Ronald Ray Interview

              John A. Adams ’71 Center for Military History and Strategic Analysis. Military Oral History Project Interview with Ronald Ray by Dr. Eric Osborne, May 2006
©Adams Center, Virginia Military Institute
About the interviewer: Dr. Osborne teaches History at VMI.
Osborne – I’m here today with the John Adams Center, sitting here with Ronald Ray. I appreciate you showing up today to fill in a few things from a prior interview that you had on your experience in the Vietnam War. I’d like to go into a little bit more detail about a few things today.
Ray – Happy to do that. Glad to be with you.
Osborne – Thanks you Mr. Ray. I appreciate it. Just for purposes of the record, could you just briefly go over your service career in terms of rank, received at certain times and where you served?
Ray – Would that be military only, or military and political?
Osborne – Military I think would be best.
Ray – I enlisted in the Marine Corps Reserve out of Wagner High School in the summer of 1960; training in ’61 and ’63 at Quantico, Virginia; was commissioned out of Center College, second lieutenant in the Marine Corps Reserve in June of 1964; active duty for five years, including two years in the 2nd Marine Division, 3rd Battalion, 6th Marines, Lima Company, combat operations and evacuation of civilians at Dominican Republic in April of 1965 as a young platoon commander, 3rd officer ashore in that operation. I was involved in operation Winter Express in Norway, training with the British Royal Marines in Operation Black Watch in Canada; two Caribbean deployments and then I received orders, as first lieutenant in 1966 to the J.F.K. Special Warfare Center at Ft. Bragg, North Carolina for training in Vietnamese language to be an advisor to the United States Marine Corps service from March ’67 to March ’68; major combat operations Coronado Two and Hue City and others as an infantry battalion adviser for 12 months; a year as a recruiting officer in Albuquerque, New Mexico OIC (Officer in Charge) from ’68 until I resigned my commission at the end of March 1969. I then took a commission in the Marine Corps Reserve when I went to law school. After law school I qualified as a judge advocate; was a tank company commander, infantry company XO (Executive Officer) and established a Marine law unit. 2
They called it a mobilization training unit--law unit in Logo, Kentucky, which eventually won the national award.
Funny, we used to go to Ft. Knox because it was such a resource and when we got to receive the national award…we were a very small unit. There were much bigger units in San Diego and other things. We’d sent in our package, a picture of us on a Soviet tank, all of the lawyers in proper utilities and the director of the Judge Advocate division of the Marine Corps said…I’m not so sure it was in jest…”We didn’t know you guys would all have a utility, much less that you could all wear them. That’s why we designated you as the outstanding unit of the year.” I did that and in connection with my appointment in the Pentagon I moved into a civil affairs unit in Washington while I was Deputy Secretary of Defense and there were a number of political appointees able to get in the civil affairs unit up there so I did that for 18 months. I got some interesting schools…the NATO War College in Latimore, England, the Marine Corps Command Staff College at Quantico, Amphib Warfare School, Command Forward Planning out at Coronado, and then retired as a Marine officer June of 1994, as a colonel.
Osborne – I will take it just a little further. Then, after that, you got into the political realm.
Ray – [Mr. Ray is elaborating on the occasion where he became interested in politics.] Actually I had been…if I may just elaborate a little bit…the Hue City thing where Walter Conkrite made his declaration to the world, on or about the 10th of February 1968, that the North Vietnamese, during the Tet Offensive, had won a strategic victory and America had suffered a strategic defeat and we were fighting an almost World War I brutal house-to-house kind of thing in Hue City…U.S. Marines, Vietnamese marines…I believed that we did win, and it was so clear to me that the most trusted man in America was either dead wrong or worse and that the lie was repeated by Frank McGee and all the other media outlets in the United States. I came home on the 21st of March 1968 and saw my Command-in-Chief declare that he would not seek re-election. One of the things that worked on me a great deal was that I believe there was a connection between what I believe now is a lie, that was told from Hue City, and the President stepping down and later events in the war and that caused me to consider politics…that, plus the casualty calls I was making as recruiting officer. None of my training prepared me to make those kinds of calls. Had me think about law school and politics, so I went to law school and finished second in my class. I don’t know if you’ve ever heard, or read a book, called The Nightingale Song.3
Osborne – I’ve heard of that book, yes.
Ray – It’s about four Naval Academy guys, Vietnam veterans, who made a contribution politically…Bud McFarland, Jim Webb, John McCain and one other. But he made the point in the beginning of the book, how does a young nightingale learn to sing? It’s when they hear an older nightingale sing a song, they immediately know the tune. For me, that event was in August of 1964…I think it was August at the Republican national convention when Ronald Reagan gave that speech at the Goldwater convention that nominated Goldwater. When I heard that song, I knew the tune and so I got interested in Ronald Reagan’s possible candidacy for the presidency and supported him against Gerald Ford in 1976 in Kentucky as a delegate. In 1980, when he was elected, I got appointed in ’81 to a volunteer organization called the Vietnam Veterans Leadership Program and was eventually called into the administration in March of 1984. I figured that some of the biggest problems with the Vietnam War were in Washington or New York, or both.
Osborne – What kind of spirit was invested in you and those you served with in terms of your motivations in the context of the Cold War? Were you aware of things like “containment theory” and “domino theory” and things like that? How did you perceive the Cold War going into service in the 1960’s?
Ray – That’s a really good question. It’s an interesting thing as a person who is involved in leading the effort to build the Kentucky Vietnam Veterans Memorial and the Vietnam Veterans Leadership Program. One of the things I heard from a lot of veterans that I talked to of all kinds…”Why did you go to Vietnam?” or “Why did you sign up?” and they said “I guess I saw too many John Wayne movies. As funny as that sounds, the folks that trained me in the early ‘60s were virtually all…except the younger officers…were either World War II veterans or Korean veterans, or both. There was a certain degree of patriotism. We all heard John F. Kennedy’s remarkable words when he was inaugurated…”Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country.” And I think there was a draft in place. I like to tell people I beat the draft by enlisting in the Marine Corps at 17 and recommended, as a recruiting officer, that others could do the same thing.
It’s interesting that the Cold War was a backdrop to all of that. Certainly the Cuban Missile Crisis and the whole thing about Sputnik…‘1958…we are all aware of the media attention paid to those. I was 4
in college when the Cuban Missile Crisis occurred so I didn’t have the experience that my wife did, being told in the event of nuclear attack, put your head under your desk…those kinds of things. But we knew that. I had seen a movie and read a book about Pork Chop Hill and that had a big impact on me. I don’t know if it did on others. What Pork Chop Hill became, after the Panmujon negotiations were going on, was a test case in which the North Koreans and Chinese, moreover, wanted to test our resolve. Were we willing to die for a worthless piece of ground as readily as they were willing to die for a worthless piece of ground. And those of us who were a little bit more thoughtful, and I’m not saying whatever ranks they might have been, I think that that was pretty easy to see that the perception was in Southeast Asia, like Berlin and the Airlift, this was going to be a test case, like Pork Chop Hill was, where our resolve in the Cold War would be tested in a seemingly out of the way place where there didn’t appear to be any economic interest involved. It was simply a question of self-determination.
I’ll say something that had a bearing on that. I roomed with a Vietnamese marine officer when I went to the Basic School in Quantico in ’64 and ’65, for that six months, and there were five in our class and, because I roomed with the first lieutenant…the others were second lieutenants…he was senior, so when they couldn’t stand any more of our rich cooking I’d rush them off to some Chinese restaurant where they could eat some of their own food. But I listened to them talking about what they were fighting for and it was pretty moving. These were really intelligent folks. They spoke French, they spoke Vietnamese, they spoke pretty good English. Some of them could write and read Mandarin Chinese characters. I was impressed with their dedication. Their emblem was Vietnam surrounded by a red star, with the eagle on top. It looked very much like the U.S. Marine emblem but instead of North America, as you see on it, you saw their country surrounded by a red star. The enlisted marines, when they graduated from the boot camp in South Vietnam…the Vietnamese marines…had a tattoo on their arm, sat-kong, which means kill the communists.
I was pretty certain, really, by ’64 that I’d probably end up going to Vietnam. I had it in that context and that’s exactly it, and it’s hard to find out motivations, I think. Most of our parents were World War II veterans and this was going to be our test. Certainly the Marines, because they were all volunteers at that stage, had decided they would enlist in the service. If you’re going to serve, you might as well serve with the finest. And I think of those motivations and you had a lot of testosterone and you’re 5
looking for an adventure. When I graduated from Center College, only three of us got commissioned, two in the Marine Corps, one in the Navy, and I went to some job interviews…a couple of banks and Ashland Oil, I think, came to Center College to interview…just for the experience. I could not, at that particular point, imagine myself going to work for a corporation. I was looking for a higher calling and I think that was probably true of a lot of my contemporaries.
Osborne – So, with that, you came out of training all ready to go and thinking you were going to go to Vietnam. But before any of that, you end up with the Dominican Republic crisis. I would very much like to know, and I’m sure a lot of people would like to know, more about that. What precipitated it, what was the U.S.’s role in it, and, of course, yours in that?
Ray – I reported to Camp Lejeune, North Carolina in March of 1965 with orders to go to Battalion, 2nd Marines, which was going to begin what was known as Lock-On. That is, the battalion would come up to speed and would begin training at the lowest level…fire team squad, platoon, company, battalion. At the end of this phase, they would be deployed to the Mediterranean about six months hence. I came in with a fellow named Steve Sayre I’d been through Basic School with. We’d taken a little leave together in Florida in the spring, and reported in and the major greeting us said “Which one of you hasn’t unpacked your bags yet?” We flipped a coin and I’ve never been able to recollect whether I won or lost but I ended up not going into the six months of Lock-On and graduated training. I was going to join L Company, 3rd Battalion, 6th Marines, which was going to deploy on April 2nd for a Carib cruise. I don’t know how far back this went, probably into the ‘50s, that we had a ready 6th Fleet in the Mediterranean, 7th Fleet with Marines in the Pacific, and in the Caribbean we had already an amphibious squadron with a battalion of Marines.
We embarked on the U.S.S. Boxer with the flag ship, converted World War II ESSEX class carrier for a landing platform helicopter for the squadron of T-34 aircraft, HM-264, I think it was. We went down to Viejas, Puerto Rico for training and did landing exercises. We went to bed on our way to Panama for jungle warfare school and woke up on our way to Santo Domingo because there was apparently a civil war underway. Rumors were some Cuban-based insurgents were involved…the bad guys had a Communist connection…and Cuba may have been exporting revolution to there. Not just to Central America and South America, but also in the Caribbean, and for the first few days we evacuated American 6
civilians. It was not a combat operation at all. In fact we were giving up our bunks and putting women and children in the bunks and Marines were sleeping on the deck of the ship.
After three or four days, President Johnston ordered us, L Company, to be the assault force and to land in Santo Domingo and try to, as we were all told…in every banana war we’ve been told…go ashore to protect American lives and property. We did. We landed down there in a driving rainstorm on a resort hotel where the flags were still on the greens and the rakes were in the sand traps. I deployed my weapons platoon with fields of fire down various fairways behind the Bahador Hotel. First platoon with some of my weapons attached…when they got in and we established a perimeter…went to the U.S. Embassy, which was believed to be under attack. It was an old colonial embassy with a two and a half to three foot wall on the outside. It was not well protected, but there were a half dozen U.S. Marines assigned there and they were armed largely with 45 and 38 pistols. They didn’t even have rifles and shotguns and that kind of thing and the embassy was petrified. In fact they had broken out the medicinal alcohol and were having a few drinks.
The first lieutenant, Phil Tucker, my contemporary, actually went in to report to the ambassador that the security platoon was there and were taking up positions around the embassy and wanted to know if there were any special instructions. The ambassador was crouching down behind his desk, and handed him the telephone and said something that sounded like “He wants to talk to you.” So this second lieutenant, U.S. Marine Corps, Phil Tucker, picks up the phone and a very profane Lyndon Johnston says “What the f is going on down there, lieutenant?” Later on it appears that the information was that the embassy was under attack, when, in fact, warring factions were on either side, shooting at each other, and the embassy was caught in a cross-fire. I have no doubt that there was an anti-American sentiment on one side. We were supposed to be opposing rebels and supporting loyalist forces, but you wonder whether Johnston’s decision to come to the aid of the embassy because it was under attack, turns out to have been accurate or not.
We were there 30 days. We secured the airport, the 82nd Airborne didn’t have to jump in. They were able to land in C-130 aircraft, bringing them from Ft. Bragg. They were there for 14 months. We took six or seven KIAs and about 55 wounded. We set up corridors, we blocked off the city, set up road blocks, confiscated weapons from people going through road blocks. You know, if there’s a civil war 7
going on, you’re probably going to find people carrying weapons. In retrospect, I didn’t speak very much Spanish and I secured the services of a 12 year old American who was down there with his father who worked with one of the large oil companies. He spoke fluent Spanish and so, not only was he serving as a translator, but he began to suggest while at the road block where I was…these are bad people and these are good guys. I mean, he was this kid 12 or 13 years old and we would pay a little more attention to the ones he said were problems. Field expedient, we call that in the Marine Corps.
Osborne – Was there any contact with the people that, I suppose, this boy would have labeled the “good guys”…the loyalists…or were you doing all of this independently?
Ray – That’s a good question. When we landed behind the Bahador Hotel, we set up in a bunker, literally a sand trap bunker and the force recon 1st lieutenant named Taylor, the force recon platoon commander, came running out of the tree line and he saw me and I waved him over and he said “Look, there’s 200 cavalry in the tree line, and I don’t know whose side they’re on.” We did find out that they were loyalists and there were some small Air Force and they were all loyal, but I didn’t have direct contact with our Allies. Whatever the legitimate government that we came in there to support. Although, remember, we were told “Protect American lives and property” and the primary reason we went ashore was because the Embassy was threatened and we provided a security mission like we’ve been doing in embassies in the Middle East and Far East and Africa and stuff in recent years. It was the same kind of a thing but we were just there 30 days. I cannot remember any briefing. Like I said, some of the intelligence we got indicated that we were to look out for Cuban presence.
Osborne – Were the casualties you incurred the result of the fact that you were trying to set up this perimeter and, at the same time, caught in a cross-fire, or did you actually have to face enemy forces?
Ray – We actually went downtown. Once they secured the landing zone and they set up…eventually it was an RLT—regimental landing team—and two or three battalions were in there, then we went downtown and literally corridoned off Santo Domingo, which was a very large city of, what, six million? I don’t recall, but it was large.
Osborne – It’s something like that.8
Ray – A lot of field expedience. We didn’t have maps but every service station did. We commandeered ESSO maps of Santo Domingo, which worked really well. The city was kind of L-shaped, tying in with the river on one side and the ocean on the other side, and I was down on the ocean front for about two weeks. You could literally see their version of the Washington monument down the street from us. In the security area we were concerned with, we would not cross into the city across the street from where we set up our perimeter. In other words, we couldn’t have listening posts on the other side of the street. It created some real tactical concerns because you had to check your lines at night and be sure everything was alright and, literally, the bad guys could come right into the other side of the street. Our casualties were mostly taken from sniper fire, some fragmentation and that kind of thing. We had a lot of contact but it was all small arms…no mortars…they had no artillery or anything like that.
Osborne – When you were taken out, when you left, was the situation pretty stable by then, overall?
Ray – Yes. It was stable, and I don’t know what happened to the bad guys. There had been a breakdown of order because there was over 1,000 people who had been murdered. There was a park down there…I didn’t see this with my own eyes…but it was reported by enough people, that there were bodies and heads on pikes and it was pretty grim. A lot of machetes were being used. Again, it was never clear to me until I started doing some historical work on my own, what was going on.
Osborne – So, talk about trial by fire then, in terms of coming out with training and then being injected straight into a situation like that.
Ray – I was a second lieutenant, green behind my ears. I didn’t know, really, the names of most of the members of my platoon. But, you know, the NCOs (non-commissioned officers) were terrific. The training takes over, is the thing you realize. You will instantly do the things you’ve been trained to do. I mean, the Marine Corps training is good, to that extent, that even though you don’t know what to do, you don’t have time to think about it. You communicate and execute.
Osborne – That training you had, initially, as well as the experience of combat, that really gets buttressed right after that by more training…those training exercises that you talk about after the Dominican Republic with NATO. I believe it was Winter Exercise?9
Ray – The first thing I did, we hit a swamp. Orders came in when the deployment was over in July for virtually all the second lieutenants to Vietnam or to units that were on their way to Vietnam. I didn’t get orders. I was one of the continuity guys because I was the late-comer. These guys had all been in the unit since December. I joined in late March. Most of my friends left…one first lieutenant didn’t. We were what they called a “cadre battalion” at that particular point in time, so they took us and we got a pass from a two-star general to let our beards grow and we became a Spanish-speaking insurgent group that went into the Croatian National Forest over between Camp Lejeune and Cherry Point, North Carolina, the Marine Corps air station. We went in there for 30 days of sort of guerilla training and field craft and then they sent in a brigade. We were the aggressors and we set up villages and this kind of thing. It was really a South or Central American scenario. It wasn’t a Vietnamese scenario but it would have translated to that and they came in to get us in a couple of weeks and we had ambushes set up. It was interesting to walk around a Marine Corps base in uniform with a three week or four week old growth of beard and get stopped by all kinds of people and stared at by a lot of people, and you had a pass in your pocket with a two-star general’s signature that says “This Marine is ordered not to shave.”
Osborne – So that training was important.
Ray – That training was important for me because I got a chance to think about, from my experience with the rebel faction that we had in Santo Domingo, as well as the counter-insurgency we were hearing so much about…the British experience in Malya. Of course, we were all reading Bernard Fall and what went on in the first Indo-China war, but we got a chance to think. It was a really good experience for almost two months, to think like a guerilla.
Osborne – And to be better able to deal with that sort of war in a situation when our Army is really designed for set peace engagement.
Ray – Exactly. A lot of training we did was landing operations in the Caribbean, as if they were amphibious…ship-to-shore movements, as well as helicopter movement…where vertical envelopment was a much, much battered around phrase, but you could see more and more small unit so-called counter-guerilla operations, L-shape ambushes and all that kind of thing. It was very helpful to me when I got to Vietnam to have had two months to think like the aggressor, to think like the people I was up 10
against and try to employ small unit tactics, and to have the initiative of when and where to fight is really a tremendous advantage. I mean, against a larger force, a more cumbersome force, moving slowly, a small hit-and-run kind of thing. Guerilla operations throughout history will show you that’s a tremendous advantage.
I did go to Canada for six weeks with the Black Watch and some Royal Marines to learn winter warfare…skiing, living in temperatures about five below zero…and then we went to Norway for two months for Winter Express, which was a NATO exercise. And, again, we had an interesting experience…I didn’t care for it, but our company was actually assigned to Brigade North, a Norwegian Brigade, up north of the Arctic Circle that was supposed to protect the Cold War connection there. The Soviets, if they made a move on NATO and on Europe, one of the first things they were supposed to need to do was secure a 12-month warm water ports, year round port. One of the most likely scenarios would be for them to drive down through Norway to get a port on the Norwegian coast, so Brigade North was stationed up there all the time and what they did was assign us, so we were not the Allied command Europe. We weren’t going to be the reinforcement. We actually went in under the operational command of the Norwegian lieutenant colonel. Of course, the interesting thing was, we didn’t have the cold weather skills and we certainly didn’t have the skiing skills, even though we had almost two months in Canada and 30 days down around Voss, Norway where the temperatures were not extreme and we were the number one entertainment for every young kid anywhere near us, because they had never seen adult men who didn’t know how to ski. They’d come out and watch us fall down.
Osborne – That would be a big change. One second operations in the Caribbean, and then thrust into an entirely different environment.
Ray – Exactly. And I came back from that operation…and I must say, that’s the first time I ever saw Marines start to quit. The temperatures at night were terrible. This wasn’t just learning to live in the winter. We’d done that down south and we’d done that in Canada. We were actually tactical for 10 days. The movements were at night where temperatures got to 55 below zero without windchill factor. If you wanted a drink, you had to stop, get protection, set up a stove, start a fire and melt snow. Everything was frozen. You had to watch men go to the bathroom. You had to have the drill because men would not do that and if you didn’t get enough water, constipation. We had some casualties. Not as bad as the 11
Italians. I’m surprised that the Italians had casualties. They had an Alpine brigade there that was outstanding, by reputation, but they had more casualties than we did. I saw Marines…about the ninth day…they’d had enough. It was miserable in the extreme. We were moving at night. Everything took five times longer to do than it does when it’s not extreme cold. As far as we were concerned, if the Soviets wanted that part of Norway, they could have it.
Osborne – I’ve never been in cold like that before.
Ray – Somebody says…vacation, you want to go out to Colorado and go skiing…my stepson, Shelby, loves to ski. He’s a really good snowboarder and all that. I never forgot that. I go south. I don’t go to the snow. Snow sports is not something I engage in. It was easier to get over Vietnam in some ways than that 10 days. We came back from that in March and quickly got physically climatized for another Caribbean deployment. We did get to Panama this time for jungle warfare school. We were probably one of the sharpest companies in the whole Marine Corps in terms of winter warfare skills and they sent us back to the Caribbean and jungle warfare school in Panama. Go figure.
This was December of ’65 until March of ’66. The Caribbean deployment was in June, July, August and came back in September. I took the whole 6th Marine Regiment through rifle qualification when we got back, which was a challenge…the whole regiment. The regimental commander of the 6th Marines wanted to do that. Then I got ordered in October ’66 to the maddi(?) course to begin in January.
Osborne – When did you receive training in Vietnamese language and the situation there?
Ray – Oh. I had been reading…Bernard Fall comes to mind…I read everything I could get my hands on about the history of Vietnam and Red Mow(?), on guerilla warfare, Chun Chin, Primer for Revolt, North Vietnamese Communist. We got some French stuff that realized that Ho Chi Minh was one of the founders of the French Communist party. That was an interesting insight to me and I read some things about Communism that I hadn’t read before…Ugly American, Eugene Burdick’s book….also wrote Nation of Sheep. I did a lot of reading about the English experience. We were starting to get people coming back. The Marine Advisory Unit was created in 1954 by a French-speaking Marine officer named Victor Croiznt. He was an advisor to the Vietnamese Navy, and stayed, and they began to create a Marine Corps and a Navy after the accords in 1954. So we were having advisors go down there and the 3rd Marine Division which operated out of Okinawa, we started sending young officers, usually first 12
lieutenants, for 30 days OJT (On the Job Training) to an advisory tour in Vietnam, either to ARVN (Army of the Republic of Vietnam) or Vietnamese Marines.
We were starting to see guys coming back when I was going through my early ‘60s training. There’d be a guy wearing an Armed Forces Expeditionary Ribbon, which was kind of the catch-all for that 30-day period, and even a Purple Heart or two, and so we were getting some “I was there” and some insights into that, but I got the orders…Tony Zinni and I got later, CENTCOM commander Anthony C. Zinni, was a second lieutenant and made first lieutenant there. We were on the same set of orders in the fall of ’66, got to know each other and reported to Manna(?) with about seven other Marine officers who were going to go. The rest of them were Army officers. We were going to go to the Vietnamese Marine Corps and we got eight hours a day of Vietnamese language and physical fitness and about four hours that was culture and tactics and techniques, that would be useful to advisors. It was heavily for the Vietnamese Army but the language was a big help. I probably stumbled out of there with, probably, a 2,000 word vocabulary so that I’d be able to communicate and understand that. But the organization of the Vietnamese Marine Corps did not allow for advisory teams. The U.S. Army operated an advisory team…even the A Team, Special Forces operates with a team…and they would go in and train and work with. We went in with two Marine officers. A senior advisor and a junior advisor, with no enlisted support from the U.S. Our support was Vietnamese support and frequently we would go days without seeing each other because they deployed the XO of their battalion as if he was the commander of two companies and they would move on an axis of two companies and the CO (Commanding Officer) would move on an axis of the other two companies and there would be an advisor with each unit, and I was the assistant battalion advisor to the 3rd Vietnamese Marine Battalion. So we found that to be extremely effective because if you work as an advisory team, you tend to carry America with you. They would find and scrounge C rations and all that, and one of the things that we learned…of course I read Lawrence of Arabia when I was in college. I read some of his stuff and he emphasizes, and others with that experience that were ever in…and the British had a lot of experience with indigenous forces and places we’re involved in now…Afghanistan, Khyber Pass…all that kind of thing. They all said that the most successful advisors were ones who could adapt to the culture, eat their food, live like they lived, as 13
opposed to a Colonial setting where you come in and bring your Colonial culture with you and barely have any contact with indigenous personnel.
So the Vietnamese Marines did that well. In fact, I’ll only say this. They assumed, because we were picked at commandant and Marine Corps level, you had to have either a prior tour in Vietnam or a prior combat tour to be an advisor. I think that maybe Tony Zennea may have been one of the few advisors that didn’t have that, because he was still a pretty young guy. I’d had the Dominican Republic experience. But the Vietnamese Marine officers who spoke all these languages, and spoke English better than we spoke Vietnamese, assumed that we were the best Marine officers. That our combat capability and our bravery was established. Well, most of us didn’t think that way. They assumed we were better than we were. The challenge, they wanted to know, was whether we could live like they lived. I did pretty well at that and that is an important thing. You did get a lot of credibility with your counterpart.
Osborne – We’ll pick up on that one a little bit more when we talk about your combat experience in Vietnam. Before I get there, again, what was your perception of the conflict at this point? By the time you get to Vietnam, you have already had people coming back, telling you what it’s been like so far. Upon your arrival on the ground…in terms of the overall picture, the effort, what was your feeling going in, in 1967, as to where the U.S. and South Vietnam stood in terms of the overall effort against Communism? What was your perception of the military situation.
Ray – Boy, that’s a great question. I’m going to come at this with a negative and then try to come with a positive. It never dawned on me, I never heard it said, that Vietnam is a fourth world country the size of the state of Mississippi, and how come this is taking so long? That was not an issue. We’d heard repeated and repeated and repeated that unconventional warfare, guerilla warfare, comprises the wars of national liberation. This is what we were hearing in the late ‘50s…certainly in the early ‘60s we were hearing this…so the notion of a limited war, which, when I looked at the Korean model, the notion of fighting a war while the negotiations are going on and Pork Chop Hill…I looked at it from the positive side of that, as opposed to looking at the negative side of that. And the false premise was the notion that if we used our might in Vietnam or if we’d used our full might in Korea, that we would have engaged in the nuclear exchange, either with the Soviets…we were told likely with the Soviets…we were told they had weapons of mass destruction and that the Chinese would likely come in the way they’ve done in Korea. 14
Those were unexamined assumptions from most of our point. Perhaps they should have been examined. I’m not so sure that what we were being told was accurate. That’s something that I’ve spent a great deal of time on since I came back. We believed that In Drang Valley had been a success. Hal Moore is a good friend of mine. I talked to him. I got an advance copy of his book to review. Starlight was the first major Marine operation in the summer of 1965. The Marines went in March. They caught a regiment out on a sand-spit, moving where they shouldn’t have been, without support. So we were hearing successes.
I think in December of 1966 the Washington Post printed an editorial favorable to the Americans, how the war was going. So we were getting favorable treatment. As far as I know the media was fairly favorable in terms of the reporting and certainly what we were hearing from people coming back was that we can fight them on their terms. We had Rogers Rangers [a company of volunteer rangers attached to the British Army in the French and Indian War, 1754-1763]. We whipped the British in the French and Indian War…that was unconventional…and we were doing those kinds of things in the Revolutionary War. I mean, we’ve got a lot of experience at this. All we needed to do was re-learn old lessons, so we were all learning about what some people said later on was fighting with one arm tied behind our back. We did have air superiority and we had fire support that was enormous in terms of our artillery, fixed wing. We were fighting an enemy that was primarily dealing with mortars on down and we should have been successful.
Osborne – What did you think of your Vietnamese allies, as far as their level of training, commitment to effort?
Ray – Great question. That’s probably one of the things, at the time, that I was mad about, was the notion that the Vietnamese weren’t willing to fight and couldn’t fight. It’s interesting…a double standard. I noticed the double standard almost from the get-go. First of all, the Vietnamese Marines and the Vietnamese Airborne, each was a brigade that became a division. There were about six battalions of Vietnamese Marines and I think there were about six battalions of Vietnamese Airborne. They were the national reserve forces. They were excellent. They were dedicated, they were willing to fight. In fact, the company commanders and on up had had years of experience in fighting this insurgency, which became, really, the North Vietnamese invasion of South Vietnam. They were excellent. Some of the ARVN units were O.K….their equivalent of the militia. Regional forces and popular forces, of course, were not up to 15
snuff. But the point that got to be a real picking point with me, was that the North Vietnamese fought only when it was to their advantage, they never fought when it was to their disadvantage. They would make contact, break away, and the media would report that. “They stealthily moved away in the jungle”…you know…”They inflicted damage. It was a hit and run operation and they melted into the jungle and got away.” It was always presented favorably. The South Vietnamese Marines would fight the same way. They weren’t there for a year. They didn’t come to do a 12 month tour and rotate home. They were going to stay for the duration. They were going to be, win, lose or draw, so they would fight when it was their advantage and they would do a tactical withdrawal. They would break contact if it was a disadvantage. It was like a chess game.
That was reported in the media early on. That was the first negative report. I mean, I saw that when I was in college, when I was in the PLC [Platoon Leaders Course] program. There were criticisms about our Allies. Certainly there were political criticisms in terms of the leadership. There was a coup and they were turning over, South Vietnam President Ngo Dinh Diem was assassinated in October of ’63, but that was regularly reported. Also that the South Vietnamese weren’t willing to make the fight and that raises the political question about what Kennedy was really prepared to do and what Johnston was really prepared to do about making this an American war. I think the American forces would have done better. We all came in with the old World War II…hey-diddle-diddle—right-up-the-middle…and it didn’t take me very long watching my counterpart, with the reading I was doing, to realize that this is a hit and run. You press your advantage. If you have a gambit and it doesn’t work, cut your losses and break contact, because there’s nothing more demoralizing than making a stand or a frontal attack to take a hill or a hamlet or some river crossing, or whatever it is, and then immediately walk away from it: To have to come back a month or two later and take the same ground again, because it was clear that ground didn’t matter. And, of course, we got into the ubiquitous body count, which they studiously avoided in Iraq, in terms of the enemy. So-called enemy, in terms of what the body count is, because these Marines did not do body count. They counted weapons. They knew that a weapon represented a great deal of logistical effort to get that weapon down to South Vietnam, and they would capture the weapons and they would give out weapons as trophies. 16
The first major engagement I was in, I got an AK-47, which I finally determined to carry instead of my own…a carbine first, and then an M-16…when they got them to the Marines. The AK-47 could shoot no matter what. You didn’t have to spend a whole lot of time keeping it clean. It would shoot no matter what. The M-16s we got, fired really well if you’d keep them clean but in rice paddies and jungle fighting there’s a lot of dirt.
Osborne – That’s a good weapon.
Ray – Well, it’s dependable. It takes a lickin’ and keeps on ticking, as we used to say.
Osborne – How about the civilians? Those people around you. When you got a chance to see civilian population in South Vietnam, what did they think about all of it? Of course, I imagine the perception was different between city and outside cities. What was your take on that?
Ray – Let me talk about outside the city first. The great thing about being with the Vietnamese Marines is that we didn’t have any language problems in terms of interacting with them. They knew when we were with friendlies or neutral people and they knew where we were with somebody who was probably aiding and abetting the other side. They knew that, just the same way we would know that. You could see that. You could read people. You could read body language. All the nuances that get lost when translation is necessary. The U.S. Marines began to use some of these Chewhoy [converted Viet Cong] guys that came over from the other side. Chewhoy was a program to induce VC, or even North Vietnamese for that matter, to come over to the South Vietnamese government. If you came over and turned yourself in, you were repatriated, went through some training, and they put those out as Kit Carson scouts. The U.S. Marine units and I Corps wanted to have somebody they could trust that could do the same kind of thing. Of course, some of these guys were trustworthy and some of them weren’t. We didn’t have any trouble with the civilian population, outside of Saigon. Inside of Saigon, my first six months in Vietnam…the Marine Advisory Unit was located in Saigon and that’s where the Vietnamese Marine headquarters is. BoTwoLan LaTonTone(?) is the name of the street, being very close to the presidential palace, very close to the center of downtown Saigon. It’s just a few blocks from the Rex Hotel which is where all the newspaper correspondents hung out. The public affairs building was next door, and the Rex was a field grade BOQ [Base Officers Quarters]. It had a continental palace type, 17
open-air restaurant bar on the top of it and they could go up and watch mortars at cocktail time, out on that capital military district around there, and report the war, sitting at the bar drinking a cold one.
In the city, I think, everybody had a little bit more difficulty with that. For six months I would go out on an operation for a matter of days, even for a few weeks, then I’d come back to Saigon to refit for a few days, and then go out. We were never going very far away. When I went up to the Bong Son Plain with II Corps, which began in the fall of 1967…the next six months I was never back in Saigon very often. I was deployed constantly. There were incidents. There was a Mekong floating restaurant that was hit. The Viet Cong had a makeshift Claymore mine, so you’d get these incidents that would keep you uneasy. They weren’t that effective, except that they made people look over their shoulder. They would explode a grenade on the dock, everybody ran for the exit and then they had the makeshift Claymore mine that would occasionally happen in a theater. Drive-by shootings were not prevalent but it happened often enough that you would find yourself, if you were on the street in Saigon, watching. You have to be a little more alert once in a while. The first 30 days I was over there, I carried a 45 under a loose shirt and, after that, I got acclimatized to it and, I think, was less concerned about it than people who were rear echelon staff types who were wearing khakis and had a hotel to go to every night. I think they were more alarmed by that than the combat troops were. There’s a little bit of fate or fatalism that goes on and you just don’t want to be lugging a pistol around.
You could see peoples’ eyes. I could even sense it after four or five months. We never spent the night in the field where there were unfriendlys. Many times we would move into a village and we would move right in with the villagers and live in a hut and have dinner with the village chief or whatever and it was a thing for him and, of course, we’d usually give them some rice or do a medcap and that kind of thing. We were trying to win friends and influence people, win hearts and minds, they used to talk about. I think the Vietnamese Marines and the Airborne were better soldiers and I think the ARVN had some of the same problems that the U.S. Army had…when in doubt, take them out. There’s no question…we would actively see…and I’m speaking in generalizations now…a friendly village [to the U.S.] that was really supportive. The VC would run ops to try to get us to draw fire. If we were maneuvering in an area, they’d get between us, and they would shoot, wanting us to over-react to that, so that they could come back to say to that village, “See, these are not trustworthy people.” 18
The politics of the war were never very far away and, to me, it was the perfect assignment for me. I think, if you were a U.S. unit…Airborne, Army, U.S. Marines…I think that they had some disadvantages. Of course, up in I Corps, by ’67, virtually all the contacts were with main force North Vietnamese units. After Tet, the VC were never an effective force any more. We were fighting the North Vietnamese, ably supported by the Soviets, the Chinese and the whole Soviet Bloc. I mean, that was clear. You could see it in the equipment. I’ve got a Soviet officer’s belt, taken off of a guy who wasn’t supposed to be there. There were Soviet advisers, there were Cuban advisers, there were North Korean advisers, there were Chinese advisers. You didn’t know where borders were. If you got out west, you didn’t know where you were. I mean, there wasn’t a “Welcome to Cambodia rest area—2K.”
Osborne – That is interesting. That really does not get enough press, you know: People that weren’t supposed to be there. I’ve delved into it a little. There’s an encyclopedia in here on the Vietnam War by Spencer Tucker. I don’t know whether you know him or not.
Ray – I know him by reputation.
Osborne – A little bit on that, but not very much. So, is that something you’d encounter, just say every once in a while?
Ray – Every once in a while. And the Vietnamese would encounter it more often and would tell you the story. They had the equipment to prove it, because they were interested in the equipment. Not just from an intelligence standpoint, but they would use it. One of my counterparts, a Vietnamese Marine major, had fought with the Viet Minh again the French. He had a big Viet Minh patch on his jungle jacket. Think about how much experience this guy had. I remember in ’67 he was fighting with the Viet Minh in 1950. I’m advising him.
Osborne – That had to feel odd sometimes.
Ray – No question about it. We’d go places and you could see…of course the jungle will reclaim, but there were places where you could see…not just huts, but you could see old evidences of fights, and they would tell you “This is four years ago, blah, blah, blah happened here. There was an ambush right here” and they’d lay out the tactics and we actually saw VC tactics or North Vietnamese tactics that were used, that were similar to what had been used before. We came across places where French engagements had taken place with the Viet Menh, so this had been going on since ’46…21 or 22 years. 19
It’s not that big a country. South Vietnam is about the size of the state of Mississippi or something like that. That was interesting.
The quickest thing I did was I realized that ground was not worth dying for. It was a chess game. We tried to get in position where you could inflict greater harm on him than he could on you, and you pressed your advantage. When we would move away, it was clear to me the wisdom that we were showing. General Cushman, in an encounter I’ll tell you about later in general, he dubbed the Vietnamese Marines “reluctant dragon” because they wouldn’t go hey-diddle-diddle—right-up-the-middle. He was the I Corps commander during the Tet Offensive. Robert Cushman, who eventually became number two man at the CIA, was very close to Nixon and became commandant of the Marine Corps.
I had a friend that was crucified and skinned, probably alive…a guy I went though the maddi(?) course with. I think he was Army. He was one of my classmates over there and that happened early in the process. One of the great challenges was to, immediately, be aware that the other side played by no rules. There was no moral limitation. There was no notion of the Geneva Convention or Articles of War. In other words, practicality. If it advanced the cause, it was moral, because it advanced the cause. That was the first time I ever really came face to face with the moral dilemma that here we were, from a civilized country, where we were seeing evidenced, repeatedly, of unlimited…whatever it takes. They would torture the village chief to get to the place where nobody wanted to be the village chief, in those areas. When we encountered that, I would get from my Vietnamese counterparts, other examples. Terrorism is just a tactic. We encountered a lot of terrorism. It has taken on a new definition.
Re-characterization now, as if it’s not just a tactic, it’s something else. You’re constantly thinking to not let that limitation be, I mean, you had to deal with the temptation to cut corners, from a practical standpoint, to gain an advantage when you knew that was wrong and you didn’t want the moral code, the virtue honor, subordination, patriotism, undermine your combat effectiveness, but, at the same time, the Vietnamese Marines helped that a little bit. Because there was less ambiguity with them. Their country, they knew people, they knew when somebody was lying. I have only one experience with violation of our moral code…I’ve reason to suspect that excessive measures were taken in an interrogation after Coronado II, where a North Vietnamese woman executed most of our wounded and they overran our 20
headquarters. She was captured. I was wounded and shipped out. She was apparently captured two or three days later and died under question.
Osborne – Let’s talk about that operation for a second as an example. Many of the operations, it appears, that you undertook were search and destroy missions such asCoronado II.
Ray – Let me make one clarification. One of the things the national reserve force…the enemy’s airborne Vietnamese Marine Corps did…is that we would go where somebody else had found an enemy. They’d find them and we’d go in with the idea of finishing the fight if there were suitable targets. So we did some search and destroy. But Paddington(?) and Coronado II were both reaction to a known enemy there, in both cases. Paddington, we had real good intelligence…but Coronado II we knew that there was a brigade minus many, many…we didn’t know we were going right on top of them. That was unknown. We didn’t know they were right there until I was getting on a helicopter and one of my friends ran out and said “You’re going right where they are.” That had not been communicated to the advisers that were going in with the first wave in Coronado II. I’m just characterizing. The proper use of the National Reserve Force was to be employed to fight a known enemy in a known area, so it wasn’t like we were just doing tactical TAR—tactical area responsibility—where you’d just sweep that area to search and destroy any enemy that might be in that area. We did less of that than typical American units did and I think they began to adapt in ’68 and ’69 and they started using their reaction force tactic, so that you’d have a better trained, better equipped unit. Somebody else would find a fight and then you would re-enforce with a reaction force that was capable of dealing with whatever you got into. Because the idea wasn’t to have a fair fight. The idea is to overwhelm with greater combat power.
Osborne – And that was the situation you found yourself in with Coronado II?
Ray – Well, it’s very interesting. I’ve been getting letters from guys who were there and piecing together things that I didn’t know. I had the after-action reports for Coronado II for some time because when I was in Albuquerque as a recruiting officer I was asked to give a class over the University of New Mexico for the MOI—Marine Officer Instructor—first on the Tet Offensive and then, later, on Vietnam Marine operations in the Vietnam War and that kind of thing so I wrote headquarters in Saigon and got all the after-action reports. A lot of the guys who were advisers on those operations had never seen the official after-action reports. The after-action reports and the reality turned out to be somewhat divergent 21
opinions. But Coronado II, we were the national reaction force. We went to the advanced base for the 9th Army Infantry Division and U.S. Army and Vietnamese Airborne were searching and destroying and we were to go in, when contact was made, and be the assault force. They would find them and fix them, and we’d go fight them.
For three or four days no contact was made and there was a meeting that I did not go to where an intelligence report was made and the adviser didn’t talk to me until the next morning, that basically said there was a sizable unit, at least six companies, in the vicinity of where we were going. I was told that the Vietnamese Marines, because they lived differently than U.S. forces, in terms of camp sanitation and all that kind of thing, that they were tired of what it was doing to their very nice base in the Mekong Delta. They wanted to get us out of there, so we were being sent in and it was going to be a walk in the sun and that we would follow this river, get to a main road and be picked up by trucks and go back to Saigon. That was the way it was presented to me the night before.
We got up at dawn, and the guy runs up to me and says “You’re going to land right on top of where they are. They’re there.” I wish I’d known that. We did land in that setting. It was literally a stream like this. This was the landing zone. We were supposed to go here, do this and do this, two forces. That was the operation that I had prepared for. And there was a little hutch out there with nearby rice paddies. Twenty-four hours I was out there and we were getting…I mean, it was literally circle the wagons and you land right in the middle of where the Indians are. You’re in the Indian camp. I could elaborate on that. I think I discussed that in pretty good detail in the interview with Shelby, but I’d be happy to answer any questions. This is the first time I saw a frontal attack by the Vietnamese Marines. Their first company commander led two frontal attacks, shot through the arm, to try to get out of this. We didn’t have our prep-fires we were supposed to have…artillery prep-fires. We eventually had them on call the next morning, which proved to be a decisive blow.
I got off the helicopter and there was a real 50 caliber Soviet machine gun right there. We had a gunship prep, so there were two dead North Vietnamese right there, but whenever you see that, you know it’s a minimum of a company. We started receiving fire from a tree line, from others. We counted half a dozen already, so we knew we were outnumbered. I went in with 120. We quickly went up to about 450 and we were probably outnumbered two or three to one…maybe four to one…but we had all 22
the air assets. I’d put in gun ships and fixed wing…we issued the call for “all available,” which meant if you’d completed a mission and you’re going to dump your bombs or you’re going to land with bombs on the rack, you’re diverted to where we were. So I was putting in mostly Air Force assets through a great deal of that and we were able to make them keep their head down.
Osborne – Of course, this is the operation where you got your Silver Star?
Ray – Both Paddington and Coronado II…in both cases we were at a disadvantage. This is the one where I was wounded.
Osborne – And that was a mortar fragment?
Ray – It was either a mortar or a rocket. When it got to be dark and they quieted long enough, we caught up with a little water, a little meal and re-supply, and then when it was dead dark, we got to puff the magic dragon to fly and drop flares all night long. So the contact went from about 6:30 in the morning until about 8:00 at night; from 9:00 until about 4:30 or 5:00 in the morning. We had a little hospital and had about 25 or 30 wounded in it when they launched an attack about 5:00 in the morning and pushed through there and all the wounded were executed with a shot to the head. It turned out to be a woman. That’s what I was told later. I was wounded.
They knew we were a CP [command post]. We were behind a series of paddy dykes. You can see the antenna, so they started before the attack, the first thing they did, they were either mortar or RPGs [rocket propelled grenades], or both. Everybody in the headquarters were wounded. My buddy got it in the spleen. Mac, Cowboy and Bodyguard, my radio operator, were wounded. I was hit in the head and was unconscious for about 15 minutes. This attack got to about 50 yards from me when I came to. They had taken me and moved me a little bit and this guy, making $19.00 a month was laying on top of me, holding my head out of the water, wounded himself.
Osborne – So, I supposed, that close, you called down artillery support?
Ray – Pre-arranged fires. Pre-arranged fires that were supposed to be part of the prep-fire and that night we shifted them, so they were here. I called in and Jerry Simpson, my senior…I was the three Alpha, he was the three…called in pre-arranged artillery fires that fell on their base. When they fell behind them, these guys broke contact. We had a body count of roughly 300 to 325. They found another 400 as they tracked this other unit and made some sporadic contact, and captured some people, 23
including the woman who turned out to be with this attacking force who, supposedly, executed our wounded. And I heard all about that, back in Saigon, after the fact, because I was evacuated at dawn. The fighting was over at dawn…actually the fighting was over after these pre-arranged fires fell.
Osborne – So, as these things go, Coronado II was a success?
Ray – It was, at that time. We lost 100 Vietnamese Marines…95-100. We started with 305 and went to 365 and, with better figures, probably 700 confirmed kills out of a unit that could have been 15,000 to 18,000. They were out of action for awhile. It was a mini-version of what was going on in the In Drang with Al Moore. I mean, in the sense that he went out there and turned a bad situation to a disadvantage and it was because of our technical support…fire support, air support. I mean, if we had been fighting infantry to infantry, those guys probably would have waxed us.
Osborne – When you get to the Tet Offensive, you were, if I remember from reading in Saigon and Hue City?
Ray – Both of those.
Osborne – Both of those? Can you talk about your experiences in that offensive, just in general?
Ray – Sure. I was actually on R&R [Rest and Relaxation] in Hong Kong when the Tet Offensive started. It was at night, like the 30th or 31st of January. I remember the next day I had two more days left and I paid an Army specialist $24.00 or $25.00 to get his seat on the next flight going out the next morning, got to Cam Ren Bay and my battalion was in the Bong Son Plain which is II Corps’ area in Vietnam. I Corps is all the way up, II Corps, Saigon is in the middle, III Corps and IV Corps is the Mekong Delta. I’m in my khaki shirt and civilian clothes and I’m trying to get to Saigon to get back up to the Bong Son where my unit is, because there are only two advisers per battalion…there aren’t very many of us.
Osborne – So you were recovered by then?
Ray – Oh yes. I was in the hospital for about three days and returned to duty. It didn’t penetrate the skull; it was a fragment and like a concussion. So I got to Cam Ranh Bay and probably the most historically interesting event was that we carried orders from Westmoreland that would permit us to bump to priority one asset to get available use of resources. There wasn’t anything I could get. It was kind of chaos in Cam Ranh Bay and they thought they were going to be hit and they really weren’t ready, and 24
there was a lot of that going on. Some master sergeant pointed me down the flight line and said “There’s a C-130 cranking up and I think it’s going south.” So I went out there with my bag of Hong Kong goodies and waved this guy down and they opened up and I talked to the crew chief and he said “They’re going to go to Ton Son Nhat airport. They’ve got batteries, ammunition. They’ve got material.” And it turns out, the guy called me up when we got close to Saigon…the pilot did…and I was up between the pilot and the co-pilot as they approached and you could see the fighting, you know, because you could see VC tracers and our kind of orange color tracers, so you could see the fighting. It was the first plane that landed in Ton Son Nhat, post the Tet start. They did land and I got off and a rear Air Force colonel with a pistol in his hand, came up and I’m in khaki uniform and said “Are you a Marine?” I said “Yes sir, I am” and I saluted, and he said “Would you be our company commander?” I’m looking around at this place with a lot of Air Force guys running around with M-16s. There is sporadic firing going on and I said “I’ve got orders to get to my unit as soon as possible and they’re going to pick me up at daybreak.” And I just found a place and hunkered down that night. This was probably 10:00. When I got in the next morning I got over to my hotel, got my combat gear and everything and reported to headquarters and they basically said “There’s been a guy wounded in the 1st Battalion, so you’re short. Would you go be the senior for 1st Battalion, Vietnamese Marines and they’re out near the JGS [Joint General Staff] headquarters, which was their equivalent of our Pentagon. The bad guys had gotten into there, so I joined the 1st Battalion and was involved for a week in the street fighting in Saigon. It got to be 9 February when, basically, Saigon was secured and we cleared the JGS headquarters. A New York Times correspondent was with me for a day in that operation, and somebody later sent me a copy of the article he wrote
It was my experience from that movie that Coppola made…Apocalypse Now…because after the airport opened up, we were pushing down the street in direct contact with the North Vietnamese regiment. I rolled over to make a radio contact and I saw the underside of a brightly colored…I forget what airline it is…it had lots of colored planes. They were pink and they were red, yellow…so there was a civilian airliner flying over this firefight to land at Ton Son Nhat. That was a backdrop to the whole Vietnam War for all of us, because there are a lot of places where you can pick up American rock and roll, and the music, and it was kind of surrealistic. It wasn’t like watching our parent’s generation in the great World War II. If you were in France and could get to Paris, maybe it was, but we seemed to bump into 25
civilization in odd moments, which were kind of mind blowing experiences. My deros(?) was March 21…this was February 8th, 9th, and I figured I was getting to the place where we’re probably going to secure Saigon, or at least go out on the capital military district, which was an area outside of Saigon, in which they had constant operations just to secure the city. We would do that, usually, for the Vietnamese Marine, who would come back after a major operation, and you’d serve a period of time on the capital military district where there was very little contact. I thought maybe this was where I was going to stay for the end of my tour.
The next day we went to Ton Son Nhatven orders to go to Hue flew into the Marine combat base. Actually, with the map we were given, the airfield was on the map, was the one inside the Citadel, so for about an hour, I’m talking to my counterpart and we’re back and forth thinking about are we going to make a central combat assault in the C-130s? I mean, are we going to land in an airfield inside the Citadel? Then it became clear, because it happened in a hurry, and I mean, advance party for the rest of Task Force Alpha, coming up behind, that we’re going to Dong Hai and that the whole task force, three battalions, will marry up there and then probably either a motor march or a walk into Hue City was what was going to happen. So we did. We got in there and got set up and I think I had maybe a battalion minus with me at that time. The next morning, about 10:00, I’m on the phone trying to coordinate the lift when I heard some very angry and authoritative voices behind me. I turned around and I’m looking at more stars than I’ve ever seen in my life and it was General Cushman. General Cushman was saying some things about “reluctant dragons and why didn’t you get those Vietnamese Marines that came in last night…why weren’t you moving down to the Citadel?” And there were maybe five senior officers, a couple of two-stars, two or three one-stars and some colonels and I’m looking at this and he’s very angry with me. Basically I said “I don’t command. I’m trying to get the lift of the rest of the task force and when the task force is assembled the Vietnamese commander is ready to operate in due course.”
After about a really good three-star ass-chewing, they moved out and it was kind of interesting because I walked outside to shake it off and a white-haired brigadier was there and he introduced himself as Foster C. Hugh(?), who was the assistant division commander of the 1st Marine Division. He said “Look, he’s under a lot of strain and he knows, actually, that you don’t command the unit, but he heard that there was a battalion of Vietnamese Marines here and he wants them thrown into the fight, now.” It 26
turns out he’s from Cardian(?), Indiana, and he actually commanded the Marine Corps Reserve Unit after World War II, and was mobilized with that unit that I later commanded and he was a guest of honor a couple of times for birthday balls and stuff like that, and he told me that Westmoreland called him every morning about 8:00 and asked if that flag was still flying and General Cushman would say “Yes, sir.” Then Westmoreland would just hang up. So he was getting that…I want the flag…the Vietnamese flag that was flying over the Citadel, was a great source of embarrassment. It was political. The way they were holding on was a political decision, although the fighting forces had been told, “When you walk into these district capitals and these regional capitals…when you get there, the citizenry is going to rise up to support you. They’re on your side. They’re going to welcome you with flyers.” You’ve heard that recently here in the last three years. That wasn’t the case, but it was interesting.
But we did get everybody all consolidated. We did take a motor march. We went right down and dismounted right where that bridge was dropped into the Perfume River. That’s the famous photograph where you can see it. We were in sight of the enemy. The 1st Marine Division was getting ready on one side; we were going to go all the way around to the top of the Citadel. In the corner where the 1st Oregon Division headquarters was, that was the only thing that didn’t fall inside the Citadel. They were able to defend that perimeter, and we were going to land there and, of course, we were going to go in LCUs [landing craft] and Ms [papa boats] and the notion of going out in the river, literally under the enemy’s guns, from the wall…”Well, it’s going to be alright because we’re going to have air, and this and that.” It looked like a foolish maneuver to me but we did it, and got away with it. We took a 106 recoilless rifle fire from Nyland(?) out there that didn’t hit any of the targets, but I thought we just bunched up in these LCUs like a catapult, went all the way around…took us a day to make that movement. Combat orders were issued and we took the rights out of the Citadel as you look at it. You almost need to be looking at a map. We got up here and the Perfume River swung around like this. I mean, it was a big diamond, and U.S. Marines took this half down here. This is where we came from so this is south. This is north. And we were going to do this swinging operation, and the real brutal fight started, not so much here. The U.S. Marines had to get on top of the wall to cover their flank and we had to get on top of this wall.
I no longer was a battalion adviser. After I left the 1st Battalion in Saigon, I became Task Force Alpha’s, working for the guy who put me in the place in the Coronado II…Talbott Budd, Major Budd. That 27
lasted about 30 days. For a while I was coordinating most of the supporting arms and they finally ended up with a colonel. I think a full colonel came up but I was, by necessity, coordinating, because we had four or five different sets of Vietnamese supporting arms, and we had three or four different U.S. supporting arms, and there was no fire direction center set up. Eventually an Army colonel took over and my boss in Saigon came up. Colonel R. L. Michael, Jr. came up and he’s the one who saw that this shouldn’t be. I mean, I’ve got a junior captain who’s trying to, by necessity, coordinate Vietnamese and U.S. and got me out of that responsibility. They fought very well.
The temperature was in the low 40s, rain most of the time, overcast. They issued field jackets but they had no liners in them, most of them, so everybody was climatized down south. In Saigon it’s 90 degrees. Monsoons going on up here. We could get virtually no air assets from this. We did get coordinated artillery fire. We got some naval gun fire but even 8-inch was bouncing off those walls. The North Vietnamese fought, and they left booby-traps behind and we captured a lot of weapons. I think it was over the first week of March. I’d have to go look at the record.
Osborne – That’s about right. Then, of course, the Tet Offensive for the North Vietnamese was a failure, at least militarily. Right when you started this interview, you touched on Walter Cronkite, and what happens right in the aftermath of this offensive. Of course, you’ve been on the ground in pitched fighting for awhile, by the end of Tet and you see that Tet didn’t work out for the enemy. You were eventually able to hold and repulse it. How did people in the war start to react when they realized that, in the face of what is really militarily a victory, you end up with popular perception at home that is negative?
Ray – That’s an excellent question. That’s an interesting way you posed it too. Kronkite must have been there about the time we were starting. I need to check our arrival date. I’ve seen the footage of his interview. In fact, he and Maury Safer(?) and one of his other running mates came to Louisville and taped a national show on the Vietnam War while I was a practicing lawyer there, that I got an invitation to. That’s another story, but Kronkite made his statement that “There’s no light at the end of the tunnel. That this is a great strategic victory for the North Vietnamese and a strategic defeat for the United States.” We could see that in Saigon, they got into the Chinese part of the city. They did get a sapper unit inside the walls of the American Embassy. They did get down some streets but there were an awful lot of places they didn’t get, and they were quickly driven out of Saigon. I mean, it was almost like you wonder what 28
those sappers were told. You know, you breach the wall, you get inside, and boy, we’ll have a regiment right in there on top of you. And they look around and it’s that Tonto and Lone Ranger business, you know…surrounded. And they didn’t show up.
What was apparent to us, from the reports that were coming into our headquarters, when the fighting stopped in Saigon and it was secured, it was clear that not only were we being successful where we were engaged with the North Vietnamese units, but the main force VC units had come together. We were being able to engage people who we didn’t know were VC. It was a strategic defeat for the North Vietnamese on two counts…their strategic objective to gain a foothold in the south and have people popularly rise up and support them, where they would not just be above and below the DMZ, was thwarted. But, more importantly, the VC were never an effective fighting force after the Tet Offensive. Literally, hundreds if not thousands of VC were killed, wounded or captured, that we hadn’t even identified. I mean, they stood up and identified themselves and, therefore, we could engage them. The problem with the VC was, you didn’t know who they were sometimes. They were part-timers or they would be a farmer…that kind of thing. So that was already apparent, that we’d done a real job on the VC and, in point of fact, after Tet almost all the main force contacts for the rest of the war were with the North Vietnamese Army. So it became conventional war in that extent.
Kronkite, basically, declared that there was no light at the end of the tunnel, that there was no hope of victory. The Americans needed to come to that and go to the negotiating table. This sounded like Korea now. I hear that. It’s interesting…I tried to think when I heard that report…whether it was before I left Hue City or not. I left Hue City on about the 10th of March. There was a follow-on operation that I was part of. It was a pursuit. I was going to start out-processing and I got to Saigon on the 11th of March to out-process and depart on the 21st, so I had to do my after-action report, check in and do all the out-processing. So I heard something but I might have read something when I got to Saigon, and then I got home on the 21st of March and Johnston made his announcement at the end of March…I think the 30th or 31st. So I actually saw him do that. Frank McGhee, later on, and I’ll do a little retrospect.
When I was active in the reserve, I went to Washington and met a former Marine named Peter Breshrip(?) and Peter had worked for Jim Billington at the Woodrow Wilson Center, and took over for Billington when Billington was named librarian in the Library of Congress. We had a lot of friends and so I 29
started corresponding with him and his book came out, The Big Story, which was a two-volume set on how the Tet Offensive was covered in the media. So he and I became friends. He later went to work for Billington in the Library of Congress. Anybody that’s going to look at the Vietnam War has got to read that book. Not the one volume abridged…the two volumes…because he outlines, essentially, that the biggest story of our generation was 180 degrees wrong. Then, in the last chapter, he basically, starts to opine that we just got it wrong because they were young and they didn’t speak the language. I mean, he lets them off the hook. But I have a hard time with that in terms of accepting the fact that they got it wrong and then Admiral Moore and others confirmed for me in the further research that I did, it was pretty clear that the question that I had avoided asking, started to come clear to me in my own reading.
The first loud and clear was when I was a freshman in law school in 1969-70. I think it was the spring of 1970. Senator Thurston Morton, former Assistant Secretary of State, very close to Dwight Eisenhower, senior senator from Kentucky, been around for a long, long time, naval officer from World War II, gave a speech at the law school. I’m one of the few guys with short hair and wearing a coat and tie, so when he asked for questions he called on me and I asked the question “Tell me about the Gulf of Tonkin.” And he said “Lyndon lied us to war.” Essentially that’s what he said and there were no North Vietnamese. That’s the first time I’d heard that and I’m listening to a pretty authoritative source. After it was over and I crowded around him and got some follow-on questions. Well, that’s when I got my uneasy feeling that what I’d see at Hue had something to do with what happened to Lyndon Johnston who, whether I agreed with him or not, was my Commander-in-Chief, has been brought down by the grossest error in reporting that’s ever been made, and I began to start doing some serious research. I got out of law school, got involved, and it wasn’t until probably Breshrip and I met in the ‘70s, whenever the big story came out, and I began to travel to Washington and when Reagan was elected in ’80 I was in Washington often and then went to work for Casper Weinberger, Defense Secretary, in March of 1984, with access to ask questions and get some fairly good answers coming out and satisfy myself that the real question is, “Who would believe that the United States of America could take on a country the size of the state of Mississippi; that it would last 21 years; that it would take 58,000 killed in action, and come out on the short end of the stick?” 30
I got to know Goldwater and his staff a little, and I got to know Jesse Helms and his staff a lot more. They were really the best conservative staff in the Senate and the guys with military backgrounds had been with him a long time and between Barry Goldwater and Jessie Helms, in 1986, just after I left the Pentagon, they got declassified the Rules of Engagement that had been in force. It’s about 60 pages…45 to 60 pages. Have you ever read it?
Osborne – No.
Ray – O.K. And you realize, when you read that document, that it began to shed light on McNamara’s statement, after his book came out, where he said “I believed in 1965 that we couldn’t be successful, but I didn’t tell anybody that. I didn’t tell my boss that, the American people that, and the Armed Forces that. I didn’t say those things until three years later.” But he knew those Rules of Engagement…I believe he did. I don’t know how many general officers knew about those Rules of Engagement but I do know that Admiral Moore was able to breach them twice. The mining of Haiphong Harbor, which he’d been trying to do since ’65; since 80 to 90% of the war-making capacity of North Vietnam came through Haiphong Harbor. You cut that off for six months and you’re not waging war any more. And, of course, with the strategic bombing of Hanoi, which occurred in December-January of the linebacker raids. He’d been urging that as Chief of Naval Operations, and then as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, he finally was able to, as he said “I’m one of those few people that was able to snooker Henry Kissinger. If you would like to know how that actually worked, I can give you a shorthand version of how the mines were actually put in place.
Osborne – I’d like to hear that.
Ray – Kissinger was really good. If he couldn’t do it directly, he could do it indirectly, and that’s how he would operate. He was a master in-fighter and the chairman picked his time and went to see Nixon. Kissinger was present and he made the case for mining Haiphong Harbor, and had it chapter and verse, and Nixon could not, and did not, say no to him. But this time he was prepared because he had the helicopters. The mines were already on the helicopters, the carrier was into the wind, they were ready to launch. The pilots were in there and when he stepped out of the Oval Office, he issued the execute order. By the time he got back to his office in the Pentagon, there was a phone call from the President who said “You know, I think Henri should have stayed in the Oval Office. I think it’s the right 31
thing to do but it may not be the right time to do it.” And he said “Mr. President, the United States Navy has executed your mission 20 minutes ago.”
Osborne – I like that. That’s good.
Ray – It’s an interesting thing that Moore was CINCPAC [Commander in Chief, Pacific] Fleet for almost four years and then he became Chief of Naval Operations for four years, and then he was chairman of the Joint Chiefs for four years, so he probably, because he was chairman of the Joint Chiefs under Nixon from ’69 to just beginning ’73 and CNO before that. If you put those years down there, you’ve got the whole American involvement where he was a three or four-star CINCPAC Fleet was at that time. He was literally was in a position to watch for almost 12 years, the whole overplay of the Vietnam War. The only thing I’m unhappy about is me and others that encouraged him to participate in the preparation of a biography. I’m still trying to get the papers from friends of the family. He died 18 months ago. Named Henry Kissinger an honorary pallbearer. One of our close and mutual friends gave the eulogy and the eulogy revisited a lot of these same subjects and Henry had to be there to hear it. Funerals in Washington are political events…high politics.
Osborne – Any reaction at all?
Ray – I don’t think he was all that happy with some of the things he heard, from the attempted sinking of the U.S.S. Liberty, which was a matter of great concern, to Admiral Moore, Chief of Naval Operations, and the delay in the Linebacker raids and the delay of mining Haiphong Harbor.
Osborne –You’ve had a lot of time since Tet, and then leaving Vietnam and watching events unfold after that, to really evaluate what happened, and hold it up against what you’ve seen, and your experiences and everything else. You’ve already been alluding to it, but, in your mind, now that you’ve seen other things…and just for the sake of the record…what do you see as mistakes? You know, where it all went wrong.
Ray – Well, I’d rather give you a book list than answer that. Let me try to characterize the frame of mind from 1970 confirmation from my own senator, that Gulf of Tonkin, August of 1964, which was when I went on active duty, was misrepresented to the American people. The fact that we’d been lied to and intervened directly in the Gulf of Tonkin resolution had been based on a lie…there were no North Vietnamese…and that was confirmed by Admiral Stockdale to me by phone. Some of my friends were in 32
his class up at the Naval War College and he and I wrote and talked by phone. He confirmed, for me, his flight leader. He said “That’s the secret he was most concerned was going to come out while he was a POW in North Vietnam. That he was the flight leader and he knew and reported that there were no North Vietnamese torpedo boats at the Gulf of Tonkin. So I went from that knowledge about the Gulf of Tonkan…which was later confirmed right here at VMI.
I’m out here on the Parents Council with my wife, putting up a tent for the Parents Council for one of the events in the fall of ’04, for a football game and I looked up and an old veteran is walking across with a U.S.S. Turner Joy hat on and he’s the grandfather of a cadet and he’s there and his son, or son-in-law, was on the Parents Council with me so I went up and introduced myself and said “When were you on the Turner Joy?” He said “1964.” I said “I’ve got to ask you the question.” He said “I already know what the question’s going to be.” He said “There were not any North Vietnamese torpedoes or torpedo boats at the Gulf of Tonkin.” And then he described the way he was treated after that was over and how he was kept out of the United States and so he grew up in Italy. I’m going to go and take an oral history. He offered to do that and I’ve got a file and I’m going to go to Richmond and get an oral history from him. But he did not ever talk to the press and the Navy did not want him to talk to the press.
So it bothered me that so many people in power disregarded the basis that we’d gone to war. I was surprised that we could overlook that and be involved in what was clear after Tet. It was clear to all of us that we weren’t trying to win the war. After what Kronkite said took hold, dancing around about negotiations, over the size of the table and the shape of the table and all that kind of stuff began, and it was pretty clear that we weren’t. We went over thinking we were there to win a limited war, to win Pork Chop Hill, and, in fact, that was not the case after Tet.
This is a Cold War incident. I was on reserve duty at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, when Richard Nixon announced his resignation. I happened to be at a meal at the officer’s club at Camp Lejeune. It was one of the most eerie moments of my life, because most of the guys in the club were Vietnam veterans. Here’s the Commander-in-Chief. Now, for me, this is the second Commander-in-Chief, O.K.? And you could hear the artillery. You could hear mortar and artillery fire crumping across the New River, and everybody in there was the most solemn, because everybody knew this was not right. They didn’t know exactly what happened but they knew this wasn’t right. For me, I’m thinking, this is the 33
second Commander-in-Chief that has been brought down…second Commander-in-Chief for the Vietnam War, that’s been brought down in an undemocratic fashion, or apparently in an undemocratic fashion…albeit you could argue that Lyndon Johnston was, in a round about way, democratic because the media got it wrong and that was believed and therefore he lacked the support. He ran second or a close first…I’ve forgotten…in the New Hampshire primary, but the point in fact, the two Commanders-in-Chief…and for me, a little later, it became apparent. I said “Well, we have John F. Kennedy who was murdered, undemocratic, and Johnston…the three Commanders-in-Chief of the Vietnam War were removed from office, other than at the ballot box. It was a very sobering thing that went on.
I wrote a piece in the middle of the Carter years. Again, I’d been for Reagan and against Ford. We came really close. North Carolina was the high point and it wouldn’t have taken very much for him to have been elected in 1976, and I, somehow, think that the Reagan legacy would have been greater if he’d been elected in 1976 than when he was elected in 1980. But I wrote an editorial that kind of comes to mind, about limited war. I mean, that was where I was in the middle of the Carter years and it was published. It was a state-wide version of the Washington Post in Kentucky, called the Courier Journal. But that was what I said…foreign policy based on restraint. I was criticizing that whole notion of limited war. So that’s where I was at that particular point in time. I had misgivings and was uneasy about it and then, during the Reagan administration, I gathered more information. I had a hand in what became known as the Weineberger Doctrine, which later was sort of refined as the Powell Doctrine, about the six things you had to have, and all of them were built around what had happened in Vietnam. You know, that we were going to have the support, we’re going to use the reserves more, we’re going to have the support of the American people against gradualism.
I don’t remember all six of the points, but certainly George Herbert Walker Bush followed the same…his refusal to invade Iraq after pushing the Iraqi army out of Kuwait in 1991, was based on that same doctrine. We went over there with half a million fighters and that was as a direct result. And every one of the ground commanders was a Vietnam combat veteran, including General Peay, who commanded the 101st Airborne Division, and Walt Boomer was the commander who was an adviser to Vietnamese Marines during the Easter Offensive in 1972. So, they went in and they did it right in Kuwait and we were all satisfied by that. 34
I went back to Kentucky in January of ’85, thought about getting in the senate race against Wendell Ford in Kentucky, but declined. I looked at it because serious people asked me to look at it, but it was clear to me that was mission impossible and I wasn’t Tom Cruise. But George Herbert Walker Bush wanted me to make the race and, through Lee Atwater, told me “Look, if you’ll run against him, we’ll give you as much support as we can. We’ll start off with $150,000 and we want you to keep Wendell Ford in Kentucky. We figure he’ll win and that’s an important mission.” I said “Look, I really appreciate your commit and candor with me but I’m not the guy to do this.” So I didn’t, but then I got a phone call, not too many weeks later, which said “Well, we were going to help you, would you help the President? The vice-president is going to run for President.” And I said I would and for three years I did that, which was an interesting way of being able to keep your hand in the process and I believe George Herbert Walker Bush was a strong supporter of Reagan, who I was a strong supporter of, so I did that with enthusiasm, and I continued to meet people along the way. I was gathering books. I got a library of about 800 books on the Vietnam War and files…as I talked about…we don’t have enough place to put them…files and articles…’86, the Rules of Engagement, you know, and the books are coming out and the best and the brightest doesn’t tell the story. Harry Summers’ book was getting it…Why We Lost the Vietnam War…I read it. When I was deputy assistant I went up to Carlisle Barracks, PA and the War College up there and met with Harry Summers and spoke at the War College. There was something missing. Harry’s written all the tactical mistakes, O.K.? But it’s a geo-political thing, that begs the question, you know.
It was during the period of time between 1990 and 1992, I was on the American Battle Monument’s Commission with George Herbert Walker Bush. I was actually supposed to go into the Pentagon with John Tower and be Special Operations ASD [Assistant Secretary of Defense]. I had a lot of regard for Tower as Chairman of the Armed Services Committee, and he was attacked by some of the Neocons(?)…congress foundation and others…and, in hindsight, it looked like it was a hatchet job, that is, it was a smear job. They accused him of inappropriate relationships and having one too many cocktails and then Dick Cheney comes in and that was a whole different story and Dick Cheney brought in his own people and the White House told me that Dick Cheney has been given carte blanche and he’s going to bring in who he needs to bring in, involving issues like women in combat and homosexuals in the 35
military. Tower was on record as far as exemplary conduct, virtue, honor, guard against suppressive behavior and that kind of thing.
They wanted me to do other things but I ended up on the American Battle Monuments Commission, which was interesting because I’d built a memorial in Kentucky. Bush laughed one time and said “I think I’ve done something right for a change. I put a guy on the Battle Monuments Commission that actually built a memorial.” I appreciated that. But in ’91 my wife was put on the Defense Advisory Committee on Women in the Services by Dick Cheney. So, here we were, both of us involved in the Bush administration. Every chance I got when I met anybody that was in a position in those things, I was acquiring information from historians, from veterans, flag and general officers, into my files to ask the question “What was the Vietnam War all about?” My wife makes an interesting observation. She said “How big a deal was it that Ron Ray built a memorial in Kentucky and spent seven or eight years of his life?”
Men can’t fight successfully for each other, or for intangibles, to make the world safe for democracy. It has to be something tangible. That’s one of the most devastating things about the Vietnam War, was that land didn’t matter. We weren’t marching to Hanoi. We were against Communism or the spread of Communism. You need to fight for your home and your heart, your family, at least your way of life, the Constitution. I mean, provide for the common defense. It’s pretty clear when you start looking at Vietnam very closely and you start looking at a lot of other places where, perhaps, we weren’t providing for the common defense, going all the way back to the suspicious circumstances surrounding the sinking of the U.S.S. Maine in Havana Harbor in February of 1898.
It was in the ’90-’92 time frame. I met Admiral Moore in ’92. I met other folks and began to ask questions and began to get a tutorial on what happened and the delays and the mining and all that kind of thing, because if we had mined Haiphong Harbor in 1965 the war would have been over in 1966, and we didn’t. Mutually assured destruction was supposed to be the same thing, you know. Do you think the Israelis would accept mutually assured destruction in the Middle East? They don’t want that. They don’t just want an edge, they want a monopoly. But our leadership…Henry Kessinger and others…devise mutually assured destruction which made us impotent, diet when we need to diet. Obviously that was highly flawed. 36
I will say this. I got a phone call from folks who were senior Senate staffers who were very close to the Senate Select Committee Hearings on POW-MIA affairs. I had started to get some publicity on the Presidential commission on the assignment of women in the military in 1992. I’d handled myself O.K. in terms of some media opportunities. I got a call from David Hackworth, who was a friend of mine. Hack said “Larry King’s trying to get me to go on his show and talk about all the sexuality in the military. You know something about that, why don’t you do it?” So in August of 1992, I did Larry King Live on that subject. I had done some research. I’d been involved in a civilian case involving religious discrimination against a big bank in Kentucky, by a homosexual who wanted to launch the gay civil rights movement in Louisville, Kentucky, so I had had to look at that political movement and what it was about and what it wasn’t about. So I did Larry King Live with Larry Corb, who had been Assistant Secretary of Defense for Manpower and Personnel, while I was in the Reagan administration. About 10 minutes into it he didn’t connect me with our prior service so he’s promoting it and I was able to say “Larry, how come you didn’t advance any of these ideas when you were in the Reagan administration?” Larry King said “You all know each other?” And Corb did an oh-no, somebody’s on the show…a page of history is worth a volume of logic, right? How come you didn’t promote those…you were there when we adopted a policy that homosexuality is incompatible with American military service. Now you say, “What’s different, Larry?” He didn’t have an answer, you know, and, of course, there was a guy in a uniform…a naval officer, Tracy Thorne I think was his name. I did better than a beginner on national television should do…by the grace of God and a few Marines, somebody said.
And I got a phone call the next week from these guys and they said “Would you be willing to spend some time with us and look at what’s being suppressed by the Senate Select Committee, looking at MIA-POW affairs?” I knew these guys by reputation, a couple of them I knew, I said I would and they did, over the next 30 days when I was in Washington, which was often a couple of times a month, get briefed. We had 591 came out, there were 1,500 beds for a very good reason in Clark Air Force Base that we left living, breathing. They didn’t release them all. Henry Kessinger had promised three billion dollars of reparations systems post-war reconstruction and with Water Gate and the end of the war, and they cut off the funding of the war, that money was never going to be forthcoming, so the North Vietnamese retained some of our men as bargaining chips as the assurance that they would eventually 37
get that money, and the evidence was overwhelming. John Kerry and John McCain were both working to that end together, which was a stunning thing because I’d known John McCain for a long time very well, since 1975. We were in the leadership program together. I had Kentucky, he had Arizona, before he was in the Congress. I was surprised by that.
I took that information to Admiral Moore. I wrote the book Military Necessity and Homosexuality and, after the Larry King Show…because of David Harwood’s testimony to the Presidential Commission, which basically said we planned to use women in combat and homosexuals in the military to undermine the U.S. Armed Forces, subject to penalties and perjury…official statement in Los Angeles…also in August of 1992.
Osborne –While you’re accumulating data after the Vietnam War, you served in the Reagan Administration. While you were in that office, what challenges did you face, in the last years of the Cold War and, as you faced them, was it becoming increasingly apparent to those in the administration that things were actually moving to a breaking point? A lot of people say they can’t believe the USSR fell overnight and all of that.
Ray – I had guard reserves in training and actually Jim Webb asked me to help organize that office. He was out in Kentucky to give a speech. He and I had corresponded and had met over Vietnam common interests and fields of fire and that kind of stuff. His challenge was, this is the first time we’ve ever had an Assistant Secretary of Defense reserve affairs. Congress moved it up in ’83. They wanted more attention paid. They didn’t want that to go through the Assistant Secretary of Defense for manpower and personnel. That was Larry Corb, a personnel guy. They wanted Garden Reserve readiness to go right to the Secretary of Defense. So they created the office, which Weinberger didn’t necessarily want. But he liked Webb. Webb got the job and Webb’s challenge to me was “Help me organize this office.” I’m better at initiation than I am about managing something that’s already there. We were both Vietnam combat vets and we dedicated ourselves to issues like mobilization. I was dedicated to the total force which was a Weinberger idea, as well as the mobilization. The points were we were going to be sure we called the reserve early and all that kind of thing. A lot of what we did was foreshadowed by Vietnam. It was an interesting office because we had everything but nuclear and strategic forces, because the Garden Reserve touches the whole gamut. I had a Coast Guard Reserve 38
and we were trying to find things like common readiness indicators and all that kind of thing. I didn’t see the debate going on between the Team A and the Team B at the CIA. If you asked me, while I was there and if you asked me right up to the election of George Herbert Walker Bush, Soviets looked like big guys…looked like they were still a threat…seeing what they were able to do in this hemisphere…get a foothold in Nicaragua. The whole thing with the Contras…I was a friend of Ollie North before he was a national figure.
I was surprised. I was not watching that. I was not a Sovietentologist(?) or anything. I did start to read Billington’s stuff and he’s a great guy on the Soviet Union. Jim Billington wrote Fire in the Minds of Men: The Origins of the Revolutionary Faith. If you’re not familiar with that book…any book written by the librarian in the Library of Congress is worth looking at, particularly because he’s in the position as a historian to be more influential than any other historian, unless the President picks up your book or something. I was surprised and most of the folks I knew were surprised. I agreed wholeheartedly with Reagan and Weinberger as we don’t want parity, we want superiority in any and all ways. I supported that notion 100%, based on what I knew at the time. Now I hadn’t read Anthony Sutton until later. I got to correspond and talked to him on the phone and read the books he’s written at the Hoover Institute, and I went out to the Hoover Institute about that time…1988 or ’89…and spent a day there, and I was starting to hear that same talk at the Hoover Institute. We all knew that was going to happen. I asked the question. “You really knew that was going to happen?” I was stunned by the notion that Yeltsin could jump up with a megaphone in his mouth and stand on the hood of a car or bus or truck or whatever he did, and the Soviet Union collapsed. It looked like a pseudo-event. It looked like a photo op in a political campaign.
Osborne – All the same, though, that was it. Now that the Cold War is over, one of the purposes of the Adams Center is to get experiences like yours on the record so that people, for the future, will know their history instead of being uninformed. Just looking back on your experience now, what lessons do you believe all of that should impart on today’s generations, given the challenges we face in the post-Cold War world?
Ray – The Constitution begins “We, the people…” and it says in the Declaration of Independence that “All legitimate government rests upon consent of the government.” The word that are not there but 39
are clearly implied, are “informed consent.” Between the media monopoly and political correctness in terms of history, what’s published, what some wag said…and I think there’s some truth to it…the Soviet Union might have fallen but Marxism Leninism is alive and well in the tenured faculties of most of our colleges and universities. I think that a real solid knowledge of history, comes from working to get at the truth. It’s not a benign environment. There are a lot of agendas, there are a lot of special interests. So I think history, geography and civics… which used to be the mainstay of the American education…need to be invigorated. I think that you need to follow Ronald Reagan’s adage while he was running for President. Every time he talked about the Soviet Union, he said “Trust and verify.” If somebody wants to give you some history, look at it and you verify it, and go to the most organic utterances. Go to the most authoritative sources. If you can quote a former President…I’ve read a lot of the first books a President writes.
You look in there and see. The mission of the President of the United States is to secure the blessings of liberty and that comes by having liberty and justice for all. You know how you define liberty? This is really powerful. Here’s the test for liberty…the thermometer. If the weakest person in your society can challenge one of the more powerful interests in your society, with confidence in a just outcome, we enjoy liberty. I was raised to believe, and I heard it many times from family members and friends and neighbors…you can’t fight city hall. I didn’t know that that declaration was an admission that we don’t have liberty and justice for all in the country. And the way back, I believe two things are necessary. I think America needs a revival. I mean, we’re a third grade awakening, because the political outworking of that was the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution. And I think the other thing is to understand that parents have a duty to be sure that their children know what it is to be an American, not that you were just born here, but knew ideas of the Declaration of Independence, the Articles of Confederation, the Northwest Ordnance, the U.S. Constitution, the Bill of Rights. When you hear people today ask why do the terrorists hate us so much? and they say it’s because of our freedom and democracy, I say “What freedom and what democracy?” I appreciate Adams’ focus on the Cold War because I think the Cold War is one of the most interesting events of the 20th century.
By the way, Walter Cronkite…I read his autobiography…and he said “While I was at CBS and was their chief spokesman, I always believed that we should have a global government but I couldn’t say 40
that when I was on CBS.” 1997: A Reporter’s Life, Walker Kronkite. I like to see what the actors say in print and that challenges me to trust and verify what you hear…read more books, watch less television, and that kind of thing. It’s interesting. I heard an awful lot of Vietnam veterans tell me, over my memorial work, my political work, In many ways, while we were brave and we meant well and we were oftentimes tactically successful, the Vietnam War was wrong. If you had asked me a few years ago whether or not something like that might happen to our sons and now our daughters, I’d have been very surprised that could be possible. That a similar, open-ended sort of no-win circumstance…that we could have been drawn into something like that. And it wouldn’t have happened, absent 9/11.
Osborne – You believe, then, that we face an extremely similar situation?
Ray – In many regards it is. Certainly the hunt for Bin Laden had to begin in the Afghanistan area. The facts that I’ve looked at shows that the Iraqi situation seems to be a special interest political agenda that goes all the way back to the ‘70s, that two Presidents as different as George Herbert Walker Bush and William Clinton refused to get involved in. Let me say this. All of our founding fathers said something that resonates with me. While I was doing this Vietnam work, I went back and started reading the founding fathers and really looking at what it means to be an American. I realized I finished second in my class at law school, going to all of the finest military schools, National Defense University, distinguished graduate of the Naval Justice Corps NATO War College, Center College…all that kind of stuff…I didn’t know anything about history. I didn’t know anything about the American law and civil government. I went back and got into all of that and read original documents and came away with a lot of things. But I think one of the most interesting things was that every one of them said, one way or the other…they said “Always beware. Never trade your liberty in one nation under God for any man or politician’s promise of security, because you’ll deserve neither, and lose both.” I think that’s really what we’re in danger of seeing happening now, because there are an awful lot of people who said “We need to give up the Bill of Rights because that will make us safe.” I pose the question “We spend half a trillion dollars a year, and have for many years, on national security and couldn’t defend our military headquarters.” Nobody has been held accountable as far as I’m concerned. If the ship runs aground, no matter where the captain was, he’s responsible. So I think there are some serious questions and I think the answers are in history.41
Osborne – Mr. Ray, thank you very much.
Ray – I’m grateful for your time and I appreciate the opportunity.