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Today we meet those men, the men on the boats, the soldiers and the sailors of the mobile riverine force, the mrf. The strangest, most improvised and arguably most effective fighting formation. America deployed in the Vietnam War. September 15, 1967. 7:30 on a hot, steamy morning on a narrow brown river called the Rock Ba Rai. Deep in the Mekong delta of South Vietnam, a column of American boats is moving north at a painfully slow pace. Six, maybe seven knots. A comfortable jogging pace. The boats are squat, ugly, slab sided things plated in steel and draped in what looks like rebar fencing, looking more like a tank on today's Ukrainian front than a boat. And they are packed with soldiers of the United States Army's 9th Infantry Division. The men crew in the boats belong to the United States Navy. And together they are something the United States hasn't done since way back in the Civil War. A floating arm to the teeth partnership between the army and the Navy that brought the fight deep inside enemy territory, using rivers as their highway. Up ahead, the river loops back on itself in a tight double bend that from the air looks just like the profile of a very famous beagle from the comics. So the Americans with their inimitable pop culture humor, they named it Snoopy's Nose. And it is, as every man on those boats nose, the most perfect ambush site in the entire Mekong Delta. Every man on those boats is on edge, scanning the jungle lined banks of the river for the glint of a rifle or the movement of an enemy soldier. And Right then, at 0730, the lead boats enter the bend and the world explodes. Rocket propelled grenades streak out of the Dnieper Palm from both banks at ranges so close the gunners can see the men who are trying to kill them. Recoilless rifles hammer the armored sides. Heavy machine guns rake their decks. Within minutes, nearly every boat in the column has been hit. Sailors are slumped at their guns. And somewhere behind the lead boats, a decision is forming that will define this force forever. A decision that would have been instantly familiar to the men who rang the batteries at Vicksburg way back in 1863. Not whether to get out of the trap, but whether to turn around and to run the gauntlet again. A couple of episodes back on this podcast, we told the story of how three Seawolves. Not long after that, the producers of that Seawolf documentary reached out and they invited me to watch an online premiere screening of their newest documentary. Which brings me to today's podcast. The Seawolves, the Navy's gunship squadron, the most decorated squadron in the history of naval aviation, scrambling off barges and LSTs and a Mekong Delta to save men they'd never met. And if you listened to that episode, and if you haven't, please go back and give it a listen, you may have found yourself asking a fairly reasonable question, which is, who exactly were they saving? Who were the men going deep into enemy territory, into the heart of the beast? Because every time a Seawolf fireteam thundered down a canal at treetop height with rockets streaming, somebody down below was pinned, bleeding, and very glad to hear those rotor blades coming. Today we meet those men, the men on the boats, the soldiers and the sailors of the Mobile Riverine Force, the mrf. The strangest, most improvised, and arguably most effective fighting formation America deployed in the Vietnam War. It was an army brigade that lived on Navy ships. It was a Navy flotilla that fought like infantry. It was a fleet of converted landing craft armored with, among other things, repurposed rebar, commanded jointly by a colonel and a Navy captain who were politely instructed by their superiors to figure out the chain of command amongst themselves. Nothing quite like it had existed since Ulysses S. Granted and Admiral David Dixon Porter steamed up on the Mississippi a whole century beforehand. And nothing quite like it has existed since. So this is the story of how the United States, almost by accident, rebuilt a brown water Navy from scratch, bolted an infantry division to it and threw the whole improbable contraption into the rice paddies of the most densely populated battlefield of the war. It is a story of mud, of ingenuity, of extraordinary courage, and one truly terrible morning at a riverbend named after Snoopy's nose. So once I saw that documentary about the Mobile Riverine Force, I knew I had to retell the story here. It's another one of those stories like the Seawolf story that has been largely forgotten. And that's tragic because it's one hell of an American combat story. So to understand the Mobile Riverine Force, you first have to understand the delta itself, because the delta is the reason that this force had to exist. The Mekong river rises in the Tibetan plateau and runs nearly 3,000 miles through six countries before it reaches the South China Sea. And in its final act in the southern quarter of Vietnam, it does what all great rivers do at the end. It sprawls out like a hand with a thousand fingers, each finger splitting off into countless more. It splits into channel after channel. The Vietnamese call this region the Land of the Nine Dragons. And it deposits an enormous pancake flat, hugely fertile Plain of silt, rice paddies, mangrove swamp and canals. And I do mean canals, not rivers. Because centuries of Vietnamese, Khmer and French engineering had threatened the delta with thousands of miles of navigable waterways, roads, barely bridges, a few, and most of those were blown in the Delta. The rivers were the roads. Rice moved by sampan, people moved by sampan. And by the mid-1960s, an awful lot of the enemy ammunition was moving by sampan too. So here's the bottom line. The Delta held roughly a third of South Vietnam's population, and it's where most of its rice grew. Whoever controlled the delta controlled the food and the people, which is to say the war. And in 1966, the unpleasant truth acknowledged in classified assessment after classified assessment was that the government in Saigon did not control the Delta. The Viet Cong did. Whole districts were in daylight, nominally governmental, let's say, and after dark they were entirely communist. The VC taxed the rice harvest. They ran recruiting. They had battalions of full time uniformed, well armed regulars, the NBA, living in fortified base areas like the Kamsan Secret Zone. And that's a name which tells you everything about how long these bases had been there undisturbed. Because you generally don't get to call something a secret zone on the official maps of both sides unless you've held it for quite some time. So why not just send in waves of American troops? Well, because of the mud. And I cannot overstate the mud. Think World War I Flanders Mud, mud that sucks you down. The Delta's water table sits essentially at the surface. There's almost nowhere to put a conventional American base, nowhere dry to park an armored division, and precious few places even to build an airfield. Tanks bogged, trucks had no roads to drive on. A rifle company moving cross country waded through paddies, over dikes, across canals, chest deep, hour after hour, in 95 degree heat, with 100% humidity, with their feet quite literally rotting inside their boots. The army would learn to rotate troops out of the water every couple of days simply because human skin cannot tolerate constant immersion. They called it paddy foot, kind of like trench foot in World War I. And it took more men out of the line than bullets did. So a vital region laced with water, impassable to conventional forces and held by a dug in enemy. The French had faced exactly the same problem 20 years earlier. And the French, who did not fare well in Indochina, had actually been pretty good at this particular problem. Their answer was the Division Naval Dassault or Dina Sotomayor, the Naval Assaults Division. Little fauteuils of armored landing craft carrying infantry up the rivers, fighting their way ashore and then withdrawing. Bernard Fall, the great chronicler of the French war, rated the dinosaurs among the few unambiguous French successes of that entire doomed enterprise. The Americans, they read Bernard Fall, they studied the dinosaur, and in 1966, planners at Military Assistance Command, or Mac V, along with the Navy, sketched out something the staff papers called the Mekong Delta Mobile Afloat Force. The concept was audacious in its simplicity, because if you can't base an army in the Delta, then you just gotta float one. So what emerged from those staff papers in 1967 was a genuine one off in modern American history. A permanently joined Army Navy formation. Task Force 117 on the Navy side, River Assault Flotilla 1 on the army side. The 2nd Brigade of the 9th Infantry Division, the Old Reliables, a division reactivated at Fort Riley, Kansas, in 1966 specifically for Vietnam. And I want to pause just for a second on the command arrangement because it's quintessentially pre Goldwater Nichols, American structure. The brigade was commanded by an army colonel, William Fulton, of whom we'll speak more of in a moment, and the flotilla was commanded by a Navy captain. And neither was placed in command of the other. They were, in effect, told to cooperate. Two services, two chains of command, one boat. Military theorists will tell you this arrangement violates roughly every principle of unity of command. Military historians, however, will tell you that mostly thanks to the personalities of those people involved, it worked anyway. Fulton himself later wrote the official army study of riverine operations, and reading between its very measured lines, you get the sense of two staffs that simply decided to behave like grownups. And that's a rarity between the army and the Navy, I'll tell you. It also helps, perhaps, that everyone involved was too busy being shot at to argue about protocol. But first they needed a base, and since the delta offered no dry land, they manufactured it. A few miles west of the city of Mito, dredges began sucking sand off the bottom of the river and pumping it ashore, building cubic yard by cubic yard, 600 acres of brand new Vietnam. A harbor, an airstrip, artillery positions conjured out of the riverbed. General Westmoreland himself chose the name for this place. Dong Tam. It means roughly, very roughly, united hearts and minds, but kind of ironic, I suppose. But Dong Tam, it was only the anchor, the genius of the Mola riverine forest, the thing that made it terrifying to the enemy was that it didn't live there. It lived afloat. The heart of the force was a cluster of barrack ships, World War II hulls that were reborn USS Benoit, the flagship USS Colleton, later USS Nueces, and a self propelled in name only barge designated APL 26, known to all hands inevitably as the Apple. You get it? Apl Apple. And then you add a repair ship, the USS Askari, and LST's hauling supplies, and you had a complete military city that could up anchor and move itself anywhere in the Delta's major rivers within a radius of a few hours steaming, the MRF could put a reinforced brigade ashore at dawn, essentially anywhere along hundreds of miles of waterway. The Viet Cong never knew where it would land next. One captured enemy document reportedly complained that the Americans in the Delta had become impossible to predict, which, given that unpredictability, was the entire point. Must have been a very satisfying reading aboard the good ship Benoit. Life aboard those ships produced a dichotomy of experiences for the soldiers and the sailors. The barrack ships were air conditioned. There were hot showers, clean bunks, movies on the mess deck, ice cream. A soldier might eat a hot breakfast off a steel tray in climate controlled comfort at 0400. And by 0700 he'd be wading through a leech infested paddy under fire, soaked to the chest in water the temperature and color of coffee 48 to 72 hours later, because that was about all a human foot could take. He'd be hauled back aboard, hosed off, fed and patched up with the war suddenly, surreally, on the other side of a steel bulkhead. Veterans have said the whiplash of it was its own kind of strain. Other infantrymen in Vietnam slept in the mud every night and envied them bitterly. The riverine soldiers would have traded a great deal not to know exactly what they were going back into at dawn. Now the boats. And then there were the boats. If you have an image in your head of a sleek naval vessel, you should get rid of it right now. The river salt craft of Task Force 117 were built on the hull of the LC M6, the Humbled Mike boat, a World War II landing craft designed to carry a tank to a beach. Cut open, plated over, up, armored up, gunned and transformed in what can only be described as a floating medieval siege engine. The workhorse was the atc, the armored troop carrier or tango boat in the radio Alphabet, and just tango to everyone else, a platoon of infantry in the well deck, machine guns and grenade launchers and armored mounts. And over all that distinctive lattice of steel rods, bar armor, standoff armor, armor welded around the hull like a birdcage. The job of all that metal rebar was to detonate a shaped charge rocket before it reached the proper hull. It looked absurd, but it saved a lot of lives. Some Tangos carried a flight deck. A steel platform barely bigger than the helicopter that landed on it, making them the smallest air capable vessels in the history of the United States Navy. Medevac pilots landed Hueys on those potion stamps in the dark under fire on a moving boat. So file that away next time someone tells you. Carrier aviation requires a thousand fleet of deck. That just kind of sings to my heart as a rotary wing pilot. So riding shotgun were the Monitors. And yes, the name was chosen deliberately. A straight salute way back to the Civil War ironclads. The Monitor was the battleship of this midget fleet. A turreted 40 millimeter cannon forward, a mortar amidships, machine guns everywhere there was room to weld a mount. Later versions carried 105 millimeter howitzer, a full sized artillery piece on a 56 foot hull. And a few carried flamethrowers instead. The dreaded Zippos, which could hose burning napalm into a fortified bunker at a range of a couple hundred meters. There were the CCB's command boats, floating brigade headquarters bristling with antennas. And from late 1967, the ASPB, the Assault Support patrol boat. The Alpha boat notably, was the only vessel of the entire war designed and built from the keel up specifically for riverine combat in Vietnam. The Alphas were the greyhounds of the force, the escorts and minesweepers, which meant they led the column, which meant they got hit first. So remember that it's going to come up again. The top speed of a loaded tango is about 8 knots. And let me tell you what that means. When a mobile riverine force column went up a narrow river between banks held by an entrenched enemy, it did so at roughly the pace of a man jogging in vessels the size of a small house. In water too shallow to maneuver on rivers too narrow to turn around, the men aboard could not dig in. They could not take cover beyond the armor they carried. And they could not leave. Every operation was a deliberate act of crawling past the enemy's front door and inviting him to do something about it. So in the spring and summer of 1967, the force worked up, it shook out its procedures and it began operations. The Coronado Series they were called. And the enemy who had watched the straying green armada assembling with great professional interest, they decided to test it. June 19, 1967. The first great blow fell not on the boats, but on the infantry. On June 19, 1967, near Kanguak, south of Saigon, troops of the brigade's 4th Battalion, 47th infantry, landed from the boats and pushed across open paddy towards what intelligence suggested was a Viet Cong company. It was not a company. It was a dug in main force battalion waiting behind mud bunkers in a treeline, holding fire with determined discipline until the Americans were deep in the open. What followed was one of the worst single days the 9th Infantry Division would suffer in the entire war. Pinned in the paddies under murderous crossfire, companies bled through the long afternoon. Helicopter gunships, artillery, the Monitor's cannon, everything was thrown in. By the time the position was taken, almost 50American soldiers lay dead and the enemy battalion had been effectively destroyed. Around 250 Viet Cong killed to this day, June 19th is the date the Mobile Riverine Force association keeps as its memorial day. The force had learned in the hardest possible classroom what fighting in the delta was going to cost them. And then three months later, came the morning at Snoopy's nose. On September 15, 1967, Operation Coronado 5. The target, the Kham Son secret zone. The fortified base area on the Rock Bay Ra river where intelligence placed the 263rd Viet Cong Main force battalion, a veteran well equipped regular outfit. The plan was classic. MRF boats run up the river at first light, land the infantry beyond the enemy and hammer him against blocking positions. Simple on the map. But the map however, included that double hairpin bend. That's Snoopy's Nose, where the channel narrows and every vessel must slow and turn broadside on to both banks in succession. If you were designing an ambush kill zone from scratch, you would design that bend. The Vietnamese 263rd had spent days preparing bunkers dug into the banks, weapons sighted, rocket teams and spider holes at the waterline. By some accounts, the ambush position stretched well over a kilometer along both banks. A U shaped gauntlet of recoilless rifles, rocket propelled grenades and machine guns armored all of it sighted on a stretch of brown water that American boats would have to crawl through at a jogging pace and before the guns open up. I want to take you across the water, just for a moment to the other bank. Because there are men waiting in those spider holes too, and they were not faceless. Picture a young fighter of the 263rd crouched in the mud at the waterline with a rocket launcher across his knees, listening for the diesel growl combing up the bahrai. He has spent days helping to dig these positions and Remember this. For most of his life, these rivers had belonged to him and his. The delta was the southernmost reach of the Ho Chi Minh Trail. The rice, the recruits, the ammunition, all of it moving by sampan in the dark. And for years, the Americans had come only by helicopter and on foot. So you built your defenses facing inland, toward the paddies, toward the tree lines, because no one in their right mind attacked from the river. The river was the safe direction. The river was home. And then the armored monsters came up the rivers themselves. And overnight, the safest direction in the delta became the most lethal. Because these were not foolish men, and they learned fast. They learned which canals were too shallow for the steel hulls to follow. They learned the boat's habits and timings. They dug bunkers thick enough to shrug off a direct hit from a 40 millimeter shell. So well built, in fact, that the Americans went looking for flamethrowers just to deal with them. And on this particular morning, on this perfect bend, the 263rd had done everything right. Every weapon laid, every range marked. A kilometer of riverbank, patient and silent, sighted on a strip of brown water, the Americans had no choice but to enter. By every rule of war ever written, this was a trap that should have worked. So at 0730, with the morning mist still burning off, the lead minesweeping alphas came around the bend, and the banks erupted. The opening salvo of rockets struck the lead boats simultaneously. Within moments, the entire column, tango's loaded with infantry monitors, the lot, was inside the kill zone, taking fire from both banks at ranges down to a few dozen meters. The boat gunners, sailors standing in armored tubs fired back at muzzle flashes they could practically reach out and touch. The steel turrets rang like a bell being struck a thousand times. Rockets that struck the bar armor detonated in a spray of sparks. Rockets that found gaps, punched through the quarter inch plate and filled the troop wells with fragments. Men were hit at their guns, and other men pulled them out of the tubs and took their places. The column fought through the bend and broke out the far side, dragging its wounded boats with it. And here's the moment the one I opened the episode with. The force pulled together upstream, transferred as casualties and took stock. The mission was to land the infantry and destroy the 263rd. The 263rd, very obligingly, had revealed exactly where it was. The river was the only road in. And so the commanders on the scene made a decision that defines the story. Reform the column and run the gauntlet again. So think about what that order meant. To the 19 and 20 year old sailors standing in those gun tubs, some of them already bandaged, looking back downriver at the smoke. Every man knew precisely what was waiting in the bend because he had just lived through it. And every boat turned, came up to jogging speed and went back in. This time the boats went through ready and with guns blazing. 40 millimeter cannon, 20 millimeter, 50 calibers, mortars firing direct every weapon in the flotilla scything the banks while artillery and airstrikes called in during the pause crashed along the tree lines among the aircraft overhead. That day, working the banks alongside army gunships, were the Sea Wolves, those navy helicopter crews we now know well. The Delta air and water team in full battle mode. The comms smashed through the nose, beached and put the infantry ashore. For the next two days, the 263rd Battalion was hammered through its own bunker line. By the time the VC broke contact and slipped away, as they nearly always managed to do, they had taken something on the order of 80 confirmed dead and far more importantly, had thrown their best punch at the riverine force in a perfect ambush on ground of their own choosing and failed to stop it. The cost was real. Seven Americans killed and well over 100 wounded, most of them in those few hundred meters of river. Nearly every boat in the assault took hits. But the lesson absorbed by both sides was the one that mattered. The ugly green boats could take a beating that would have annihilated unarmored craft and the men aboard them would steam back into a kill zone on order. After Snoopy's Nose, the Viet Cong in the central delta became noticeably more reluctant to stand and slug it out with the riverine force. They would mine, snipe, harass and ambush. But the set piece attempt to destroy the MRF on the water was never seriously made again. Which was fortunate because in a few months the MRF was about to be needed as it had never been needed before. In the last hours of January 1968, during the truce for the lunar New year holiday of Tet, the Viet Cong rose throughout South Vietnam and attacked virtually every city and provincial capital in the country simultaneously. You probably know the broad story, the embassy in Saigon, the siege of Hue. But the Tet offensive in the Mekong delta is one of the war's forgotten chapters. And it is the mobile riverine forces finest hour. Across the delta, Viet Cong battalion surged out of the swamps and into the towns Mitou Bintrai, Binh Long Can Tho. Government control sparse enough in daylight as the best of times collapsed overnight in city after city. And here the Delta's eternal logic asserted itself one final decisive time. There were no roads by which reinforcements could come. Any conventional relief force was days away. The town should have fallen and stayed fallen, except that somewhere out on the great Brown river sat a brigade of infantry on its boats with its artillery on barges and its supply train afloat, beholden to no road on earth. What followed was two weeks of pure distilled vindication for everyone who had ever signed off on the floating army concept. The MRF fought at Mi to, landing from the river into a burning city, clearing it block by block alongside South Vietnamese troops. Then it pulled back aboard, steamed through the night and did it again at Vinh Lom, then again near Canto. A formation built to raid swamp base areas found itself doing urban combat. River assault, an operational level maneuver in the same fortnight, pinballing between cities a hundred kilometers apart at a speed no Lang force in the Delta could even dream of. The men barely slept, the boats barely stopped. One after another, the Delta cities were wrenched back. General Westmoreland, not a man given to gushing about other people's ideas, gave the force its greatest compliment, crediting the MRF with having, in his words, saved the Delta. Strip away the institutional politics and the after action gloss and the claim, I think it holds up pretty well. In those first chaotic days, the MRF was very nearly the only mobile reserve in the entire region. No boats, no relief. And the 1968 map of the Mekong Delta looks very different indeed. But honest storytelling of a story requires the other half of the ledger, because those cities were also saved by high explosive. Mito was devastated in the retaking, and it was at Ben Trai in the Delta in those very weeks that an American officer was famously quoted as saying it had become necessary to destroy the town in order to save it, a line whose precise origin journalists and historians have argued about, but whose grip on the war's memory tells you something true. Regardless, the people of the Delta were grateful to be rid of the VC occupation. And they buried their dead and they looked at the ruins of their homes, and they drew their own complicated conclusions. Any honest account of the Riverine War has to hold both of these truths at once. In September 1968, a new commander arrived to take charge of all naval forces in Vietnam. And we've heard of this fellow before, Vice Admiral Elmo Zumwalt, Bud Zumwalt, future Chief of Naval Operations. Zumwalt looked at the Brown water war, the MRF's assault boats, the PBR patrols of Operation Game Warden, the coastal blockade of market time, and concluded that the Navy was fighting three separate wars when an ought to be fighting one. So his answer was a strategy and the mother of all acronyms, Sea Lords, Southeast Asia, Lake, Ocean, river and Delta strategy. Essentially stop patrolling the big safe rivers and push everything, PBRs, salt craft, sea wolves overhead, seals in the treeline into the enemy's waterways. The narrow canals along the Cambodian border, the supply corridors, the places the enemy had owned unchallenged for 20 years. The riverine sailors called these waters Indian country Zumwals. Barriers cut across the infiltration routes from the Cambodian sanctuaries. And the boats of the mrf, increasingly operating in smaller, meaner task groups rather than the great brigade sized armadas of 1967. They took the warp canals that were sometimes barely wider than the tango boats themselves. And it worked. By the metrics of the moment, it worked. Infiltration was squeezed. Base areas along untouchable places were raided. The cost was a casualty rate among boat crews that Zumwalt himself acknowledged was among the highest of any community in the war. And in the background, the entire American enterprise in Vietnam had changed key. After Tet, Washington wanted out. In June 1969, President Nixon announced the first withdrawals, and the 9th Infantry Division was at the front of the line. That August, barely two and a half years after it was born, Task Force 117 was deactivated. The Mobile Riverine Force, the floating army, the force that saved the Delta, it ceased to exist. But the boat stayed under Zumwalt's accelerated turnover program. Hull after hull was repainted and handed back over to the Vietnamese Navy, with American advisors riding along ever shorter stretches of river. And there's something almost mournful in the photographs from those ceremonies. Rows of tangos and monitors, scarred and patched and repainted, drawn up under a new flag, waiting for a war that would go on without the men who had built the force around them. Some of those boats fought into 1975, a handful remarkably still exist. Museum pieces and rusting survivors. The last ironclads of America's last river war. So how should we remember the Mobile Riverine Force? I'd probably start with the sheer improbability of it. In under a year, the United States resurrected a form of warfare it had abandoned after the siege of Vicksburg. Invented the doctrine more or less from scratch with a French operations pamphlet and a stack of Bernard Fall books. Welded the armor onto secondhand landing craft in theater, married an army brigade to A Navy flotilla with ever quite deciding who was in charge and produced the most mobile striking force in the Mekong Delta. It is hard to think of a better case study in military battlefield improvisation that actually worked. When the modern US Navy stood up its riverine squadrons again in the 2000s for the rivers of Iraq, the doctrine writers went straight Back to the MRF's after action reports. General Grant and Admiral Porter would have instantly recognized the boats of Task Force 117. And the men of Task Force 117 supplied the textbook for the riverine sailors of the 21st century. There's a bit of a continuity there, a brown water thread running through American history that we don't honor or talk about nearly enough. And then we weigh the achievement. The MRF never won the Delta. Nobody really won the Delta. The war's verdict was rendered elsewhere and much later. But on its own terms, the force did what it was created to do. It broke the Main Force battalion's grip on the central Delta. It survived the perfect ambush at Snoopy's nose and made the enemy regret ever doing it. And in February 1968, when every city in the region was burning and not one road was open, it was the force. The only force that could be everywhere and actually was everywhere. Saving the Delta is a big claim, but also on the evidence for the time, it was probably about right. But we end, as we always try to on this podcast, with the actual people who did it. The men in those ironclad boats, the 19 year old gunner's mate standing chest high in an armored tub, holding his fire until he could see the rocket team that was aiming at him. The rifleman from Kansas who ate ice cream at midnight and waded into a leech filled patty at dawn, his feet peeling apart inside his boots, doing it again, 48 hours on, repeated again and again and again. The boat captains who heard the order to turn around had Snoopy's nose and pushed their throttles forward and overhead, always overhead. The sea wolves, the other half of the story, rolling in hot on the tree lines because somebody on the water was in trouble. The Delta war joined them all together. Soldier, sailor and aviator on the brown water in the green hell, doing impossible things in ugly boats because the mission was there and the river was the only road. If you're going to remember anything about this story, remember the men, the poor grunts and the swabbies. So bear with me for a moment while I focus on two men in particular. One sailor, one soldier. Because when you strip everything else away, that's what this force was one of each in the same fight on the same river. The afternoon of June 15, 1969, the Ang Muang Canal in Qianhua Province. Lieutenant Tom Kelly, a kid from Boston, was running a column of eight river assault craft pulling a company of 9th Division infantry back off the bank after an operation, a routine extraction. And then one of the tango boats radioed the words every river sailor dreaded. Its loading ramp had jammed. Mechanical failure. The boat was stuck dead in the water, broadside to the bank, ramp hanging open, right out in the kill zone. And at that exact moment, the Viet Cong opened up from the far side of the canal. Kelly had a choice. He could pull the rest of the column clear and lead the crippled boat to its fate, or he could buy it time. He ordered the disabled craft to crank its ramp up by hand and ordered the other boats into a protective cordon around it. He then took his own monitor, the most heavily armored boat he had, and deliberately drove it out into the open, placing its steel hull squarely between the enemy guns and his stranded men, directly in the line of fire. And he told his gunners to commence firing. A rocket answered him. It punched clean through the armored plate of his coxswain's flat and exploded just feet from where Kelly was standing. The blast hurled him to the deck with serious head wounds. He couldn't stand. He couldn't speak clearly enough to work the radio, and he still would not quit. He lay there on the steel and relayed his commands word by word through one of his sailors until the enemy fire was finally beaten down on every boat, the cripple included, pulled clear to safety. Only then did they medevac him out by helicopter. Tom Kelly lived. He stayed in the Navy for a full career, retired a captain, and years later served as Secretary of Veteran Services for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. And to this day, if you ask him about the Medal of Honor that he received, he'll steer the conversation to a corpsman named Doc Nelson, who he credits with keeping him alive on the deck of that monitor. That's the kind of man that we're talking about. So if Kelly gives you the sailors, war James Foes gives you the soldiers. And it is so much harder to tell this story because Jim Foes did not come home. He was 21 years old, from Omaha, Nebraska. Company E, 4th Battalion, 47th infantry, the 2nd Brigade, the Riverine Brigade, the soldiers who lived aboard the barrack ships, aboard the Beneua herself, as it happens, the very flagship we've been talking about. And as a man who survived Faust platoon to tell this better than I can. He came out to the Delta as a green replacement in the spring of 1968, stepped aboard the Benoit and the first friend he made was a kid named Jim Fos. They swapped stories about home. They each had a younger sister they were proud of and promised to look out for. And then they went to war together. This was May of 1968, what the troops called the May offensive, the enemy's follow up blow to Tet and the single bloodiest month for American forces in the entire Vietnam war. On the night of the 14th in Qianhua province, Foes was in a four man position on the perimeter where he spotted three Viet Cong creeping toward them in the dark. He opened fire and dropped two of them. The third managed to throw a hand grenade into their position before slipping back into the vegetation. Four Americans, one live grenade. And Jim foes did not hesitate. He shouted a warning to the men beside him and he threw himself down onto that grenade and he took the full blast of the explosion with his own body. So the other three would live. They lived. Jim Fose was gone at 21. President Nixon presented the medal of honor to Fose's mother in 1970. And that friend, the one he'd met just weeks earlier on the deck at the Benoit, finished out that terrible May as one of only about a dozen men still standing in a platoon that had begun the month nearly 30 strong. And that's the arithmetic of the brown water war and is exactly why the decorations stack up the way they do. The mobile riverine force put men in the most exposed place a fighting man can be on a slow boat on a narrow river in the front of a dug in enemy. And they ask them to go and do it again and again and again. There's a reason the mobile riverine force has been called the most decorated joint unit of the Vietnam war. The valor was real, it was constant, and it was paid for by people with names in hometowns and little sisters waiting back home. Tom Kelly and Jim Fos are just two of them. There were a great many more a hundred years, from Vicksburg to the rock Barai, America's river wars are rare. But when they come, they ask everything of the people involved. The men of the mobile riverine force answered. They deserve to be remembered alongside the ironclads and the gun crews of the Mississippi, the latest and so far, the last of the combat river sailors. So if you'd like to know more about the mobile riverine force, check out the fantastic documentary The Mobile Riverine Force, narrated by Mike Rowe and by the same folks at Arbello Entertainment who created the Seawolf documentary. It's well worth a watch. The archival footage and interviews, they're fantastic. They're like, they're just good. Give it a look. You can find it on PBS or Google it for the producer's website. There's also a few good books that I recommend, but I steer you to two in particular. The first is Thomas Cutler's Brown Water Black Berets, probably the best single narrative of the whole Brown Water Navy. And if you want the story straight from the man who Built the force, track down General William Fulton's official Army history, Riverine Operations, 1966-1969. It's fairly dry in places, the way official histories tend to be, but it's the foundational account, and the best part is that you can read the whole thing for free online through the army center of Military History. So, my friends, that's all for now. Thank you for listening to the history that happened before the history you know. And if you enjoyed this episode, please give it a like and a share and support your National Naval Aviation Museum and the Museum Foundation. Until next time, this is Lucky signing off.