Papa Bravo Romeo U.S. Navy Patrol Boats at War in Vietnam

PAPA BRAVO ROMEO Prologue This book is not intended to be a history of the U.S. Navy's PBR (patrol boat, river) river rats during the Vietnam War. It is a personal account of my experiences in an unusual combat environment over thirty years ago with those little fiberglass boats. It is an incomplete first-year record of a great U.S. Navy unit that existed for only twenty-two months. One unit of two dozen or so, formed in the cauldron of war, with no history and no future. A force assembled for a short-term mission to help stave off a communist victory in South Vietnam. The mission was a short-term success, but ultimate failure. The boats and their sailors were not failures in any sense. The boats were basically off-the-shelf commercial cabin cruiser/sport fishermen hulls, painted green, loaded down with machine guns and ammunition, and sent to war. The little boats got into combat in the spring of 1966, within ninety-days of the signing of the first production contract. The Uniflite Boat Company of Bellingham, Washington, delivered the first vessels of an initial 120-boat run within schedule and at slightly less than the estimated $100,000-per-copy cost. The whole production line of that small-boat company was dedicated to the Navy for three years. The $100,000 cost included engines, water pumps, all control systems, the radar system, acceptance trials, and even the green paint. The government furnished guns, ceramic armor, radios. The .50-caliber guns came from stock left over from World War II and the Korean conflict. Some of those venerable guns probably were going to war for the third time. They had been fired by 8th Air Force gunners on B-17s over Nazi Germany and by Army infantry or armed personnel in Korea. The additional cost to the government to fully equip a PBR for combat was probably less than $5,000 total per boat. Altogether, the cost of each of those boats delivered into combat was a slight fraction of the cost of a patrol plane of fighter bomber, which even in 1966, cost the tax-payers a couple of million dollars each. The little fiberglass boats were first intended to replace Navy land-and-sea based patrol craft monitoring enemy movement on the waterways of the Mekong Delta. The Navy was using both Lockheed P-2 (land-based) and Martin PM-5 (seaplane) aircraft to patrol the waterways of Vietnam at low altitude, but the aircraft were expensive and ineffective on that mission; they had been designed to seek and destroy submarines. Second, the boats were to identify and engage enemy watercraft using the waterways, something that fast-moving aircraft, even at low altitude, could not accomplish. The PBRs did that more and more. They saved friendly outposts by the hundreds, medevacked wounded friendlies by the thousands, saved a couple of provincial cities during the Tet 1968, and were the main tools for sealing off the Cambodian border as sailor warriors face-to-face with the enemy on the water and in a platform suited for the mission. The PBR was a great example of how the United States government and industry can work together on an emergency basis to deliver an effective, cost-efficient weapons system. The first combat patrols in 1966 showed that the little boats were vulnerable to concentrated enemy fire from fortified positions on the riverbanks. They needed reliable air cover, and reliable intelligence. The Seawolves (helicopter gunships) came first. The Navy gratefully accepted old UH-1B Army gunships, and combat-experienced Army gunship pilots provided training to Navy helicopter aviators trained to battle submarines. They provided reliable air cover. The SEALS (sea, air, land), the U.S. Navy commandos, came second. They were to provide reliable intel. It was the sailors on our boats who made them such an effective implement of war. Most of them were captained by first class petty officers or CPOs (chief petty officers), sometimes by sGoldsmith, Wynn is the author of 'Papa Bravo Romeo U.S. Navy Patrol Boats at War in Vietnam', published 2001 under ISBN 9780804119214 and ISBN 080411921X.