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River patrol boats slow Red supplies
A river patrol boat heads into the rising sun after a night on ambush in the Mekong Delta in 1969.
By Jim Falk | Stars and Stripes September 24, 1969
ON THE VINH TE CANAL, Vietnam — About midway along this canal, which runs for 40 miles along the southwest border of Vietnam and Cambodia, you can look to the east on a clear day and see a mountain range beyond the rich, flat delta land.
Another mountain range lies well within Cambodia, to the west, with the same sort of paddy field apron leading up to it.
A man can walk the distance between these two areas and, if he chose, he could carry a 50-pound pack of rifle ammo, land mines, mortar rounds or whatever other arms he had.
Charlie chooses to do this nearly every night.
And every night he finds more than 16 river patrol boats of the Brown Water Navy spaced along this waterway waiting in ambush for Charlie to make his move.
These 31-foot, 27-knot, heavily-armed boats built on fiberglass pleasure craft hulls leave their haven in groups of two and four every day for 24- to 48-hour missions.
They work their way to rendezvous sites, checking civilian waterborne traffic for infiltrated arms, draft dodgers and VC suspects.
Not many of these are found now. In the 10 months these Border Interdiction Group forces have been cruising the canal they have sharply reduced enemy influence in the area. Villages along the route are predominantly pro-government.
But the night is something else. This is when Charlie does his thing.
To catch him where they can, the four-man crews of these patrol boats join with Vietnam Popular Forces platoons to set up night ambushes in groups of two and four, covering both sides of the canal.
Sometimes they do catch Charlie and a deadly flurry of sound and fire shatters the black calm. Most often they don't though.
"We're not deluding ourselves that we are halting the infiltration (of troops and arms)," says Cmdr. Richard D. Heenan, the commander of this portion of Operation Sea Lords. "We don't have the assets to stop it completely."
Heenan says, however, that they are hurting the enemy. This they have learned from captured documents and intelligence reports.
They also know it from the welcome fact that contact with large-sized units has long stopped and Charlie has switched to smaller units to move the supplies he so badly needs from the hills in Cambodia to the hills in Vietnam.
