the country. the problem was that it was a very difficult thing, to. and the way they did it was not the right way. now, you know, what the answer should have been still is a really clear to me. john kennedy have done in the u.s. military entirely? well, we can say yes to that and we had to ask what would have happened afterwards. what if he had done that? what is the marines had gone into cuba in april of 1961? it's hard to know how that would have played out. what we do know is what happened, and what happened was tragedy. thank you all very much for coming tonight. i really appreciate it. thank you. [applause] .. >> this is about an hour. >> the title of the event is "vietnam: an american war in asia." american and vietnamese perspectives. i'd like to call your attention to two things up here. these two canvass, as many of you probably are aware, a program started in 1995 here in charlottesville called the vietnam graffiti project. this is material found on a troop ship. the graffiti left on these birthing canvass was created by young american soldiers going to seat that many in 1966 and '67. it is a tribute to their service. we display them here because the virginia foundation for the humanities has been sported -- supportive of our effort, the vietnam graffiti project, and we thank them for that as well. we'd like to begin the session with general ira hunt who served with the ninth infantry division in the mekong delta, and his book is "the ninth infantry division in vietnam: unparalleled and unequal." general hunt? >> good afternoon, and thank you for coming. can you hear me well? >> yes. >> good. this book is a story of how the ninth division with a student management employing all sorts and intelligence coupled with aggressive, innovative tactics was able to achieve combat effectiveness. the book also shows lots of stories about the bravery and dedication of the ninth division soldiers. now, the war in vietnam, as far as the communists were concerned, was all about grabbing land and people. they needed that for two reasons. one, the cache it gave them in the united nations, but secondly, they were fighting a grer ril la war -- guerrilla war and needed land and people to support them. their primary focus was on the mekong delta. the vast alluvial plain was where the bread basket of vietnam and most of the people were. so that's where they were concentrating. in 1965 things were going poorly in the delta, and the government of vietnam asked the americans if they would send a major unit to go down there and help the security of the delta. that was approved. and mac v, that's the top echelon in vietnam, said there are two requirements for that outfit. one, they have to be located deep inside of viet cong territory and, two, they had to have a river operation. they found that the french were very successful when they were there with river operations. so in first of february, 1966, the ninth division was formed in kansas, the only american division activated to serve in vietnam. at the same time, the navy was told to come up with the ships necessary for river operations. and so then the ninth division arrived in vietnam on the first of february, '67, one year later. they were located in the delta. i show hear bearcat, if you could read it well, that's our headquarters 15 miles east of saigon. the camp being made was down on the river, dong tam, and that was where the river reinforcement was going to be located. we kept highway 4 open, the other at bearcat saving the installations there, and the marines had kenwa province, the home of the national liberation fund, and that was a hotbed for viet cong activities. about this time the north -- in june, the tango boats arrived. they were the navy ships, the assault craft. we called them river reinforcements. the reason for that was simple. viet cong always expected an attack by land, and they used the water for an escape route. they'd escape by water. now the riverring came in from the water, and they were program in booze led. they didn't know what to do. we're going to start our general offensive, and that will lead to a general uprising of the people. and that means they would no longer go at night, they would no longer have small units, they were going the attack in the daytime and with battalions. and the first phase of the general offensive, general uprising was tet. and they attacked all the cities in vietnam. the ninth division, the only unit south of saigon, had its work cut out for us because there was so many big cities in the delta. the third by -- brigade, the first brigade by land, the second brigade went by water. you go to throw them out. the second brigade threw out people from five or six major cities in the delta. at the end of a month, month and a half, the viet cong were eradicated from the villages and cities. results of tet were interesting. first, it was a big defeat for the viet cong. terrible defeat. yet you wouldn't know it from walter cronkite. second, there was absolutely no uprising. but, third, which is probably more important, that the viet cong infrastructure -- those embedded in the cities -- had to rise up when their battalions attacked, and they were eliminated. so now the government of vietnam controlled all the cities without question, and they wanted to move out in an oil bob sort of strategy in order to pacify the people. and that's what the war in vietnam was about, totally about pacifying the rural people. both sides were trying to do the same thing. i remember then many -- in may, middle of may 1968, the division artillery officer came rushing into our tactical operations center at 3 1:00 at night -- 11:00 at night and said our radar has picked up a huge attack on saigon by the viet cong. at daybreak they met at the wide bridge in saigon, and for eight days there was a battle in saigon that recalled the battle of saigon, the papers called it mini tet, the north vietnamese called it the second phase of their general uprising. but they were defeated. now at the end of may the division found itself in a pickle. we had 2500 casualties from tet and mini tet. we had two headquarters, one at dong tam and one at bearcat. and we also had all these guard duties. but in july of that year everything changed. dong tam was ready, this huge camp that they built out of alluvial sand. we then started to eliminate our overhead, and the fist thing we said -- first thing we said we'll put all these extra troops we thought were support troops back in their units. we were really disappointed to find these troops were infantrymen, and they had a debilitating foot problem. we called it immersion foot. they could not go back out into the paddies. we had to do something about that. you know, in the delta you couldn't take a break. you had to sit in the water. you couldn't have an operation, you had to walk in the water. so with the help of walter reed at the end of two months, we'd solved the problem. it was very simple. after 48 hours in the water, immersion foot went up asymmetrically. so we said you can't keep the troops out there more than 48 hours. one company had to always be trying out. but our organization didn't support that. we wanted pressure on the enemy, so we asked if we could go from a three company battalion to a four company battalion. that was approved. we went from 27 infantry companies to 39 infantry companies. so now we had instead of a thousand men in the field, we had 3,000 men, and we wanted to support them as best we can. we wanted to get more tiger scouts. who were these? these were the people, the viet cong that surrendered to the government. they went to an indoctrination camp. they were then graduated and said, please, find them a job. we were looking for them. they were great. they were loyal, they knew the language, they knew the viet cong tactics, booby traps, so we wanted one for a squad and one for a platoon. now that we had the men in the field, healthy men, we had to support them. two ways: you had to have good intelligence and good aviation assets. as far as intelligence go, there are two types. you have human, when which you get from humans, and you have sensors which you get from machines. our best machine intelligence we called the airborne intelligence protecter, we called them a people sniffer. you fly over and somebody down there, you get a reading that says viet cong's down there, you can jump on 'em because that was realtime. as far as the human goes, we had the med cap. what is a med cap? we sent our medical people out every day to treat these people. this was so well received, it was unbelievable. these were peasants. they'd never seen a doctor. and it was so well received, we said let's do it in the viet cong villages because, after all, we want to get them into the government. we said, we'll get a lot of intelligence there. we got no intelligence. and the reason for that was in the village there were only women. the men would come back at night, but they were not in the village. so we called and said we want some women tiger scouts. i made the call, they laughed. they said, they're crazy, what are you talking about? send us some. we put them on our i caps, now we had a lot of information. the next thing we had to do was get our aviation assets up, and the guy that did this was a mechanic. wonderful people, these mechanics. unbelievable. couldn't fight a war without them. we had operational readiness up to 80%, and now we're ready to go. so the first thing we looked at then was tactics. we'd been looking at tactics all along, of course. and the tactics mac v said you cannot attack a position unless you have an artillery prep ahead of time. we said this delta if you have an around artillery prep, the ey will know you're coming. we don't want one. so we didn't have one, but we always had artillery no matter what. never was anybody in a fire fight without artillery coverage. the second thing was mac very said you have to attack with ten choppers, ten hueys. a huey can carry seven men, you have to have 70 men. we thought that was too much, we said, no, we want five. if we found something, the other five would come. if we didn't find something, then the other five would go to the next target. if they didn't find anything, they'd go to the next target. we called that jitterbugging. by that way, we always found the enemy. our intelligence was good, but we could go to six or seven targets if necessary. we never had to go to more than two or three. now we had the area covered in daytime by our helicopters. viet cong did not move in the delta in the daytime but at night, oh, my gosh, it was constant moving. they had their positions. they had to stay -- they could not stay long. they had to move from position to position or we'd find them with our personnel people sniffer. that they had to get reinforcements of people, reinforcements of ammunition. they had to -- they couldn't talk on the radio, so they had to have runners. everybody was moving in the delta, therefore, we had to get new ambush techniques. we had many. one we called a checkerboard. we'd insert an infantry company at dusk, three platoons, three squads. they would predetermine a position for each squad. these squads would go out, these men of eight or ten men, and we had nine ambush sites. that would cover a square kilometer. that wasn't very much. we had to have more in the delta. the thing that changed the delta for us at night was our snipers. we want snipers. we went to the army unit at fort benning, we got 44 sniper rifles, the unit to come over and train our people. our fist class graduated in november, and the snipers went out. one sniper, two infantrymen. man, that changed the whole idea of the division. the rest of the soldiers saw these three guys can go out and have great results, we can do it too. so they weren't afraid of the night. they went out, night was just as easy for them as daytime. this is our number one sniper, sergeant wald on. he has two dces. this guy was phenomenal. he could hit a fly on your head at 500 yards, i'll guarantee it. it was absolutely wonderful. so now we had a small area covered at night, but we needed to cover a large area. we had to do it with aircraft. we came up with the idea of putting a night vision device on a helicopter. we have a soldier looking down, he sees somebody running on the waterways. he'd fire a tracer bullet, the attack helicopter would come in and shoot them up. we kept improving that and improving that, but the most interpreting one to -- interesting one to me was the night raid. a young captain came to me one day and said, colonel, if these vc come back to the village at night, why don't we go after them at night? so we decided we'd land two choppers in the middle of a village and have coverage with two attack helicopters and command and control. and the first operation we did that was in march '69 led by hudson, and it captured five vietnam, threw them on the helicopters, killed four. from that time on, the viet cong were not safe anywhere. and so this will show you in this slide -- i don't think you can read it too well, but we had squad platoon company operations. we had 50% more nighttime operations company, but we had 3,572 operations. only 1120 made a contact. ma means 2400 -- that means 2400 was a walk in the sun, no enemy. in this a nine month period we had 22,300 operations that never saw the enemy. 85.5 percent did not see the enemy. why do i bring that up? a lot of people say the reason the ninth had such great results is they put pressure on the troops to come up with something. we had great leaders. we hand picked our leaders. our company commanders, our battalion commanders and, third, we had a lot of enemy. the place was full of enemy. now, i've been talking about security, but security was purpose only. the end game in vietnam was pacification. that meant control. how do you measure control? mac v came up with an idea, they called it the hamlet evaluation survey. they went out -- you won't believe this -- they went out over month to 10,000 hamlets, graded them on 165 questions, put them in order, safest to not so safe. a and b were considered safe. you couldn't get in the village, you were v. so let's show our area. excuse me, this is the most important thing in my talk, and i almost forgot it. when general abrams came down in april '69, the cr division -- we're talking about the security aspect -- this is what he had to say. the performance has been magnificent, and i would say in the last three months it's an unparalleled and unequal performance, and that's the title of the book we have. this is our operations at delta, our four provinces. we had 1.7 million people. look to see at that time at the end of may, we had more viet cong than we had people under the government. you'll notice at the beginning of tet which is the top one to the end that, actually, they lost stroops. there was -- troops. there was no uprising. the viet cong lost people. the most important thing i want you to watch is the 662,000 contested people. this was what the tug-of-war was all about. these were the people we wanted to bring into the government of vietnam through security and through their work that they did with their rural redevelopment people. and so now when the ninth division left a year from there in july of 1969, we had brought 410,000 of these people into the government control, that we had almost completely pacified the delta in our area. how did we do it? first of all, we worked with the army. they were good soldiers. we went on operations with them, but most of all they gave us intelligence. they had the language. they knew what was going on. without their intelligence, it helped us. but also we built roads, we built schools, we took orphans for a walk. in a four month period with our med cap and i caps, we created 45 villages a day. 45 a day. we treated 344,000 vietnamese. the government was so happy with what we were doing, they gave the ninth division the civic action medal. that may not mean something, but up to that time no military unit had ever been given a civic action medal. of course, they gave us an award for our security forces. the cost of gallantry, they called it. without any question, they were introduced to access to the resources and improved security. the political social aspects of the pacification program could occur, and that mission was done. we said so, the south vietnamese said so, i want you to mow the north vietnamese said so. in 1973 the intelligence, the j2 had access to top secret papers that they got from north vietnam. you know, there were leaks. leaks from us, leaks from them, leaks all over vietnam. you never knew whether the other side knew what you were doing. this was quoting the north vietnamese. they said phases one and two of the general uprising was a debacle. they made a mistake, but what i want you to look at is the bottom line. >> that was our job, and that's what we did. i'd like them to quote one more guy, general westmoreland. here's what he had to say. >> and that concludes my presentation. [applause] >> thank you very much, general hunt. and i think everybody in the audience would like to thank you for your service. our next speaker is james zumwalt. his book is "bare feet; iron will," and it's a little bit of a different perspective on the vietnam war from the other side. jim? >> thank you. good afternoon. general, i want to thank you for a very illustrious career in the army. i salute you, sir. "bare feet, iron will "represents a journey. that journey culminate inside the writing of my book. but i think it's important to understand from where that journey began. every male member of my family served in the vietnam war. my father commanded the naval forces, my brother was a swift boat commander under his chain of command. i was the black sheep of the family, i joined the marine corps and served as a platoon and company commander that was part of a battalion landing team. all of us returned from that war unscathed, or so we thought. in 1983 my brother was diagnosed with lymphoma, and normally you either have hodge kins or non-hodgkin's lymphoma. he was one of half a dozen cases in the medical history that had both. he also had a son that was born with severe learning disabilities. he fit the profeel of many of our veterans -- profile of many of our veterans who were returning and suffering from agent orange exposure. the bit el ironny for my family was it was my father who had ordered the spreading of agent orange in vietnam. let me explain briefly why that was done. the navy was experiencing a 72% casualty rate. anybody who served one year in the brown water navy, a 72% chance of being killed or wounded. and the reason for that was they were traversing these narrow waterways with heavy vegetation on either bank, affording the enemy great concealment in which he could set up his ambushes, and the boat would be in the middle of an ambush before it could respond. with the introduction of agent orange and the exfoliation on the river banks, the casualty rate dropped from 72% to 6%. so from a military standpoint, it made a great deal of sense to use agent orange. probably tens of thousands of leaves were -- lives were saved and, unfortunately, we would learn later that thousands of lives would be lost because of it being carcinogenic. my brother died in 1988. when there's tragedy in your family, there's two ways you can take it. one is to convert that into positive energy and to do something constructive with your life. the other is to let the negative energy consume you. in my father's case, it was the former. he threw himself into the agent orange issue and desperately to win benefits for veterans who had been exposed. i, on the other hand, let the negative energy get ahold of me and became very negative about the war