Stalking the Vietcong: Inside Operation Phoenix: A Personal Account

“A poignant, personal account by an Army district advisor who discovered the Vietcong to be a formidable opponent.”– The New York Times 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. Stuart A. Herrington was a counterintelligence officer in the Vietnam War. He served the last year of his thirty-year army career as a member of the faculty of the Army War College at Carlisle Barracks, Pennsylvania. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. “A Model Revolutionary Village” xa0 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. xa0 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. xa0 The Vietnamese flag is well-designed. xa0 Where they’re not red, they’re yellow. xa0 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. xa0 [Penned in immediately below:] Don’t worry. After one year, you’ll have baggy green skin! xa0 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. xa0 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. xa0 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 Colonel Jack Weissinger was a “hard-charger” who had already served almost two years in Hau Nghia. The colonel explained that Weissinger “needed good people,” and I was to fly the following morning to Hau Nghia on the daily courier flight. xa0 I went to the club that last night in Bien Hoa and sat at the bar downing Budweisers in a futile attempt to conceal my concern for what lay ahead. I had already figured out what “Weissinger needs good men” meant. Hau Nghia was not Phuoc Tuy. I was scared, and the Vietnamese and Americans at the club didn’t offer much solace. The Americans nodded knowingly when I told them I was going to Hau Nghia. It seemed that Hau Nghia province was famous for two things—Colonel Jack Weissinger and the Vietcong. The issue was in doubt whether it was Colonel Weissinger or the Vietcong that was the most feared thing about the province. xa0 I tried out my school Vietnamese on the girls who tended bar. It was interesting to watch their surprised reaction when an American spoke their language. Their initial response was always the same; they asked a series of questions that to an American seemed nosey: xa0 How old are you, captain? Do you have a wife, captain? How many children do you have, captain? How much do you weigh, captain? Where are you going, captain? xa0 And when I answered “Hau Nghia” to this last question, the response was ominous. “Oh God, Dai Uy! xa0 Hau Nghia! Beaucoup VC, Dai Uy!” xa0 I spent that last night in the transient billets, watching the occasional flares and the streams of tracers that erupted on the horizon around the perimeter of the base. I could hear the “thud” of outgoing artillery, and found myself wondering if the perimeter were under attack. Later I learned that the artillerymen were firing routine “H and I” (harassment and interdiction) missions at suspected enemy locations. The flares and tracers I had seen were also routine—the troops periodically opened fire to test their weapons and to let the enemy know that they were awake. Unfortunately, no one told me all of this in Bien Hoa, so I slept with my M-16 rifle uncomfortably draped over one arm. xa0 I flew to Hau Nghia in a Swiss-built Porter aircraft that was known for its short takeoff and landing capabilities. During the short flight, I had the first of many looks at Vietnam from the air. I can still recall my pure astonishment at the lush beauty of the countryside. Conditioned as I was by the images of Vietnam drawn by others for the American people, I was unprepared for the tropical beauty that was spread out below. What about the infamous defoliation operations? Where were the wasted “free-fire zones” that I had read about? Hadn’t our artillery laid waste to vast stretches of the rural countryside? Finally, around a triangular mud fort somewhere west of Bien Hoa, I spotted a sea of craters. Still, what I saw (and what I didn’t see) during that flight activated a tiny caution lamp in my head, and I warned myself to be careful of preconceived notions and generalizations. xa0 My thoughts on the rural beauty of Vietnam came to an abrupt halt as the pilot demonstrated his aircraft’s tricks. From five thousand feet directly above the Hau Nghia airstrip, he corkscrewed his way down and landed in a stomach-turner that made a believer out of me. The aircraft halted almost instantly. The pilot yelled at me to get out, and the enlisted mail clerk threw the cargo out on the runway. The entire operation took less than a minute. Just when I thought I was going to be left alone on the tiny airstrip, a jeep charged around the tail of the aircraft, and within seconds I was on my way to the headquarters of Advisory Team 43. The silver aircraft was airborne within thirty seconds. First Sergeant Willie Tate, the jeep driver, introduced himself and made an unflattering reference to skittish civilian pilots. xa0 The province capital of Bao Trai consisted of a single asphalt main street which was crowded with peasants on their way to and from the bustling central market. Both sides of the street were lined with small shops, and the town’s citizens walked in the middle of the street, oblivious to the intrusions of the motorbikes and three-wheeled Lambrettas that plied their way back and forth. Chickens, ducks, dogs, and even pigs roamed the streets freely, and Tate maneuvered around the plodding ox carts of the farmers. The sergeant pushed the jeep through the chaos, blowing his horn impatiently. Bao Trai was dirty, crowded, and small. If this was the province capital, what would a district town look like? xa0 The ride through Bao Trai took only a couple of minutes with Tate driving. It would have taken me three times as long. We pulled into the walled compound that housed the advisory team, and the sergeant informed me that I would stay there for one or two nights before going one step farther—to one of Hau Nghia province’s four districts. xa0 At the team’s orderly room, I learned the worst. There had been a memorial service that morning for two men who had been killed in an ambush earlier in the week. The unfortunate men had been stationed in Cu Chi, one of the four districts. When a government outpost in their district came under a Vietcong attack, the two advisors jumped in their jeep and followed their Vietnamese counterparts to the scene of the action. They never made it. The Vietcong ambushed their hastily formed (and poorly thought-out) reaction force, and both were killed when an antitank rocket hit their jeep. xa0 Later in the day, I met Maj. Dick Culp, the intelligence officer who ran the American side of the Hau Nghia Phoenix effort. The major explained the peculiarities of the program in Hau Nghia. The mission, he explained, was quite easy to define—kill or capture Vietcong agents—but it was seemingly impossible to get the Vietnamese to accomplish it. Our job as Phoenix advisors was to assist the Vietnamese intelligence services (our counterparts) in identifying the members of the “Vietcong infrastructure” (VCI) and in planning the operations to “neutralize” them. Neutralize was a euphemism that actually meant kill, capture, or convince to surrender. xa0 Culp was obviously a frustrated man, discouraged because he believed in the rationale of the Phoenix concept, but had been unable to get the Vietnamese to cooperate in its execution. I sensed from his remarks that Colonel Weissinger was a problem, though he discreetly avoided discussing the details of his relationship with the colonel. Other members of the team cautioned me that being a Phoenix advisor on Team 43 was risky business and that the risks had more to do with Colonel Weissinger than they did with the Vietcong. Read more