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Man of the River: Memoir of a Brown Water Sailor in Vietnam, 1968-1969

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I served in Viet Nam on the gun boats, during the time Chief Bryant was in country. His book is written very well. The real history of the bravery,and dedication comes through. I recommend it for people who wish to know what really happened on the rivers of Viet Nam.

I found Chief Bryant's memoir to be a very moving, and personal account of the life of the riverine sailor in Vietnam. The reader feels a part of the action because this is not a story written by an Admiral, General, or historian, but rather by one man who was part of a boat crew who was just trying to stay alive.Highly recommended for readers interested in riverine warfare or the Vietnam War. Also recommended is "Coast Guard Action in Vietnam" by Paul Scotti.

Koen Review; Volume 5,Issue 12;August 15, 1998 Man of the River, SMC Jimmy R. Bryant, USN Man of the River is a highly personal account of a man's Naval experiences in Vietnam's rivers from 1968 to 1969. In his dedication Bryant made sure to stress that this is not an individual's war story but one of a team. He shows his pride and respect for his fellow "men of the sea" in Task Force 116, River division 591. It is to these brave men whom he dedicates this book. While on active duty he is credited with 38 accounts of enemy contact with his fellow patrolmen. The role of the Navy in Vietnam's waterways was to patrol the rivers in high-speed small boats using hit-and-run tactics to disrupt the flow of enemy troops and supplies. The threat of combat was always with them, and Bryant soon realized that fear was not an option if he were to keep his men alive. His whole task force knew that one false move could be death for them all, and Bryant with great pride tells of how each member kept a cool head throughout with their own bravery and the grace of God. Bryant's straightforward and detailed account was not written for personal glory but from thankfulness for surviving to be able to tell his story in respect and remembrance of all those who fought honorably for the American ideal.

I have now had the opportunity to read in detail your memoir, Man of the River. I found it a beautiful, inspirational story. All your Vietnam comrades are fortunate that you have shared this with them and a wider audience.

All my best wishes to you and your family.

Sincerely, E.R. Zumwalt, Jr. Admiral, USN {Ret}

By William C. McDonald, Ph.D. ...In the 1990s scholars, military historians, popular historians, and military eye-witnesses can tell their stories at a remove from a war that seemed as present in the United States as it was on any for-eign soil. Finally, even the quiet university campuses seem ready to listen, as men like Jimmy Bryant tell it "like it was." Born in North Carolina, Jimmy Bryant was raised on a farm in the tobacco belt. He joined the US Navy in 1954 at the age of 18. After recruit training in San Diego, he served on six US Navy ships at sea; he had two shore duty assign-ments. His second ship was the USS Boxer CVS-21, con-verted to LPH-4, which was involved in the Nuclear Test Series of 1958 in the Pacific. His memoir covers his tour in Vietnam with River Division 591. While on active duty in Vietnam, Bryant is credited with 38 contacts with the enemy in which shots were fired. Often he stood, clearly exposed to enemy fire. His Bronze Star Medal, with Combat "V," from the year 1970 is made out to "Chief Signalman Jimmy R. Bryant, United States Navy, for Meritorious Service from October 1968 to September 1969." (Vice Admiral E.R. Zumwalt, Jr., Commander of US Naval Forces in Vietnam spells out Chief Bryant's acts of heroism) Bryant, after recov-ering from injuries received in Vietnam, finished up his last tour as Company Commander at the Naval Air Technical Training Center in Millington, Tennessee. Jimmy Bryant's memoir begins in October, 1968, the year of the Tet Offensive. (In January of that year, there was a combined assault on US positions by the NVA (North Vietnam Army) and the Viet Cong. Between Tet and his ar-rival in Saigon, Chief Bryant was stationed aboard the USS Hummingbird MSC-192, a coastal minesweeper out of Little Creek, Va. The Navy circulated a Major Call, a memoran-dum, looking for qualified men to join the River Patrol Force in Vietnam. Of this Force, Lt. Col. Victor Croizat has writ-ten: "(It was created) in September 1965 to patrol island wa-terways, to deny them to communist insurgents and enforce the curfew. The US Navy River Patrol Force, code name `Game Warden', was designated Task Force 116 and placed under the naval component of the US Military Assistance Command, Vietnam" (Brown Water Navy, 142). In 1968 Bryant volunteered to join the River Patrol Force, and after a few weeks received orders to proceed for PBR (=patrol boat, river) training at Vallejo, California. After his unit had fa-miliarized itself with the relevant boats, weapons and tactics, Bryant was sent to Whidbey Island, Washington, for survival training. This was followed by Vietnamese language training in San Diego. In late 1968, aircraft then brought the future brown water sailors to Vietnam, by way of Alaska and Japan. Bryant's manuscript begins upon his arrival in Saigon. It ends in 1969, the year in which President Nixon had begun a slow withdrawal of US ground troops from Vietnam. By sheer coincidence Jimmy Bryant's memoir appears very close in time to the comprehensive book by Gordon L. Rottman, The Vietnam Brown Water Navy: Riverine and Coastal Warfare 1965-69 (1997). Rottman begins by re-minding us that the Mekong Delta is the world's largest river delta. "The Delta's real roads are its waterways," he contin-ues, "with sampans the main mode of transportation. Even villages were either floating, built on stilts, or with individual homes on earth mounds. Malaria and dengue fever is ram-pant year around as are leeches, poisonous snakes, and vi-cious ants. The water is unfit to drink. During the dry sea-son, December to March, salt water intrudes 20-50 miles inland up the waterways. The April to November wet, or monsoon season, brings over eighty inches of rain. Tem-peratures are in the 80-100F range with equally high humid-ity. Soldiers on foot in the Delta were exhausted after three days in the field and required at least two days to recover from constantly wet feet. Longer duration operations led to immersion foot, rashes and skin ulcers" (4). Since the earliest times riverine and coastal warfare had long been practiced in the Vietnam Delta--by the ancient Vietnamese, Chinese, Khmers, and the modern French navy. In 1965, because of a deteriorating military situation, the US military decided to commit an American riverine force to the Delta. Army and Navy joined troops, and worked together, to develop the Mobile Riverine Force, whose mission was to interdict the flow of men and materials to the enemy. The Force started to dissolve in the summer of 1969, Rottman says, as US forces began the withdrawal from Vietnam (4). The role of the US Navy was to patrol the many rivers in small boats that could travel the waterways at high speeds, using hit-and-run tactics to disrupt the flow of enemy troops and supplies and to inflict as much damage as possible. The site of action was a small fiberglass boat, and the dominant weapon was the Browning .50-caliber HB-M2 machine gun. Bryant belonged to one of the better-known operations of the Vietnam Brown Water Navy, Task Force 116 (Operation GAME WARDEN), the River Patrol Force. Activated in De-cember, 1965, Task Force 116 underwent several permuta-tions, being enlarged in 1968--the year that Bryant arrived in Vietnam--to four task groups assigned to specific rivers (Rottman, 5). The first Game Warden PBRs were operational in Spring, 1966; the boats were based on the Long Tau ship channel, Nha Be and at Cat Lo, near Vung Tau. (The Long Tau channel connects three rivers: the Saigon, the Nha Be and the Long Tau.) Speaking of the PBR, the most frequently observed patrol craft in the Mekong Delta, Alan L. "Buz" Lowe observes: "The PBR came to symbolize the Brown Water Navy in Vietnam. When the US Navy decided to commit river patrol forces, it found itself in need of a small, fast vessel that could maneuver in tight places. The Navy decided to use a 31-foot craft capable of 28 knots. The boat's armament consisted of a twin .50 caliber-machinegun turret in the bow, a single .50 caliber machine gun in the stern, and an M-60 machine gun and a Mark 18 40mm grenade launcher mounted amidships. Because its armor was limited, speed and armament became the PBR's best hope for pro-tection. The PBR was born in an atmosphere of urgency and tested under actual combat conditions..." (12). Task Force 116 reached a peak strength of 258 craft, supported by air-craft and helicopters. Rottman makes the point that, "of the fourteen Medals of Honor awarded to Navy personnel in the Vietnam War, three were awarded to two PBR crewmen, one posthumously, and a river assault officer" (5). This was a task force of heroes. Jimmy Bryant and men like him would not want to be put on a pedestal, however. "Salty," Rottman says, "is per-haps the best word to describe America's brown water sail-ors. Serving long days aboard small craft with few comfort amenities, distant from desk-bound officers, they viewed themselves as free-wheeling and independent from the spit and polish of the `big ship Navy'" (16). Some wore Vietnam-ese black pajamas, the same as their Vietnamese crewmen. Warriors who didn't stand on ceremony--these were the seamen of the Brown Water Navy. They inhabited a world of mobile bases, patrolling, speed, searching out the enemy, and lightning-reaction ingenuity. The man who adapted and improvised, lived to tell his story. Tom Hain explains on his informative web page, up since 1996, "The Mobile Riverine Force", that "the tactics we used were developed on the job," because there hadn't been a need for a force like the MRF since the Civil War. The degree of coop-eration between Army and Navy also recalls Civil War times. In Hain's view, the terrain of combat was decisive. The Viet-nam delta, he reminds us, "was laced with waterways, natural and man made. You couldn't dig a hole more than 2 feet deep without hitting water. The bad guys used the waterways too." On these dangerous waterways Jimmy Bryant operated, and every inch of brown water, or so it would appear, turned into a kill zone. The Riverine forces, the subject of. Commander Don Sheppard's best-selling book, Riverine: A Brown-Water Sailor In The Delta, 1967 (1992), took the fight to the enemy under the motto "Close and Kill." The men who fought the so-called River War, volunteers from the fleet, relied on strategy and teamwork. Each operation required an orchestration of various units, both water and ground; air support figured in, as well. The task of the mobile riverine operation was tactical, rewarding daring, speed, and the surprise of the night am-bush. Each four-man crew faced the danger of sorties into unknown territory, as the fragile boats navigated the muddy, unpredictable rivers. They accepted a tight living space that was damp, dusty and noisy; there was precious little privacy. Weather was always a factor, sometimes a major inhibiting factor. (It is estimated that weather, for example, monsoon rains, restricted PBR operations up to half of the time, espe-cially early in the River War.)

As a member of the base support personnel at Nha Be during Chief Bryant's tour I was and still am pleased to serve with people like Chief Bryant. This is a great book written by a humble man who truly represents America's finest.