Engineer Memoirs _____________________________________________________________________
influence outward. We didn't have any U.S. units and little of the aviation had arrived. All
that was to come later.
When I left, I thought I was leaving something that was on the right course. By the way, I
wrote an article for the Military Engineer on "Engineers in Clear and Hold Operations,"
which was published, I guess, in November or December '63. The article recounted briefly
my experience and how you'd use engineers in the kind of operation we had in Phu Yen
Province.
Q:
Were you solicited to do that or did you write it up and send it to them?
A:
I wanted to write it because I felt I'd been in something unique and it was early. Now all
kinds of my friends were going over there to have this same experience of being an engineer
battalion adviser, so that was my motivation. I submitted it to the Society for American
Military Engineers and the editor sent it back, greatly edited. So, I wrote a strong letter back
saying, "You've really edited so much, you've taken out the context. So, either we put a lot
of it back in or I don't publish it." I suggested some things to go back in. Obviously, he also
had some good points in what he said. I got to expand the article again. He gave me another
half a page, took out a picture, and I re-edited his editing. Then we came to a satisfactory
agreement as to what should be in the magazine.
Q:
That's interesting because it's in this period of the early '60s that the Army's trying to come
to terms with the concept of counterinsurgency as a method of warfare, how to do it and the
engineer's role in that.
A:
That's right. We were all reading the books. Bernard Fall's book, Street Without Joy was sort
of a bedside table bible. Later I got into John Thompson's book on Malaysia, and we had a
lot of the novels that I really enjoyed coming out of the French Vietnamese experience. Jean
Larteguy's book, The Centurions, described the French airborne at Dien Bien Phu and the
bitterness of the lessons that they took out of that. This was followed by his book, The
Praetorians. There was another book too that described their thoughts about operations over
there. So, I did a lot of reading before, while there, and afterwards concerning all of this kind
of period and how you put it all together.
Q:
What was the attitude towards the French on the part of the young American officers who
were there? Was it their feeling that, "We can see how they messed the situation up and we
can do better," or--but you said you also were interested in the lessons learned from the
French experience, which had been pretty negative.
A:
No, I don't think it was negative. I certainly didn't have a negative feeling, nor do I recall that
sort of reaction on anybody's part. I guess I felt they were led to an experience in which they
never had the wherewithal to succeed. I mean, you have to figure the lessons we had later,
that they covered twice the area, all the north too, with many fewer capabilities. It was only
when you sit there and evaluate the task that you understand the futility of their task. You
see, Phu Yen Province is where Navarre's Operation Atlantis came ashore. He put people
ashore in an amphibious assault, but if you look at the areas on the map of what they
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