Stalking the Vietcong - Inside Operation Phoenix: A Personal Account

Zusatztext “A poignant! personal account by an Army district advisor who discovered the Vietcong to be a formidable opponent.” – The New York Times Informationen zum Autor Stuart A. Herrington Klappentext In a gripping memoir that reads like a spy novel, one man recounts his personal experience with Operation Phoenix, the program created to destroy the Vietcong's shadow government, which thrived in the rural communities of South Vietnam. Stuart A. Herrington was an American intelligence advisor assigned to root out the enemy in the Hau Nghia province. His two-year mission to capture or kill Communist agents operating there was made all the more difficult by local officials who were reluctant to cooperate, villagers who were too scared to talk, and VC who would not go down without a fight. Herrington developed an unexpected but intense identification with the villagers in his jurisdiction-and learned the hard way that experiencing war was profoundly different from philosophizing about it in a seminar room.“A Model Revolutionary Village”   The closer the World Airways charter jet got to Vietnam, the quieter the two hundred GIs on board became. We approached Saigon’s Tan Son Nhut Air Base at 5:00 A.M. Flares lit up the horizon sporadically as we glided down our approach, and we could see that the entire base was blacked out as we taxied to the reception area. The glow from the exhausts of the F-4 Phantoms in the concrete revetments reminded me of something I didn’t need to be reminded of—we were in a war zone. My stomach knew it before I did, and I felt lousy as we disembarked into the tropical heat and followed the MPs’ directions to the in-processing hangar.   Three days in Saigon convinced me that I didn’t want to draw an assignment there. The city was filthy, overcrowded, hectic, and overrun with hustlers of all types. You name the negative modifier, it fit Saigon in early 1971. Not even the graffiti on the latrine walls at the reception center could dampen my enthusiasm for getting out of Saigon—the sooner the better.   The Vietnamese flag is well-designed.   Where they’re not red, they’re yellow.   If the good lord had wanted me to come to this stinking land and walk through the swamps for a year, he would have given me baggy green skin.   [Penned in immediately below:] Don’t worry. After one year, you’ll have baggy green skin!   I had a game plan to get a good assignment, if indeed there was such a thing in Vietnam. A friend of mine had just returned from a tour in Phuoc Tuy, a coastal province southeast of Saigon best known for its resort town of Vung Tau. He had described duty in Phuoc Tuy in glowing terms—silver beaches, giant lobsters, and not too many Vietcong. There was even a contingent of fun-loving Australians stationed in the province, and my friend told incredible tales of their nonmilitary exploits. The plan was for me to go to the officer assignment folks at headquarters, rattle off a few words of Vietnamese, and Vung Tau, here I come.   It didn’t work. The sergeant in the assignments branch merely laughed as he explained that Phuoc Tuy province would not hold all of the men who had volunteered to go there in the defense of democracy. The best I was able to do was to wrangle orders to Military Region III, the area around Saigon. I was to report the following morning to Bien Hoa city, a few miles north of Saigon, for an interview with a colonel who would decide where I would actually be assigned.   The colonel turned out to be the officer who was responsible for the “Phoenix” program in Military Region III. Phoenix was the code name for the attack on the Vietcong shadow government. The interview lasted only a few minutes. The colonel told me that since I had done so well at language school, Hau Nghia province would be the perfect assignment for me. Province Senior Advisor Col...

Product details

• Authors: Stuart Herrington, Stuart A. Herrington
• Publisher: Presidio Press
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback
• Released: 23.11.2004
• EAN: 9780345472519
• ISBN: 978-0-345-47251-9
• No. of pages: 304
• Dimensions: 102 mm x 171 mm x 19 mm
• Subjects: Fiction > Narrative literature; Non-fiction book