Military Assistance Command, Vietnam

The enemy did not fail to recognize the military significance of these routes and took advantage of the narrowness of the river's by planting mines in them and setting up frequent ambushes along their banks.

In response to this threat, General Lewis W. Walt, commanding general of the 3rd Marine Amphibious Force, asked MACV early in 1967 to assign Navy patrol craft to these two rivers to provide protection for the vital logistics traffic.

The Navy was reluctant to meet this request because it would mean drawing sorely needed craft away from the Mekong Delta.

but they recognized its importance and made plans to accommodate the request.

While the River Security Group was made up of Mobile Base 1, 10 PBRs, and five LCM-6s that had been locally converted into minesweepers, and they totally left out the seven LCPLs, which some of this is wrong.

That's all I can tell you, so I'll try to keep it straight for you.

For administrative purposes, the chain of command went from Commander Task Force Clearwater to ComNav4V, but operationally, Commander Task Force Clearwater reported directly to ComUSMACV forward, the post created by General Abrams' move to Fubai in late 1967.

In all fairness, folks, I have to say that there's no mention in this chapter of River Division 543, which was a part of our unit, and those guys need need to be recognized.

And when he left the service...

Before his last kind of role in uniform, he was one of the first guys deployed to MACV, Military Assistance Command Vietnam, in 1962.

And the reasoning there, like we talked about, was very much a special forces war.

You know, counterinsurgency, direct action, identifying

It was this fear that became the US Army's prime target.

In December 1969, the US Military Assistance Command , the joint command running all American military operations in South Vietnam, compiled and circulated a detailed intelligence fact sheet on Vietnamese folk belief.

Among the details were listed various of the spirits of traditional Vietnamese folklore.

This included the ghost pig, the dog ghost and the cat ghost.

What do we need to know about Westmoreland at this point, Jeff?

Well, Wes Mullins is sent out to replace Paul Harkins, who was the MACV, the Military Assistance Command Vietnam commander, basically the American field commander in Vietnam.

But Harkins has no real field command because there aren't any American combat troops.

He's just running the advisory effort.

The book is The Vietnam War, A Military History.

1966 and 1967, more troops coming in all the time.

A man named Wes Moreland is in charge of the MACV.

He's supported by his president and the National Security Advisor and the Chief of Staff of the Army, the Joint Chiefs.

And I had heard about them, so I wanted to get down and, and I, we had to, it took the CIA to get us down there.

MACV didn't.

Y- they, they kinda shrugged.

They were very uncertain about it.