Policing the Dragons

As villagers stared curiously from the banks, a flotilla of 20 olive-green, gnat-size boats swarmed into South Viet Nam's Long Tan River for the first time last week. Planing over the water at better than 25 knots, they looked from a distance more like pleasure craft than fighting ships. In fact, they are the U.S. Navy's newest weapon against the Viet Cong, who by some estimates smuggle at least 50% of all their supplies from North Viet Nam along the Mekong River's nine tributaries--known to the Chinese as "the nine dragons"--and its labyrinth of interconnecting canals.

Up from RAGS. Not since the Civil War, when Yankee Admiral David G. ("Damn the torpedoes!") Farragut blockaded the Mississippi, has the Navy engaged in such concentrated river warfare. The task of policing the Mekong Delta's 1,400 miles of inland waterways, plied by up to 300 junks daily, has been handled hitherto by River Assault Groups (RAGS), consisting of antique French gunboats or World War II-vintage LCMs manned by Vietnamese. Because their efficacy was limited by short range and slow speed, the Navy designed an entirely new craft for Viet Nam, ordered 160 of them from a Bellingham, Wash., manufacturer at a cost of $5.2 million.

Known as the PBR (for patrol boat, river), the ungainly looking fiber-glass craft is virtually unsinkable. It is 31 ft. long (less than half the length of a PT boat), with a 10 1/2-ft. beam, draws only 9 in. at top speed, thus can poke into the shallowest backwaters reached by sampans. The craft is powered by twin 220-h.p. diesel engines, which drive water-jet pumps that are linked to the steering wheel; thus the PBR has neither rudder nor propeller to foul in underwater weeds. Highly maneuverable, the boat can make a 180DEG turn on a piaster from top speed; throttled back, it can cruise almost inaudibly, a valuable asset at night when most Red interceptions take place. The PBR is equipped with radar and a powerful searchlight; its three machine guns (two .50-cals. in the bow, a .30-cal. aft) have infrared sights.

Tributary Vendetta. The gnat fleet's four-man crews undergo two months of training, spend the last four weeks practicing maneuvers in San Francisco Bay's Sacramento River Delta, which was chosen for its similarity to the Mekong--narrow bayous flanked by swamps, head-high saw grass and dense clumps of trees. Instructors include many old Viet Nam hands such as Chief Gunner's Mate Edwin Canby, 40, who says: "I want to go back soon. I have a little vendetta to settle on the Ham Luong tributary." To date, an elite corps of 200 men, most of them volunteers, has been trained for duty on the Mekong, where the Navy expects to have a fleet of 100 PBRs by late summer.

The PBRs will patrol in pairs in round-the-clock, eight-hour shifts. They will be inviting targets for snipers and wire-triggered Viet Cong mines. Nevertheless, the river sailors hope not only to cut Communist water traffic to a minimum but also to ensure that Saigon's lifeline to the sea is not blocked by Viet Cong attacks on shipping.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.