Frank Yusi Interview

              John A. Adams ’71 Center for Military History and Strategic Analysis. Cold War Oral History Project Interview with Frank Yusi by Cadet Tripp Pumphrey, February 19, 2005
©Adams Center, Virginia Military Institute
About the interviewer:
Cadet Tripp Pumphrey (’06), from Leesburg, Virginia, is majoring in history at VMI.
Pumphrey: The following interview is being conducted for the John A. Adams ’71 Center for Military History and Strategic Analysis as part of the requirements for History 386—American Military History Since 1919. The interviewed is Tripp Pumphrey. The interviewee is Frank Yusi. Today’s date is February 19, 2005. We are meeting at Mr. Yusi’s home.
Mr. Yusi, would you give me an overview of your military career, starting with your rank, when you started and when you retired?
Yusi: I graduated from college in 1965; went back and played football in ’64, so a bunch of us graduated in ’65 after the season. I knew, basically, that I didn’t want to be drafted and a lot of us didn’t, so we joined the service. In January of ’65 we went to boot camp as a seaman recruit and then I was picked up for officer candidate school and graduated from there in April and in November of ’65 I was in the South China Sea on a destroyer. I did go to flight school for about four weeks, but my hearing went bad in one ear so they transferred me to destroyers. That kind of tells you something about destroyers doesn’t it? From there, from August of ’67 to January of ’69, I went in-country – volunteered for that on river patrol boats – River Division 533 in the Mekong Delta – after that went to OCS as instructor at Newport and then I went back to destroyers as an engineer. Had a couple of tours on destroyers, two tours at the Naval War College as a student – one on staff – and then I became a student. Then in 1984 I went back as a senior student there and then I finished my career after being in command and being an executive officer on destroyers and frigates, Naval Training Service Center School for Recruits at 2
Great Lakes. Had about 2,500 instructors and 10,000 students and we would provide training to the students when they came out of boot camp, or if they came out of the fleet.
Pumphrey: So you finished at the rank of captain 06?
Yusi: Yes. I was one officer.
Pumphrey: What prompted you to join the military?
Yusi: I think – at the time, my father was in the Navy and my uncles were in the Army. I watched one uncle in the Air Force who was shot down in Korea, so there is not a real strong tradition, but there is a tradition in our family of going into the service. I think I was more impressed with my uncle who was 17 years old and he was wounded at Iwo Jima. He wouldn’t talk about it a lot but it just really, you know, imagining what it would be like to have the experience. That’s why I did it. I wasn’t drafted, per se. I know I would have been drafted very shortly because of 13 of us in our fraternity, nine of us wound up in Vietnam together – some drafted, some volunteered – so it’s kind of interesting.
Pumphrey: So you volunteered for service and you were placed on destroyers so you’d be an ensign then?
Yusi: Right.
Pumphrey: What were your duties as an ensign on a destroyer?
Yusi: The Lavalette was an old World War II destroyer. Four 5-inch 38 weapons, guns on board and three twin 3-inch 50, torpedoes and hedgehogs. I was a weapons officers and a fire control officer. We, basically, were West Coast – Long Beach, California. There were two stations in 3
Vietnam. One was Yankee Station and one was Dixie Station and we were to provide close-in fire support for the U.S. divisions in the area. Not a lot of formation steaming as far as down in Dixie station, because there weren’t any carriers down there. They might have brought a carrier down there once in a while when there was an operation going on, but mostly carriers up north, and then we’d head up north and what they called Yankee Station in the North China Sea, I guess it was, in the Tonkin Gulf area and we’d escort carriers in if they’d launch aircraft. There were always two to three carriers up there on rotation. We did that for quite a while, so it was a lot of experience in ship-handling up there. A whole lot of following a carrier very closely at night, not even 1,000 yards astern with complete blackout conditions – what they called “lighting major green” where there are no lights showing on either ship and all you had were two little blue lights on the stern of the carrier. Basically the planes would line up on us and come in and hit the angle deck.
It was an older ship. There were no amenities on it. No air-conditioning. When we were down in Dixie Station we would sleep top-side because it was too hot to sleep down inside the ship. Did that, came back, went through a yard period in San Francisco at Hunter’s Point, made another cruise on it and at the end of the cruise – I had volunteered before the cruise to go to Vietnam and the CO wanted me on board because I would have been the senior weapons-type on board for the second cruise, so I stayed for the cruise. After eight months he asked if I still wanted to go to Vietnam and I told him yes and he got me orders. I left the Philippines and went right to San Francisco for training up around Travis Air Force Base up there, and then went back in-country on river patrol boats. So that was the first two tours.
Pumphrey: River patrol boats – was that an all volunteer force?
Yusi: It was all volunteer. Surprisingly, a lot of the guys we had were two-year reservists. We did have career-types who are boat captains – machinist mates, bos’n mates, gunners mates – but most of the enginemen, most of the E-2s – enlisted grade 2 and enlisted grade 3 – were 4
mostly two-year volunteers. And that’s where they spent their two years of duty. It was an interesting tour. I still have a lot of friends – people go to reunions and stuff like that. I haven’t done that yet, but someday I will do that. It was what you would think – it was kind of an exciting thing to be there at the time and to volunteer for it. I think that was one of the decisions after that tour of duty that made me decide to stay in the service. I liked the people who were there and I liked the duty.
Pumphrey: What was the overall mission of a river patrol boat?
Yusi: We were Swift boats – remember, what John Kerry was on? It was on the coast, and once you went into the rivers, then it became river patrol – river divisions. Our job was interdiction of enemy supply routes, enemy crossings, presence – having the presence in the rivers. In the Ham Luong River area, for instance. We were the first American units down there. It was really interesting because that area, on the Ham Luong, was basically where the Viet Minh actually started and were very strongly entrenched down there. Interdiction could be anything – from supply routes to personnel. We provided support for the many operations of the SEALs, long-range recon patrol crew units which would be Vietnamese long-range recon patrol. A lot of insertion and extraction with SEAL units – a lot. In fact, I’d say every other patrol was doing something like that – inserting men and taking them out the next morning. During the TET Offensive of 1968 we, basically, were the floating artillery for the advisers who were trapped in the base camps. Sixteen, twenty hour patrols of just staying on the river for 13 days at a time and not going ashore was pretty much what it boiled down to during that period. They wanted our presence down there; we provided presence. The people – any time there was a problem, any time someone was injured, any time someone was sick, any time there was a friendly fire incident, or whatever, we’d always go out there and provide medical support. Now they felt no fear at all, coming out there with a light on their sampan, knowing that they’d be picked up very quickly by one of the PBR [Patrol Boat River] units and taken to the doctor. 5
Pumphrey: This is the civilians?
Yusi: The civilian population, yes.
Pumphrey: You had a lot of interaction with the civilian population?
Yusi: Yes. Coming in off of patrol and we’d have C rations on our manifolds, heating up – the ubiquitous spaghetti and meatballs and stuff like that – and we’d pull into Tam Binh or Vinh Long or places like that and trade those things for fresh food from the Vietnamese and maybe have a drink of baseday [rice wine] with them or something like the rice wine or something. The people were really interesting people. They were survivors and I think we really felt badly for them because we knew we were only going to be there a year or two years, but they were going to be there for the duration and it was really hard to comprehend being in a situation like that for such a long period. We did a lot of interactions. During TET we’d get a lot of interaction because a lot of the officers in the 7th Armored Division – the Army Division of Vietnamese – were on vacation when TET occurred, so they didn’t have any leadership, so between our patrol sections and the SEALs that we had there – in essence that’s what they relied on for fire support, for calling in fire, for basically providing transportation to and from battle zones and it was kind of an interesting situation for all of us at the time.
Pumphrey: How big are these rivers in Vietnam? Were they really narrow or were they really wide?
Yusi: Could be a quarter of a mile wide; could be 25 feet wide. Canals were sometimes – we’d be in a canal and the canals would be so narrow we couldn’t turn our gunboat around and there was jungle on each side of us, so when you’re in a fire fight, very fast and very furious, so it’s pretty much who can get the most out the quickest. It wasn’t like every day we went out that you’d have this fire fight or get in a situation – like in the movies – but we used to term it as hours 6
and hours of boredom, punctuated by moments of stark terror – and that’s basically what it was. It came very fast. If you’ve ever been hunting or anything like that – I’d hate like hell to equate it to that – you have to be quick if you jump a rabbit or a deer and that’s the same way it was over there. Except, any time you went in there, you’d better mind your P’s and Q’s. Your first movement is usually the start of a fire fight and whoever gets the most out will get out of there intact.
The boats were 31 feet long. We had twin-50s forward, single-50 aft. We mounted mini-guns on the aft end there for a while so it would give us 4,000 rounds a minute. We carried 90 mil recoilless; they were bunker busters. When we’d get in close and you couldn’t suppress a bunker, we used our recoilless on it. We had two M-60s over the engines and we had personal side arms and weapons that we carried. Four men per boat. Normal load out was about 5,000 rounds of 50. We’d even carry M-60 mortar rounds with us to because we’d use them to provide support to the advisers in places like that – jacuzzi pumps, no propellers. When we were dead in the water it was 18 inch draft; when we were at high speed it was a four inch draft, so we could go right across a rice paddy if we had to. They were good boats and there were commercial boats that were adapted for the military. Trouble is, they were fiberglass, so when they caught fire, they were easily penetrated. The other thing, too – being fiberglass, sometimes rockets would go right through without even detonating; the recoilless would, mostly, so there was nothing for them to hit, so it kind of saved us a lot.
Pumphrey: What were your views of the Viet Cong’s tactics, capabilities in your situation?
Yusi: Talking to the guys that were there in ’66 and ’67 – and in fact when I got there, you were still capturing German Mauser rifles from them and things like this, shotguns and things like that. As the North Vietnamese Army got more involved and the Chinese got more involved supplying the North Vietnamese, you found out the weapons weren’t really that sophisticated. It wasn’t a guy standing behind a rice paddy wall bank shooting at you anymore. They were organized, they 7
used the recoilless, they used our PT rocket launchers, they used AK-47s, they used our RPD-50 machine guns. So they got very sophisticated in a very short period of time. They would, basically – if they wanted to cross the river or canal with a battalion or a company-size group, they’d try to avoid it just as much as possible. Because we could concentrate massive fire power on them from gunboats and also from the air as well. James Williams, who was a bosun mate at the time, got the Medal of Honor over there one night from our river division. In fact he ran across a crossing of about six or seven hundred of them and it turned into a massive fire-fight with helicopters and everything else and they always try to avoid that, so when it happened, it was always someone screwed up. Either we were in the wrong place at the right time, or they were in the wrong place at the right time also. So it was six of one and half dozen of the other. In other times they’d actually conduct ambushes on us.
They would try to get us to show the South Vietnamese people that they could counter these gunboats and they’d send a sampan out and you’d see 10 or 15 armed men on it. They’d duck back in the canal and we’d go right after them and they’d be lined up in there with recoilless and heavy weapons. You had to have common sense; you didn’t go in the canal at low tide. There is a tremendous tidal range there. It ran from six feet to twelve feet. At low tide you’d be down here and the banks were up here and your weapons would just fire and catch the corner of the banks, so we tried to keep it where you went in at high tide so at least you would get some kind of rake with your weapons, but it didn’t always work out that way. In fact, my relief, two days before I was supposed to leave – it happened to him and we pulled our boats out of there and he was wounded so severely I wound up staying an extra four months.
Pumphrey: How many tours were you in?
Yusi: On gun boats?
Pumphrey: Yes. 8
Yusi: One and a half. It worked out a long first tour and then a short second tour. They tried to get me out of there as soon as possible and I, basically, said I’d stay on until they got another relief.
Pumphrey: What year was that?
Yusi: This was ’67 to ’69.
Pumphrey: What about your views of the South Vietnamese soldiers? Did you have a lot of work with them?
Yusi: We did. We were gung-ho. We were very gung-ho. We were very aggressive. The bottom line is we had good equipment and I think our leadership at the lower level was good. Leadership at the other level was a different subject. But at the lower level, the South Vietnamese guys out there in the field were very good. And also we knew we were going to be there a short period of time and then go home. These South Vietnamese guys were draftees and a lot of draftees, if you go into the Mekong where they came from – they don’t even know there was a government in Saigon; they’d only heard about it. Now, their whole life was centered around growing rice and living on a day-to-day basis. You had people over there who worked so doggone hard, they were 30 years old and you’d swear to God they were 60 the way they looked. I mean, that’s all they did.
We got there, we tried Vietnamization. At nighttime we’d do a lot of floating tactics because we didn’t want to run the engines, because you’d run out of fuel eventually. Our patrol areas, sometimes, were so far away, so we’d drift by these villages, then 100 feet – going down along the river there – and you could hear them with a generator going and a portable TV running, how to speak English and stuff like that, so it was kind of interesting what the government was trying 9
to do. But their attempts were just not very effective, because of the way they were spread out. We’d go in; we’d take land because we’d have to reoccupy land. Why? Because someone in Saigon found out that they were growing rice on his property and they weren’t allowed to do that. And we were doing some stupid things like that which gave us all a terrible taste in our mouths. The soldiers in the Vietnamese army – typical draftee. The leaders – a lot of them got their leadership because of money, status and things like that. The Rangers? The Rangers were outstanding. The Vietnamese Marines were outstanding. So those were the groups that were very select, well trained and led by people who were trained, in essence, by our people, which is kind of interesting and they were really outstanding, but the overall army was just a lot like our Army was like at that time. You’d go to Dong Tam – the 9th Division in Dong Tam – guys with hair down to their shoulders, smoking joints, walking right down the middle of the base camp army. Just an interesting world. Hard to believe.
We were so isolated. There were only 60 of us in My-Tho and 40 of us were on patrol; 20 would be in port. If you drank, you didn’t drink eight hours before you went on patrol. If you drank before you went on patrol, or while you were on patrol and someone caught you, you’d be gone. We had that option of getting rid of you immediately. We’d send you to Saigon and get someone else. Because it wasn’t a game down there. You just couldn’t take a chance of someone, with four people on a crew, not being able to do their job. You just couldn’t afford to do it.
I felt badly for the Vietnamese people and I felt badly for the Vietnamese Army too. It was a very, very different situation. Almost like a no-win situation there. I think we might have done that, too, with our restrictions on who we shot, who we couldn’t shoot, where we shot and where we couldn’t shoot. Every time it was a holiday we had to, basically, do a cease-fire and at nighttime you’d watch them just walking across the banks with weapons on their shoulders – the North Vietnamese – and you couldn’t take them under fire because of the so-called truce. It was bad. Put yourself in that situation. You get someone who comes in, say, from France, to help us fight the war over here and we’re going to do this and do that and say why don’t you do this and 10
you’ve been doing it for 15 years, and your spirit is kind of broken at that point, so what do you do?
Pumphrey: What would you say your overall morale was over there and the men you were in charge of? You always hear the stories about soldiers in Vietnam were hated where they were and are mad at the politics and stuff like that.
Yusi: For me – I can’t basically tell about the other ones – we knew very little about what the politics were at the time. You’re so engrossed in what you’re doing. When you’re making 18-hour patrols, you go two days, 18 hours, and then you have 12 hours and you go two night patrols like that, you don’t stop that until you get your R&R in the 10th month – what you hear and what you see and how you saw it are very different. As far as morale goes, I think the morale is based upon how your unit is. We had a drinking hole there that we’d be together all the time and stuff like that. I think our morale was pretty good, because we were all volunteers and we knew that we volunteered to be there and I think we were all very idealistic in the sense that we thought we were going to make an impact there. Morale was bad during TET, not in the sense of what was going on around you but just the physical demands of being out there so long on the rivers and not knowing when you got back, if anything was going to be left of your base camp or finding out from day to day, where am I going to get fuel, where am I going to get ammo? We used to stop tugboats coming down the river – Army tugboats – and commandeer 50-caliber rounds off of them and fill up diesel fuel so we could operate on the rivers. I didn’t realize what was going on until I went back to San Francisco and saw the riots back there at San Francisco State, when Samuel Ichiye Hayakawa was president. Went to Newport. I didn’t really see very much of it because Newport was a Navy town in Rhode Island, and it wasn’t until after, when we started basically finding out about targets of the day with McNamara – different things like that – and then we did leave there and you look and say, “What did we really accomplish the time we were there, or what did we accomplish the entire time the United States was there?” When you looked at it, we really didn’t do anything and I think that was the frustrating thing. I can see how people were 11
upset, I really could. Truthfully, would I do it again? Yeah, I’d do it again. Would I be a lot more open-eyed in what I was doing? I think, yeah, I think I’d take it for what it was worth in being there and trying to make some kind of impact, knowing though, the way it was being run, we could have never won it that way unless they gave us free hand to do something. Don’t be afraid to ask if you need anything elaborated on or anything.
Pumphrey: You mentioned SEAL operations. Could you elaborate more on that?
Yusi: We did everything with the SEALs from going after prisoners of war – our prisoners of war, mostly Army – who were being moved through the Delta area. We went after prisoners of war who were Vietnamese prisoners of war. They’d go in on Class A intelligence, which was first-hand knowledge. We’d do night insertions. We’d slide in with them, drop an anchor out in the water because when the tide would go down, we’d need something to pull ourselves out with it, and then we’d sit there and provide them, basically, with fire power while they went in and did their operation. There were times they were called in because of weapon caches that were there and we had a very active Chu hoi program which means, give yourself up, tell us where the weapons are and we’ll make you a rich man [we paid them off to get information and weapons]. These guys would come out and point out where the weapons were and we’d go in there with Mike Boats and fill the Mike Boats up with weapons. [Mike Boat was a World War II amphibious landing craft which could be used to load the contraband weapons on-board.]
One time we – it seems stupid – our operation was an interdiction of a Viet Cong wedding, because it was two powerful groups and we must have captured 40-some people who were all high-ranking Viet Cong at the time, plus the bride and the groom, too, so that was kind of interesting. You could always tell when something was going on in the village or in an area because you could see people coming out. When they had pots and pans in their sampans, that told us something, because those were their most valuable utensils and if they’re pulling out of their house, something’s going on up there and we’d find out what was going on. In fact, 12
sometimes we’d have people come on board and no identification cards, and we’d bring them on board and find out they did have it – they just wanted to tell us that so-and-so’s up there tonight so the SEALs would go in there on that and get their hits and so on.
The SEALs were very professional. I think the East Coast SEALs were a lot more professional than the West Coast SEALs only because of the amount of time I spent with them, but also they had fewer accidents than the West Coast SEALs. For some reason, we had some really bad accidents with the West Coast SEALs – the weapon firing, going automatic one night on board the boat, killing a couple of people, because a sear [the pivotal piece that holds the hammer at full or half cock in the firing mechanism] dropped out of the gun and it just started firing. Drownings. They carry so many weapons and when they ease off from the boat, one of them dropped into an artillery hole that was in the water, you know – underneath the water – and we never did find him. Another night they actually called fire on each other and they were both firing at each other because they got disoriented in the dark.
Al Quist, Pete Peterson – Al Quist was an Ivy League graduate. Pete Peterson was another smart guy. It seems like all the SEAL officers were all Ivy League or very intelligent people, which was kind of interesting. Very, very professional. They called them a cross between a Harvard professor and an assassin, and that’s what they were, but they were good. It was a good experience for us. I enjoyed working with them.
The worst group I worked with was the Long Range Recon Patrol Army. Our SEAL officers weren’t on board. They were ashore with their guys. Twelve man teams – Alpha, Bravo – split them up – either lieutenant or a warrant officer in charge of the B-Team and then a lieutenant or tank commander in charge of the Alpha-Team. Army LRRPs [Long Range Reconnaissance Patrol] sergeant going ashore – give them so many weeks training and that was it. The officer would stay on our boat and wouldn’t go ashore. We would watch them at night and we’d be looking through the night observation devices and they’d be right on the coastline or right on the 13
edge of the jungle giving us false readings where they were, because they wouldn’t tell us where they were moving through. They’re out there, smoking away, and things like that. So, different levels of training. You couldn’t fault them, but it was just a major difference between the way they operated and their effectiveness.
SEALs were integral in a lot of ways for us. I think the frustrating thing with working with the SEALs was when we’d go after prisoners and we were always one step behind. We’d find the base came, we’d find the fires, we’d find stuff they’d worn, but we were always one step behind, trying to get our people back. And I think that drove everyone a lot harder, trying to get American prisoners back and even the Vietnamese prisoners. It was a very interesting group.
Pumphrey: You also mentioned getting supplies from Army tugboats. Why were the logistics so bad? Was it just because of your range?
Yusi: When our base camp was overrun, everything was gone. We found out that the North Vietnamese took some of the ammo, but they couldn’t take our 50-caliber because they used 51-caliber. We used .223 or M-16 ammo and they had AK-47 ammo. They really didn’t take that much, except we just couldn’t get back into it to get it and it took several days to do it. They had no way of getting our supplies down here. Our supplies would always come upriver by barge or something and we’d offload it there. So the only alternative was these tugboats going in and out of Dong Tam where the 9th Division was and we would, basically, pull alongside and say, “I need 6,000 rounds of this, I need this, I need that,” and after they started taking hits, they found out we were the only protection they had and they were more than willing to give us anything we wanted. We went for 13 or 14 days without a shower, without a change of clothes, without anything and our clothes started to fall off. We joked about it, but if you pulled on them, they’d just shred off you. They were just that bad from all the salt and stuff. 14
We never had any problems, but TET presented problems for everyone. Advisers who thought they were entrenched for the duration of the war and who never had a problem were overrun. Escape to the jungle was the only way to survive. Some we found; some we never found. It was a completely different situation.
Pumphrey: What are your best and worst memories from being there?
Yusi: The best – some of the things I have better memories of, basically. When things went well, we never had casualties going in. The worst memories are when you order something to happen and the boats take action on it and you had people killed and then you just question yourself all your life: what if. What if I’d done this, what if I’d done that – would it have made a difference? Writing a letter to a woman – Ralph Green, who was my first class signalman who was killed in September 1968, he had five or six kids – writing a letter to her. We got into it and I had just went to pick up the radio and the rounds hit the armor plating and decapitated him and basically we were all wounded from his fragments – bone fragments. Should we have been where we were? I don’t know. I think maybe if I had waited a while it wouldn’t have happened; if I had waited I’d never have found out that the Viet Cong were where they were supposed to be. It’s the “what if’s.” I think anything you do with your life – it’s always a “what if” situation. That was one of the worst memories.
Like I said, it didn’t happen every day. We all had different memories and if you talk to the guys there and one says, “Oh, you remember when Wood did this,” and I say, “No, I don’t.”
“Well, you were there.”
“Yeah, I think I was, but…” 15
It’s kind of interesting what you remember and what you don’t remember. I think, for us, that stayed in the military, a lot of these actions were superseded or the memories are superseded by the things that we did, where the other ones who went in for two or three years and got out, they always remember what went on in that specific time, more so than some of the memories I have of that specific time.
And I delivered a baby, too. We have pictures of that. We were supporting a Vietnamese outpost one night, all night long, and we brought out the wounded the next morning. It’s typical for the families to go with the wounded, because the only care they would get was at the hospital and the woman started having contractions and we realized she was pregnant, so we delivered a baby. A midwife was there on the gunboat and that was pretty memorable. It was kind of neat and kind of a real break in the whole thing – just a nice memory.
Pumphrey: So you left Vietnam in ’68?
Yusi: ’69.
Pumphrey: What rank were you then?
Yusi: I was a lieutenant. I made lieutenant in two years because of the situation we were in. I went from lieutenant junior grade to lieutenant and made it in October of ’68 and because of the situation, you know, you got promoted very quickly over there. I went to Officer Candidate School from there. Was an instructor and then I was picked up for Department Head School.
In the process I was married, in that period of time – 1970 – and then went to Goldsboro DDG-20 where I was as an engineering officer out of Hawaii. From there, went back to Naval War College as a staff student – it was a junior course, they called it. It was an interesting time because our POWs were coming back from Vietnam and a lot of them were in our class and we had a couple 16
of closed-door sessions with them about the torture, about things like Jane Fonda. Every time she came, the beatings increased, the torture increased and things like that. I think a lot of it we started to learn about what they really went through and just how bad it was.
And then, from there, I went out to be a flag secretary for Admiral Woods at CCDF – Commander Cruiser and Destroyer Forces – and after I left him, I went to Admiral Rogerson as a flag secretary, like an admin officer for him when he was the Commander of Amphibious Group, Eastern Pacific. We had all the amphibious units, plus we had the SEAL team with all the special OPs teams at that time. From there, went to the destroyer escort W.S. Sims where I was executive officer. From there to executive officer of the recruiting district at Jacksonville, and became CO over recruiting at Miami.
Pumphrey: What was it like working for the admiral – that closely with him? You always heard about people in high places, wanting to hear nothing but, “yes” from their subordinates.
Yusi: They’re driven. They had to produce. The admirals had greater accountability than the lower ranking officers. They were told to have so many ships ready for deployment and on a certain date, no if, ands or buts. It was not an easy job, meaning the admirals could not just sit back and let things happen. They had to command. What kind of readiness are they going to be in? What’s their local readiness? What kind of crew? Strength level – what’s that going to be? So the whole thing was to make sure those destroyer group commanders and squadron commanders, when they took ships out to WESPAC [Western Pacific Theater of Operations], that those ships were ready to fight. And it involved maintenance, it involved manning, it involved everything imaginable – training. Before you left, you went through refresher training – ref-tra we called it. And when they left they had to be battle ready. No ifs, ands or buts about it. These admirals answered to a four-star who was the – CINCPACFLT [Commander-in-Chief, Pacific Fleet]. At the time, it was Admiral – Oh, God, who’s the senator – McCain – John McCain’s father was CINCPAC at the time. A little feisty guy, smoked a cigar. He got ships over there from our 17
West Coast to Hawaii and if they weren’t ready to go, all hell broke loose, so these guys were driven just like everyone else. It wasn’t that they had a free hand. Their orders were very – what can I say – definitive in the sense of what they had to do. You know, the bottom line is, we had a lot of COs who would say, “We’re ready,” but if you’d go down there to do a material inspection and say, “Why is this generator down?” and, “Why is this weapons system down?” Well, I thought we could fix it, you know, and they were just scared to death of reporting casualties, you know – material casualties – and stuff like that and that created a lot of problems for us, a lot of problems.
Admiral Woods, he was really a destroyer guy. He commanded a cruiser, the Providence, over there, and had been around a long time. It was neat to listen to him. Admiral Rogerson – laid-back, kind of California person, had had a heart attack at one time, but just one of the nicest persons in the world to work for. I loved to work for him. When we lost our material officer, for awhile I wound up being the material officer, and got ships ready for deployment. In fact I had a screw shipped in from the East Coast to the West Coast – one of the ships lost their screw. Amazing, because the thing was like 23 feet in diameter. Things like that. The admirals were good. They would basically give you just as much freedom as you needed to make sure the mission succeeded and I enjoyed it. We were very good friends with Admiral Rogerson. We used to go down to his house at night. He was on Sunset Beach in California. I used to sit there, looking at this water, saying, “Jeez, I wish this was my house.” I liked him a lot. I worked for another admiral when I was at the recruiting office. He was another hard-charger.
My only bad experience with anything at all was the Pentagon. I went there with 22 years in the service. I was an O-6 when I got there. My first two days in the Pentagon was trying to figure out where I worked and what I was supposed to do and then, the other thing – the rest of the time I spent there, was basically who does what to whom. You shouldn’t go there after 22 years. You should have a couple of tours there to get you used to it. I did not like it at all, only because I’m not very much of a politician. I didn’t understand how things worked and I think that was very 18
difficult for me. I spent about 18 months there and Admiral Metcalf called me in one day and he says, “Are you enjoying it here?”
And I said, “No, sir.”
He started laughing and he said, “I’ve got a job for you. We have 26% attrition rate at Great Lakes Service School. Can you fix it?”
And I said, “I’ll try.” So I got sent to Great Lakes.
Pumphrey: What year was that?
Yusi: It was 1987. I went out there and had a great time. Some of the best people in the world out there. Had 2,200 or 2,500 instructors, all of them top-notch. We went from 26% attrition down to 6% with higher passing grades. We found some little civilian there whose name was Carl Ross who was an educational specialist and we just changed a few things the way we did it and made all the difference in the world.
Pumphrey: What, actually, did you change? Can you go a bit more in-depth?
Yusi: We added a few more directions on tests for the people. A few more guidelines on how to take this test – not necessarily giving them answers but, basically, explaining to them certain things. Give right-brain people left-brain people. Okay? We have a lot of people who are the left-brain who need a little more direction. We incorporated sort of like a pre-engineering course which was three weeks in length, that you could be there a week, depending on how quickly you got out of it. Refreshed them on their math, refreshed them on note taking, refreshed them on a lot of things. These kids went into service to get out of school, obviously. They are, supposedly, all high school graduates. Just did things like that to prepare them and it was geared, primarily, 19
toward minorities, but we found out we had a lot of non-minorities in that situation and just by giving them this course to improve their retention length it was just amazing. Took the chief petty officers and instructors and started having “stupid study” – we called it in the military – at night. We’d go in with them for an hour and they were assigned each night to go in there and they’d have a classroom and they’d come in, sit down and work with them. That was sort of like a duty station during the week. They all stood duty in various places, but we assigned them “stupid study” and got more involved with our kids and it made a hell of a difference. Sometimes there’d be 60 or 100 of them, whereas, the first night there are only two or three. It wasn’t that hard. It wasn’t that much of a rocket scientist type thing. It was common sense. Carl Ross, the civilian I worked with – I used to play racquetball with every day and still stay in touch with – he provided the impetus and background on what we could do and what we couldn’t do. They did the same thing at OCS when I was there. We had a lot of kids flunking navigation so, being a bachelor, I and a couple of others would come in at night and start out with four or five and the next thing we’ve got a classroom full and got them through with no problem at all. So we implemented a lot of things we did at OCS in 1970. That’s what we did up there and it worked out well.
Pumphrey: How long were you at Great Lakes?
Yusi: Two years. We were supposed to go back to command at sea – went to Washington, found out when you’re out of Washington, you’re “out of sight, out of mind.” I was supposed to get a major command. They were going to give me the Wisconsin – Battleship Wisconsin – but some senator’s aide got picked for that. I guess I should have stayed two more years – I’d have had a total of 26 years and it would have been more for my retirement, but I didn’t want to move again. I mean, I made a family decision. By 1987, I had kids in high school. We moved 14 times in 20 years of marriage – that’s a lot for the family, so I decided to get out. I would have gone back to sea and I wanted to go back to sea, but family again – to get the battleship, but it never happened. 20
Pumphrey: What was your job back in the Pentagon?
Yusi: I worked on submarines, underwater weapons sensors and underwater weapons, like torpedoes and stuff, plus SSN-21 Seawolf. I thought it was a typical job to do so I went for my briefing and they said, “Where are your dolphins?”
And I said, “I’m a surface line officer.”
“Well, what the hell are you doing, doing this?”
I said, “That’s what he told me to do, sir.”
So I was a surface line officer doing a submariner’s job and I had a great time with it. I did okay with it. I was being called around to do very basic stuff like that in the SSN-21 and the Mark-50 torpedo and doing all these things. In that regard, once I found out what I was supposed to be doing I did enjoy it, but I just couldn’t stand the atmosphere there. It’s not the military that has say-so in which way they steer you in the direction you want to go. You find out when you get to the Pentagon that you do what the civilian wants you to do. If it makes sense, then it’s probably no good for the civilian because he’s going to ensure that political promises are satisfied, whether it be jobs in the state, or jobs in a company or things like that. So there are a lot of things I found – I don’t have very many grey areas. It’s either black or white for me and I have a very difficult time with that sometimes. If anyone wants a perfect world, then I try to shoot for that perfect world and I think in the military, too, one of the reasons why I did get out, because I knew I’d never make Flag. If someone wanted to ask me a question, I’d tell them the answer and a lot of time it’s not what they want to hear.
[end of Tape 1, Side A; start of Tape 2, Side A] 21
Norm Paterrosi(?), a good friend of mine whose son died two years ago – he was the same way. He was given all the hard jobs in the military. He was given engineer on the aircraft carrier Kitty Hawk when it was a mess at the time and his predecessor went on to become a flight officer. Norm went in and fixed everything and Norm was the kind of guy – bottom line was if you asked him a question, be prepared, because he was going to tell you the proper response or basically what has to be done. He’s not going to lie to you; he’s not going to give you half-truths. This is the way it is and a lot of people don’t want to hear that. A lot of admirals, like Admiral Heckman, Admiral Woods – people like that – they thought that was a real value to have an officer like that. Admiral Calhoun, my last admiral up at Great Lakes, was the same way and I wasn’t afraid to say anything, but if he said, “This is the way we’re going to do it,” I’d always go 110% to do it. I think the biggest thing in your career is basically you have to live with yourself at night and you have to basically, you know, tell your feelings on certain things. If they want you to go ahead and do it they way they want to, then you support them 110%, but you can’t be a weather vane all your life, or a bobble-head or whatever you want to call it. You have to make decisions and you have to, basically, tell people the truth just to allow them to make proper decisions.
In 1989 I was asked to contribute to a book, a Naval Academy book, on leadership by Dr. Montrose who passed away in the last year. He came to all of us and said, “What are your views on leadership? Would you address this?” and stuff like that. It was kind of a real honor to do that, because he has me in the book and there are a lot of good things in there that apply, not only to being in the military, but also your everyday life and how you handle people and how you treat people and what you can expect from people when you treat them a certain way. I was never smart enough – there’s no leader out there who can do everything. You rely on the people you surround yourself with, just like the President does. I had officers on the W. S. Sims, a destroyer, who, when I was Executive Officer there – three of them were flight officers, my junior officers. They still stay in touch. On the Miller I had a bunch of young officers and we won the Battle E every year for battle efficiency. 22
Pumphrey: These are all destroyers?
Yusi: These are all destroyers. And it’s just the idea you empower and guide them and pull them in a little bit once in a while and make sure they understand what they’re doing and encourage them and you’ll be surprised the products they can put out for you. Battle E, Battle Efficiency, the Ney Award, given for food service excellence – we had the best afloat, dining facility in the Navy. There are all these things like that. It’s surprising what they can do and just what they are capable of doing if they are given the chance to do it. And that’s the way I was brought along. People always said, you know, they’d give you rein, they’d pull you in once in a while, and go ahead and do it. There’s many different ways to skin a cat and your way may be okay, but there are a lot of different ways to do it and to let these young officers do it that way. It was good.
Pumphrey: Could you just give an overview of your destroyer career – you touched on it earlier when you first went in and the other jobs you had later following your first destroyer.
Yusi: First destroyer was Lavalette (DD-795). I don’t know if I have a picture here or not. I guess not. I thought I had it somewhere. It was an older destroyer. Went from there to Vietnam, came back, had OCS shore duty, went to the Goldsboro – it had a 1,200 pound propulsion system. That’s the amount of pressure which hits your boiler fronts – how high it is – and that’s what they used to determine it. I went to the Goldsboro right after they had a boiler explosion where they lost three people and burned 16 very badly.
An interesting story – the CO was Gil Schmitt. I reported on board when they were coming out of the Tonkin Gulf and I wound up on board there and he said, “Who the hell are you?” He thought I was with the staff, because there was a staff guy that came on board with me.
I said, “I’m your new engineer.” 23
So we went up and talked and he’s smoking a cigarette and he knew that his cruise was basically over because of the explosion. He said, “Well, now you need to get this done” and stuff like that.
And I said, “Yes sir.”
And he said, “How many tours have you have as engineer?”
I said, “This is the first one” and his hand started shaking and he basically threw me off the ship.
He said, “I don’t want you here. You get the hell out of here.”
I went down and talked to the executive officer and I said, “You might as well give me my papers – I’m leaving.”
“Why?” he says.
“He threw me off.”
He went up there and talked to him. The next deployment we didn’t drop the load once. We met every commitment. We came out of the deployment better than what we did going in to the deployment. We’d go into Subic and instead of doing this and doing that – just minor things – we had an overhaul system set up where that whole ship was almost overhauled every time we’d pull into Subic Bay in the Philippines. Even if it was four days, I’d have compressors overhauled, pumps overhauled, everything. And it wasn’t because of me. It was because I had a great master chief petty officer and a couple of other ones. My wife came over to meet us in Hong Kong – she got to meet them all and it was a real family. It was really good. 24
From there, I went to War College and from War College went as executive officer of the W. S. Sims out of Jacksonville – that was another frigate – and then from there went to CO the U.S.S. Miller. We won a lot of stuff on the W.S. Sims with Tom Jones as commanding officer. He taught me a lot. But on the Miller we were, without a doubt – I don’t care what anyone said. Our engineers would go where other ships had asked for our engineers to go and help them. They would ask for our weapons people to come over and give them a hand with a problem. And these were ships that had more people than ours on board. We were a reduced manning ship because they were trying to experiment at the time, so instead of having 275 or 285 people I had 206 or something like that. But all the people we had were just outstanding. It was amazing.
Pumphrey: I’m not really Navy oriented…
Yusi: I would never have guessed that.
Pumphrey: As CO of a vessel, you are in charge of the whole thing? What are typical duties?
Yusi: You’re responsible – that’s a better word to use. No matter what it is, it’s just that anything that happens, it’s your responsibility. Being in charge, you have your department heads that you empower to be in charge of your division officers and your chief petty officers, so it goes right down the line. I guess the biggest thing is the accountability. Our motto on that ship – a friend of mine was XO long before me – Bob Warner – and he developed his ship with “Miller does it right” and that meant doing it right the first time. When we had a pre-inspection for helicopters, the inspectors had to come on board and check your landing, check all your safety and stuff like that and treated the pre-inspection, which is a precursor to the regular inspection, as a regular inspection. A lot of times they’d go through and say, “You don’t need the regular inspection.” And that’s the way the guys worked. We had a division officer who wrote a damage control book for us that we implemented and they found out about it and they implemented it in the fleet. 25
As far as that goes, there’s a lot of times when you just want to crawl up in the fetal position – you’re tired of making decisions, you’re tired of every stressful thing, you’re coming up in a fog at Newport and you can’t see the bow of the ship it’s so foggy. The harbor’s loaded with other ships coming down and your head’s stuck in the pathfinder radar and you just wish there was someone else to take the responsibility, but it doesn’t happen. You know, you’re the guy it hangs on. Any command, no matter what it is, or any situation, when they said, “But for the grace of God, go I,” that was very true in a lot of situations. There were better COs than me that were relieved because of an accident, because of a grounding, because of something that went wrong, and they did everything humanly possible to avoid it but, like I said, it’s just the luck of the draw sometimes. There’s no roadmap that you’re going to succeed or fail. You just rely on your own, because when you have 300 people, 520 people on a cruiser, it’s just so much that can be involved, so much that comes into play with whether you succeed or not.
Pumphrey: Do you want to comment on decorations?
Yusi: Yes. This star that we have over there – any time you see someone like that, that’s your command at sea or you’ve been in command at sea, if you wear it on the left side. On the right side, away from the medals, you know they currently have a command at that time. The one on the left is for command. That’s Surface Warfare. That designation means I’m a line officer. Legion of Merit. Bronze Star. Purple Heart. Navy Meritorious Service Medal. The Navy Commendation Medal. When you see the V’s on them – that’s all from combat – V for combat award and then your stars are for subsequent awards. Cross of Gallantry down here, and Republic of Vietnam Medal.
Pumphrey: Would you mind going into detail on how you got your Bronze Star and Purple Heart?
Yusi: The Bronze Star, I guess, was given as an end-of-tour award when I left Vietnam. This one here – Navy Commendation – I was supposed to be put in for a Silver Star. Because of politics 26
involved, they’re saying, I wound up with a Navy Commendation. We were under attack, our Hunterton County LST. I’d just come off patrol, climbed up the side – our boats were tied alongside – they put four boats on that side and four on this side and pull them along. We’d go out on them, you know, they’d do our maintenance and so on and they’d give us the mobility to go into certain areas that we couldn’t before, because there was no base camp. So we came under attack that night and what happened – one rocket round hit the pilot house, knocked everyone down there. I was right above it, looking out and having a cigarette when everything broke loose, so I went down, grabbed a kid who was wounded right underneath us there and he was obviously dying and there wasn’t anything I could do with that. Then I went down and ran across the deck and our gunners – we had gun turrets manned, but they weren’t firing because these kids had never come under fire before, so we basically got them to start shooting their 3-inch 50s. I got the 50-caliber machine gun going and got them manned and that’s what I got that for.
Another time – the other one – was when Green got killed and we got into a firefight there. That was about it. The Purple Heart was when I took a round – came through here, hit me in the hip, came across here and came out here; took one in the top of my foot and got hit in the roof of my mouth with shrapnel. How it missed my teeth I don’t know, but it kind of tells you what my mouth was doing at the time it happened. I didn’t realize it until I kept clearing my throat and it just caught me in the roof of the mouth and went into my sinus cavity. The stories get better with time. It’s very sensitive. You get there and you talk to these kids and stuff like that. You just can’t explain to them. You just don’t want your kids going through combat or anyone else going through combat.
Pumphrey: On a lighter note, I remember a story you told me one time where you fell off the back of the boat. 27
Yusi: We did not really have restroom facilities on our boat and we had to rely on the after-50 and that little transom back there – you can see where it is right here – and there was a 50-caliber gun there to hang on to when you went to the bathroom. So one night we’re going on patrol and I went back there. Every night we had check-off lists and the check-off lists were head-spacing (where the barrel comes into the breech block to allow the rounds to cycle) on the guns to make sure we had ammo on board and make sure we had fuel, make sure we had oil, make sure the routine maintenance checks were done, radio checks, radar checks and stuff like that. So in the middle of the night, I went back there and did a very slow patrol and proceeded to prepare myself to go to the bathroom and I reached up to grab the 50 barrel – I grabbed it and leaned back and off it came into my hand and into the water I went with a 50 caliber barrel. I let out one yell and went under, because the barrel wound up in my pants and I started to go down. The water was really warm, I remember that. It was like bathtub water and just gross. Luckily, my boat captain heard me going over and swung around and when I got back on board I was minus the 50 caliber barrel and minus my pants and skivvies. We were going up the river and our most urgent mission was to find me a pair of skivvies. It was funny after it happened, but I was really, really pissed off about the whole thing. Every time I see him, he always reminds me – that’s one thing they are doing quite well.
This kid here – Petty Officer Green – that’s the one with the five kids, the third one in. This on the Hunterton County LST and things like that. That’s my typical patrol. There are a lot of good stories and a lot of bad stories too. The day I left, the Goldsboro was in the Gulf of Tonkin. I was going back home and surprisingly, before I got to the Goldsboro there were three killed because of a boiler explosion and 16 burned up pretty badly from steam going in the lungs, etc. Right after I left the Goldsboro, she got hit by 155s off the coast. She was going in there for pilots and there were four killed and, like, 17 wounded at that time. So it seems like before I got there, there was a bad accident and there was one after I got there. There are memories like that and you remember the kids, who they were and stuff like that and the bad things and you wish you could have been there. It’s just like, for the longest period, I really didn’t want to leave Vietnam 28
because I didn’t really want to leave people behind. It was a hard thing to get adjusted to for a long time. You felt so goddamned obligated to them and you know your expertise and what you went through is going to save them. It didn’t work that way. It came along for a lot of these senior officers – it was the only war that they had.
Pumphrey: This is the leadership of the soldiers?
Yusi: Leadership or lack of. They were out there doing one thing. That’s my impression of the junior officers – get medals so they’d be promoted.
Pumphrey: This is U.S. forces?
Yusi: Yes. Admiral Bricker, Admiral Grey – who was Captain Grey at the time – I think he made admiral. But when he fired that M79 grenade launcher, if you put your thumb in the wrong position, it’ll come back and break your thumbnail. He put himself in for a Purple Heart for that; put himself in for a Silver Star for being in the middle of the damn river – half a mile from everyone – directing the fire fight. And the people who are actually in the fire fight area, getting hit – he puts them in for commendations and stuff like that. Stuff like that just made you sick.
You know, I got called up to the Green Board one time. I came in off patrol and the Navy said, “You’re going to Saigon.”
And I said, “Why?”
“Because you hit civilians.”
And I said, “Fine.” And I went up there and told them exactly what happened. Went up the canal – we knew there was a problem – we’re going by and here is this village we’re going to, and two 29
kids on the side of the bank with their ears covered. What did that tell you? And when hell broke loose, they were firing from behind the people and you’re not going to sit there and say, “Oh, they’re civilians, I’m not going to shoot.” Survival takes over and you just can’t take back what you’re going to do. If you’re going to get out of there alive, your body and your brain’s telling you, do everything you can to get out of there. Yes, civilians get hit, regrettably? Yeah. You wish something else would happen, but it just doesn’t happen that way. Taking a female under fire one time. Why? She had an AK-47, she was trying to get away, so what do you say – “The hell with it?” No – the next time she shoots she may hit someone. Things like that.
And these guys were just terrible, terrible leaders. It was everything for show. Sending our boats up a canal one time after they were told, “This is a bad area. Somebody’s going to get hurt.” And it winds up a patrol officer gets killed going up there – one of the lieutenants – and they were up there because the press was up in helicopters so they could see what actually happened. What the hell was the mission? There was no mission.
Zumwalt got over there – he listened. Admiral Zumwalt. He made a big difference in a lot of ways but, regrettably, I was leaving at the time. There were times, you know, you just free-fired guns – no fire zones – no such thing as a free-fire zone, no such thing as a no-fire zone because these people were out there in the middle of the night, fishing and stuff like that – women and children. You’re going to take them under fire because it’s a free-fire zone, or no-fire zone? You can see people walking across the rice paddies with weapons on their shoulders. You get very smart right away and start carrying extra ammo, take them under fire, and then when they ask for your position, give them a position two miles away. That’s how we operated. We operated in spite of what leaders had set us to do.
John Kerry. How the hell do you get three Purple Hearts without shedding any blood? He’s a good example. He played it to the hilt and that’s what bothers me. I guess I’m jealous because I 30
had no political aspirations and he had a plan when we went there. It just taints every damn thing he did – about the Purple Heart and everything else. It’s just bad.
Pumphrey: Is there anything else you’d like to comment on – on your career – that we may have overlooked somewhere?
Yusi: I think a career, military career, people don’t realize it – it’s the hardest thing in the world on a family. I looked at my kids – my oldest one and my daughter, my second oldest, and I never went to games. I never did anything with them. One of the reasons I got out was because my son was a senior and at least I got to go to some football games. My daughter – we had to leave her behind on her senior year because I wanted her to graduate at the school she started in at Mt. Carmel. And Greg’s the only one, when he was here, that I actually became what I thought was a father to him. I think what we’re doing right now in a lot of ways, with our military, really needs to be addressed as far as the Reserves and things like that. We just don’t have enough people to go around. I don’t know – someday the light’s going to come on, but I don’t think the draft will ever come back. It’s political suicide. No one in their right mind would do it. But I also think the volunteer force needs a real boost, you know. Go in the military? In all sincerity, I think everyone should go in, either for two years or whatever and if you don’t go in the military, you should go public service and find out what it’s like and experience some of the hardships and some of the joys that they have. I think it makes you a better person. That’s pretty much it.
Pumphrey: Thank you so much. I really appreciate it.
Yusi: Yes.