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A Real Hero

© Andrew Willis

In early 1967, my father enlisted in the Navy. He was proud, patriotic, and headstrong, and his reasons for joining were very different than mine were almost 22 years later. He volunteered in the era of the draft, a move that not many young men of the time were willing to make. Being young, dumb and full of himself, he quickly volunteered for some of the most hazardous duty the Navy then had to offer: the Mobile Riverine Force, serving on a river patrol boat, or “monitor.” Called “the brown water Navy,” they were considered by many at the time second most fearsome group of fighting sailors, behind only the SEALs.

Dad arrived in the middle of the Game Warden operations in the Mekong River Delta, which began in April 1966 with the establishment of the joint Army/Navy Mobile Riverine Force (MRF). He was stationed in Section 514 of River Division 51, in Can Tho, in the deep south of Vietnam. Their mission, according to a 1969 press release celebrating the 3rd birthday of the Force was “to patrol the rivers, estuaries, and canals of South Vietnam, to interdict the movement of Communist supplies and personnel and to keep innocent traffic on these waterways safe.”

To this end, they worked with SEALs, the US Army, and the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN). They performed reconnaissance, ferried troops, searched for active enemy forces and for covert weapons movements. The river patrol boats and their brown water sailors were the hound dogs of South Vietnam, and they were good at it. By the third anniversary of Game Warden, the MRF had killed over 3000 enemy soldiers, sunk, damaged or captured over 6500 boats, and captured or destroyed thousands of enemy weapons, while using their speed and maneuverability to keep their own losses at one of the lowest rates of any unit in Vietnam.

Now, in 2001, Dad still doesn’t talk much about the battles, the fighting, or the enemy. He talks about his friends, both here and gone. He talks about adventures on liberty and leave. Most importantly, he talks about the feelings he had then and still has now about being an American, fighting for American ideals (his heart was in the right place, even if McNamara and Johnson’s weren’t). He told me, “I still believe to this day that I went in and served for all the right reasons. If I had to do it over, I would do it all again. That doesn’t mean that I agree with the war or how it was fought, but I still believe in the Navy and in America.”