Military Region 1 regional offi-cer-in-charge (ROIC), Mr. Harry Mustakos.

While it wasn’t particularly alarming, thesustained firefight indicated that it wassomething bigger than a probe. We contin-ued to listen to the surreal pop-pop-poppingof small arms fire. I thought how almostharmless it sounded, like firecrackers, not atall like gunfire as portrayed in the movies.We continued to monitor our radios, as wecould hear the sounds of the firefight movewest toward the Provincial ReconnaissanceUnit (PRU) camp, located at a stately oldFrench colonial compound called “Gerard.”

We were cautiously monitoring the fight-ing, but not unduly alarmed. There wereconflicting reports about whether “Gerard”was under attack up until then, but soon wegot confirmation that it was coming underheavy attack. We continued to hear thesounds of small-arms fire and the“crump”ofgrenades and exploding mortar rounds com-ing from the two locations. The fighting wasintensifying rapidly.

At about 7:00 a.m., Bob Hubbard, a Ma-rine detailed to the embassy, and HowardVaughn, a Marine sergeant advisor to thePRU, arrived by jeep at our house. They, too,had been monitoring the fighting andpreparing to evacuate to the MACV com-pound about a mile away. Hubbard firstwanted to go to the house of the Police Spe-cial Branch (PSB) advisor, located at No. 9Phan Dinh Phung, to check on several peopleliving there. Hubbard said they had not hadany radio contact with them that morning.Hubbard and Jim departed through ourbackyard toward the Phu Cam Canal wherethe other house was located.

The sky was brightening, but the day wasgray and overcast. A light mist shrouded thestreets, and there was a slight chill in the air.SergeantVaughn and I went out to the frontof the house to see if we could detect any ac-tivity. We did not have to wait long. We werestanding by our gateposts when SergeantVaughn said he could see enemy soldiersrunning down Lam Son Street toward theprovincial headquarters about 70 yardsaway. The soldiers were dressed in green uni-

forms, trousers rolled up above the knee,with each carrying a rucksack and aweapon. I looked out and could see small fig-ures, crouched over, moving across my frontabout 100 yards away. It seemed like an end-less stream of people running down thestreet.

Sergeant Vaughn said he was going tomark them with fire and let loose a shortburst of fire from his M-16. Almost immedi-ately, it was answered with automatic fire.Chips of stone flew off the gatepost, andVaughn wheeled away from the post and fellto the ground. He spit up some blood, butotherwise there wasn’t a lot of bleeding, so Icould not tell how seriously he was wounded.He said he had taken one bullet below his leftarm. He was coughing up blood, meaningthe bullet had punctured a lung. I bent overVaughn, but still did not know the serious-ness of his wounds.

At that moment, a couple of mortarrounds struck the roof of our house andshowered us with shards of broken tile. Iasked SergeantVaughn if he could move intothe house. He pushed himself up and stum-bled, hunched over, into the house and fell,sprawling on the living room floor. I stayedoutside a couple more minutes watching theNVA stream down the street, watching to seeif they turned up the street toward our house.Things were getting more serious by theminute, yet how serious it was to becomewould not be known until later. Bob Ennis,who had been inside the house, went out toone of the jeeps to monitor radio transmis-sions. The radios we had in our jeeps weresquawking with a steady stream of English.This was a dead giveaway that there wereAmericans nearby.

A few minutes later, about 7:30 a.m., BobHubbard and Jim Harris returned. They askedif I thought we could make a run for theMACV compound. I told them that a lot ofenemy troops had already moved down to-ward the MACV compound and I did notthink we could make it. Besides, I said, Ser-geantVaughn was seriously wounded. Harris

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and Hubbard entered the house and went intoone bedroom to check the condition ofVaughnand to try to establish radio contact with theMACV compound. I was across the livingroom in the other bedroom, watching thefront door and a window on my side of thehouse. A few minutes later, I could see abouta half dozen Viet Cong come from the adja-cent house, No.4 Nguyen Hue, cross in front ofour house, and walk off out of sight. . .

About 8:30 a.m., I saw a grenade comingfrom somewhere to my right, out of my lineof sight, and land on the seat of one of thejeeps parked outside our door. A second laterthere was an explosion and the jeep was en-gulfed in flames as the grenade touched offthe gas tank. The second jeep soon followedthe same fate. So much for using the jeeps toescape.

I don’t know what happened to Bob Ennis.Frankly, in the confusion of the moment, Idid not even think of him, as my attentionwas focused on the rapidly deteriorating sit-uation. Several minutes went by, and I sawfourVC parade a group of prisoners past outhouse, their hands above their heads in sur-render. I recognized a couple of people asmembers of the IVS (InternationalVolunteerService), although I did not know theirnames. Also among the group were two ofour Nung guards.

Around 9:30 a.m., one enemy soldier en-tered the house. He walked slowly toward theright side bedroom where Bob Hubbard andJim Harris were. I was squatting down,pressed up against the door jam, hiddensomewhat by a couch, watching the sceneunfold. I looked over at Hubbard, who waswatching the enemy approach. When theVCwas about 10 feet from Bob, Bob stood up,and they both started firing on full auto-matic. It was like the gangster movies of the1930s. Chips of wood were flying off the dooraround Hubbard, but Hubbard’s bulletsfound their mark, and the VC wheeled, stag-gered a couple feet, and collapsed at ourfront door entrance. Somehow during thisviolent exchange, one of the French doors to

the bedroom where Hubbard was standingswung away from the wall, obscuring hisview of the front door from that room. Thiswas to have an impact on who engaged thenext VC intruders. Bob came away withouta scratch. Engaging the enemy at a distanceis one thing, but a shootout at 10 feet wasanother thing. My adrenaline was pumping.

About 30 minutes passed before two otherNVA would approach. I was surprised thatour little firefight had not attracted more at-tention right after it happened—not that Iwas eager. The lead NVA glanced down at thebody at the door but continued to enter thehouse slowly. The second NVA knelt down toexamine the body more carefully. You couldsee that the NVA were used to jungle fighting,and their training did not prepare them forurban combat. I don’t think either side wastrained for urban warfare. . . .The defender—in this case us—always has the advantage ofsurprise. This was certainly the case here, forI was crouched at the entry way to the leftside bedroom watching the enemy enter.When he was about 10-12 feet away, I stoodup, braced my back against the doorway,and opened fire on full automatic. I was sonervous that my first rounds hit the floor,and I remember walking the bullets up theenemy’s leg to his body. He turned and col-lapsed. I raised my Swedish-K a bit and shotthe other NVA soldier kneeling at the maindoorway, and he went down right there. . . .[Notes that this is the first man he has killed.]

Another ten minutes or so went by, andthe front doorway was rocked by an explo-sion from a RPG rocket, fired from across thestreet. The blast blew a hole in the wall, tothe left of the front doorway. All I could re-member was this cloud of red brick dust, andthe blast picking me up and throwing meabout 10 feet back into the bedroom. I wasa bit shaken but unscathed as I quickly gotup and crawled back into position at thedoorway to the bedroom. I could now lookout to the street through the open doorwayand the hole blown through the wall, but Iwas feeling very vulnerable having to dividemy attention between the front door and the

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windows of the left side bedroom, which hadbeen blown open by the explosion. I assessedmy position as being too untenable, so I scur-ried across the living room to join the others.Bob Hubbard was crouched near the win-dow opening out to the street. Jim Harriswas just inside the doorway I had just comethrough. Howard Vaughn was lying in thecenter of the room, fading in and out of con-sciousness. It looked very serious. I took upa position at the doorway, on the oppositeside from Jim Harris.

I looked into the living room at the threebodies of the VC. I could see that a piece ofthe wall above where the RPG rocket had hithad come down and crashed on top of one ofthe bodies. If the fellow was not dead before,the piece of the wall surely finished him.

Hubbard continued to try to establishradio contact on the PRC-25—“WaverlyWaver . . .Waverly Waver.”. . .At one point, wecould hear communications between someunidentified units. I thought it was the AirCav because they referred to someone as“pony soldier,”but we could not raise anyone.Unknown to us at the time, MACV had beenunder attack since 4:00 a.m., and they hadchanged frequencies and call signs.

It was about this time, about 10:00 a.m.,that the NVA made a concerted effort to dis-lodge us. Several NVA ran and took cover justoutside our front gate. I thought I saw onecarrying a satchel charge and could onlythink of the death and destruction suchcharges made to the Marine CAP unit out-side of Hue. A blast rocked the other side ofthe building. I could see one NVA soldier hid-ing behind the gatepost—the very same postthat Vaughn was leaning against when hewas wounded. I could see only a part of hishead, so I aimed my Swedish-K at him andlet loose a burst of fire. He screamed andwent running down the street holding hishead.

We looked out again and could see an NVAsoldier scurry across the street with an RPG,and a couple seconds later, a second NVA fol-lowed carrying two rockets. I think the same

thought ran through each of our mindsthen,“Oh shit, here it comes.” I think it wasthen that Bob Hubbard grabbed the bottle ofDrambuie off the fireplace mantel, took aswig, and passed it around. Hell, it could beour last drink, so we each took a swallow. Wequickly made a pact not to surrender, thatwe would fight to the death. I was not sure Iliked that last promise, but we had to remainunited.

A couple moments later, our house wasrocked by the explosion as another RPGrocket hit our house. They had aimed at theother side of the house and again we weresafe. I recall looking over at the windowsand noticing that the plastic sheets we hadused in the windows instead of glass wasshredded, but that probably saved us fromthe injuries by flying glass. . . .

Just as suddenly as the attack began,things went quiet. We could hear the soundof helicopters outside, and I saw a Huey attreetop level, firing into the tree line. We werecertain that this was the counterattack thatwe were waiting for and that the battlewould soon be over. For the next half hour,things were deathly quiet. Suddenly, just out-side our door, we could hear one of the

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Photo courtesy of Mr. Rudy Enders

The Embassy House in Hue City after the Tet 1968attack.

wounded NVA, moan and cry. We were con-cerned that his cries would bring others, soJim Harris grabbed a gun, crawled outside,and fired a couple rounds into him. Jim re-turned and said that he had taken care ofhim, but it wasn’t more than a couple min-utes later that the wounded man beganmoaning and crying again. We looked ateach other, and Jim again went outside androlled two grenades outside the front door—KRUMP, KRUMP. We were sure we had heardthe last of him, but soon, the cries beganagain. Jim said, “Forget it, he’s not real.”

It had been a long, quiet period, and withthe sight of the Hueys earlier, we were certainthat things were drawing to a close. Thisseemed to match the enemy’s M.O. [methodof operations] of attacking during the nightand early morning, then withdrawing dur-ing daylight. I don’t think any of us thoughtthat the NVA would hold Hue through day-light. However, we would wait until friendlytroops could mop up and move through ourarea before we came out. Around 11:00 a.m.,I saw a group of soldiers walking down thestreet. I thought they were friendly forces,

probably ARVN because they had on greenuniforms like what the ARVN wore and thelead individual was wearing a steel helmet.

Right about then, we took another rocketon our house. I thought it was a case of mis-taken identity and told the others in theroom, that I would try to identify us to thesepeople. I called out “Hoa ky, Hoa ky,” mean-ing “American, American.” Almost immedi-ately, it was answered by a burst ofautomatic fire. I dropped to the floor, hug-ging the tile, as bullets ripped through thewall. Bullets were coming through the brickwall not more than eight inches above myhead, and I could see splinters of wood fly offthe headboard of the bed.

Jim Harris, who had been squattingagainst the wall on the other side of the door-way, whispered“I’m hit!” I thought he meanta superficial wound and did not give it muchthought until I saw him lean away from thewall, and it was covered in blood. Still, Jimseemed all right and not seriously wounded.We were to find out later that two roundshad gone through his right upper arm and

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Another view of the Embassy House in Hue City after the Tet 1968 attack.Photo courtesy of Mr. Rudy Enders

penetrated his back and lodged inside hisright lung. Still thinking that it was mistakenidentity, I called out again, “Hoa ky, Hoa Ky,”which was answered by grenades and moresmall-arms fire.

It seemed as if the NVA were now in theother bedroom, as one grenade rolled intoour room. Bob Hubbard dived for it andthrew it back outside into the living room,where it exploded. A second grenade rolledand stopped at the door frame, about threefeet from me. I plastered myself against thewall as the grenade exploded with a deafen-ing blast. Except for a single small fragmentof shrapnel on my left arm, I was not injured.I could smell a familiar odor, for a minuteuncertain what it was, but soon realized itwas tear gas from the stash of tear gasgrenades we had left on the dining roomtable. Apparently, the explosions had rup-tured some of those grenades, and the smokewas wafting into our room.

Reminiscent of the movie Butch Cassidyand the Sundance Kid, Jim whispered, “Any-more good ideas?” He quickly added,“friendly or not, we’re not going to take this”and produced two fragmentation grenades.Jim pulled the pins and nodded to me. I didnot need further direction; I extended mySwedish-K into the doorway and sprayed afull magazine of bullets into the other room.As soon as I emptied the magazine, I pulledback and motioned to Jim, who rolled thetwo grenades into the other room. Two loudexplosions in the next room seemed to silencethings, and the house became quiet again.

By now, it was obvious that we could notstay in the house. I was closest to the backdoor and nervously I pushed it open, fully ex-pecting the NVA to be on the other side. I was“scared shitless,” but I couldn’t ask someoneelse to do this since I was there, closest to thedoor. I thought of the case of fragmentationgrenades, just on the other side of the door.As I inched the door open, I was surprised tofind that there was no one there and thecoast was clear. I went to the back bathroomand came back to motion everyone to escape

through the rear window. Bob Hubbardhelped Sergeant Howard through the win-dow and hobble to one of the back houses. Ithink these were old servants’ quarters, butthey were empty now.

We took the last room in the row. Here wejoined up with Bob Ennis and four of ourNung guards. Hubbard hidVaughn under aconcrete table, affording him good protection.The rest of us took up positions to cover thewindows and doorways. We listened as theenemy moved through the main buildingand systematically blew up the house.

We stayed in this room for about an hour.We had no illusions that we could hold thisposition, but we had no idea where to movewithout stumbling into more NVA, so westayed put. At about 12 noon, a rifle muzzleappeared outside our door. A shot camethrough the door, with the bullet strikingVaughn, this time blowing off his pinkie fin-ger and breaking his leg. Hubbard yankedthe door open and fired, killing three NVA.Hubbard pulled back, yelling that he was outof ammunition. I went to the door, ready tofire, but noticed the three NVA lying outsidethe room and no one else. I spied a grenadeand extra magazines for anAK-47 on one ofthe bodies, and I stooped to take them. Thegrenade was knotted to his belt and I wastrying to undo the knot.

Looking up, back at the main house, Imade eye contact with a NVA soldier stand-ing there in the bathroom window we hadcome through not that long ago. I think hewas an NVA officer because he was wearinga tan pith helmet and seem to be in author-ity. We looked at each other for several sec-onds, and then I got up and casually walkedaround to the back of the building. I am con-vinced that he took me for a localVC becauseI was in civilian clothes and carrying anAK-47.

At the back of the building, I linked upwith Hubbard andVaughn. I motioned thatI was going over the wall to check out thenext compound. I rolled over the wall andran to the nearest cover, which turned out to

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be a watershed. As I entered, I saw a body inthe water trough. No sooner that I had got-ten over that shock than the body rose up. Itscared the pants off me, but I motioned himto be quiet, pushing him back down towardthe water, and stepped out of the shed.

The only other place was a closet-like roomwith a small water trough. I went over to it,and it looked like a way to climb up to theattic crawl space, where I thought we couldhide. I waved to Hubbard to follow, and thetwo of us hoisted Vaughn up the wall andpushed him up. He let out a muffled scream,and then we heard a thud and moan. It soonbecame apparent that what I thought was anattic was only the other side of the wall, andwe had just dropped Vaughn over the wall.Hubbard climbed over and I quickly fol-lowed. On the other side, there was anotherwater trough, and I kneeled on the rim, fac-ing a window and door. Vaughn was lyingon the floor. Bob had taken up a positionlooking out another window.

This was the first chance that we had toregroup. During the last skirmish, everyonescattered, and now only Hubbard, Vaughn,and I were together. We did not know whereJim Harris and Bob Ennis had gone, nor didwe know where our Nung guards went. I donot remember how long we stayed there. Wecould hear some activity going on aroundus, but we did not see anything. Sometimelater that afternoon, I saw aVietnamese out-side our building. He wandered about for awhile and then came to the door and peeredthrough the crack, straight at me. I was stillsquatting on the water trough, with aweapon cradled in my arms. I stared back,but otherwise did not move. I was certain hesaw me, but I wasn’t certain whether hewould report our presence. Luck was withus, and nothing came of this incident.

As night fell, I moved into the small roomwith Hubbard. He had already movedVaughn and slid him under the bed in theroom. Hubbard faced out the small openingsto the back, while I sat in the doorway look-ing out the window. We had made it through

day one. It seemed like forever.

Some time during that first night, I sud-denly heard voices coming from directly infront of me, and in the faint light coming inthe window I could see two figures. I thinkthey were a man and a woman. I do notknow how or when they came into our build-ing, but they were suddenly there, not morethan four feet away. I called to them in mylimited Vietnamese, saying that I was afriend and not to be afraid, all the whileslowly moving toward them, hand over hand.By the time I reached the window, they weregone. I never found out who they were orhow they got in and out without us hearinganything. The rest of the night and the nextday were uneventful, and Bob and I kept oursame positions. Vaughn continued to fade inand out of consciousness, and we did notknow how long he would last.

On the second night, 1 February 1968,Bob noticed two figures moving outside. Bytheir movements, we could tell they were JimHarris and Bob Ennis. We called to them ina whisper and guided them into our build-ing through a back door. They soon joinedus and told us of their story of taking refugein the main building of this compound. Theysaid that they hid in a closet, while just out-side their door less than five feet away, NVAsoldiers gathered and chatted in the dark.This night, they decided to sneak past theNVA soldiers and try to escape, when wecalled to them. They joined us in our smallroom. Bob Hubbard, Jim Harris and BobEnnis sat on the bed, Sergeant Vaughn waslying under the bed, and I sat across fromthem on a bag of rice. Vaughn was still alivebut getting weaker, slipping in and out ofconsciousness. We shared a bar of brownsugar and an apple that we had taken fromthe worship altar and water from our watersource.

Jim Harris had lost quite a bit of bloodand was weak. Bob Hubbard rolled Jim onhis wounded side to drain the blood from hisgood lung into the bad lung and gave Jimwater. By the next day, Jim had recuperated

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