Edward L. Rowny
Having chosen the staff, I next turned to finding a name for the group. I came up
with the acronym ACTIV, which stood for Army Concept Team in Vietnam.
ACTIV had a catchy ring to it and helped advertise the image that we were a
highly motivated, can-do group. I got the name from reading about a Soviet elite
group with the same name.
My next step was to call upon Admiral Harry D. Felt, who commanded the Pacific
theater of operations. As soon as I began briefing Admiral Felt I realized that I
was walking into a buzz saw. He told me straight away that he thought arming
helicopters was a bad idea. In the first place, he didn't like helicopters. Second,
and more importantly, he believed strongly that if the Army armed helicopters and
supported ground troops with fire power from air platforms, it would adversely
affect the Navy's roles and missions. Felt commanded all U.S. forces in Vietnam
and had not received any orders from the Joint Chiefs of Staff to support ACTIV.
Meanwhile, the machine guns and rockets that we were to attach to the helicopters
and the helicopters had been shipped to Manila. I as well went to Manila and from
there spent a lot of time on the phone with Vance and Colonel Clay. Vance was
encountering difficulty getting General Wheeler to issue orders to Admiral Felt to
allow me to proceed with the helicopters to Vietnam. Vance had to go to Secretary
of Defense McNamara to get an order issued to the Joint Chiefs of Staff which, in
turn, would be transmitted to CINCPAC [Commander in Chief, Pacific (Admiral
Felt)]. I had worked for McNamara in 1959 when I was a member of the
chairman's staff group and drew up plans for the buildup of U.S. forces in Europe
during_ the second Berlin crisis. McNamara thought the A r m y ' s air mobility
concept had merit and backed Vance. In the end, McNamara prevailed upon
Wheeler to issue the necessary orders to allow me to proceed to Vietnam.
However, I was not well received in Saigon. The headquarters commandant in
Saigon was a Marine Corps officer, who told me he had received no orders to
support my experiments. Unable to get a separate office, I moved into an Army
installation several blocks away from the MACV Military Assistance Command,
Vietnam]. One morning shortly after moving into my newly established office, I
arrived to find the desks, tables, file cabinets, and typewriters out in the street.
I
had been dispossessed by the Saigon headquarters commandant who said that I had
no authority to occupy the building the Army had assigned me. While standing on
the street with my office equipment around me, Brigadier General Robert "Buck"
Anthis drove up. I had come to know Anthis when we were classmates at the
National War College. He thought I was being treated shamefully and, even
though the Air Force was opposed to the air mobility concept in principle, Anthis
invited me to establish an office in his headquarters. He had some temporary
partitions and I was able to operate from his headquarters until I straightened out
things with the headquarters commandant and moved into my own building. I have
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