From Blue to Green and Brown

Naval History ^ | December 2015 | LT Commander Thomas J. Cutler, USN (Retired)

[Retain Mike]

MARKET TIME

The transition from advisory roles to operational ones began with the creation of the Coastal Surveillance Force, designated as Task Force (TF) 115, whose primary mission—code-named Operation Market Time—was to interdict the flow of supplies to communist forces by conducting random searches among the throngs of junks and sampans that travelled these waters on a daily basis.

Seventeen existing 82-foot patrol boats (WPBs) were provided by the Coast Guard, but for these shallow-water operations the Navy had to rely on modifying a 50-foot aluminum craft that was being used in the Gulf of Mexico to transport crews to and from offshore drilling rigs. Officially designated as PCFs (patrol craft, fast), these converts were suitably armed with machine guns and naval mortars. Capable of 28 knots, they came to be known as “Swift Boats.”

GAME WARDEN

The most serious infiltration by land occurred in the southernmost part of South Vietnam, in the region known as the Mekong Delta. Geographically this area represented only one quarter of the country’s land area, but demographically it comprised about half of the population. It consisted of a vast network of waterways, with a spider’s web of streams and canals interconnecting four main branches of the Mekong River.

Despite the Mekong Delta’s long-standing reputation as one of the great “rice bowls” of Asia, the Viet Cong controlled much of the flow of rice to South Vietnamese markets, and the VNN was having difficulty keeping the shipping channels to Saigon open, which hampered needed commercial trade. Consequently, the U.S. Navy was called on to fix these problems, and another task force (TF 116) was created, officially called the River Patrol Force.

[Retain Mike]

This post is for fellow river rats.