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Category Two: Paddies, Plantations, and Primeval Swamps. No region represents
Category Two more ably than the Mekong Delta, where regular and irregular armed forces
battled from 1945 until 1975 to control its overflowing rice bowl and huge population. That
strategically crucial property, bounded by the Gulf of Thailand and the South China Sea,
spreads 1 6,000 square miles or so (40,000 square kilometers) southwest of Saigon, which
later became Ho Chi Minh City (map 22).
About one-third of those flatlands are unreclaimed jungles or marshes, such as the Plain
of Reeds, a sprawling prairie west of 14o Chi Minh City that is waterlogged during the wet
season but dry enough to burn when rain-bearing winter monsoons stop blowing. Many
vulnerable bridges and ferry sites mark Route 4, the only hard surface road to Ca Mau via
Can Tho and other agricultural centers. The best of the rest are mainly paths of convenience
rather than militarily useful lines of communication. Cross-country movement is laborious
for foot troops and, in many places, impossible for vehicles even during the dry season.
Wall-to-wall settlements and farmlands on scanty high land leave little room for airfields and
permanent helicopter pads. '~ The scarcity of suitable materials moreover makes construction
an expensive and time-consuming process. It took U.S. Army Engineers 6 months and
approximately $20 million to dredge and deposit 5,295 cubic yards (4,045 cubic meters) of
sand per acre over a 600-acre artificial island, erect buildings on site, and provide essential
amenities in 1967 for a brigade-sized Mobile Afloat Force near My Tho.~'2
Swamp-style riverine warfare, a specialized form of amphibious operations, became a fine
art in that watery environment dominated by more than 4,000 miles (6,400 kilometers) of
navigable rivers and streams. "Brown water" sailors emulated Commodore Daniel T.
Patterson, who established a U.S. precedent during the War of 1812 when his gunboats in
Mississippi River bayous briefly delayed British redcoats on their way to New Orleans. The
U.S. Army, Navy, and Marine Corps employed more advanced techniques and a "mosquito
fleet" of schooners, flat-bottom boats, bateaux, and canoes in the Everglades a few years later;
20th-century successors in Nicaraguan and Philippine wetlands produced additional
refinements. 93
U.S. riverine forces in the Mekong delta, who had superior technologies at their disposal,
devised innovative concepts, doctrines, tactics, organizations, weapons, equipment, and
modes of transportation. Their flotillas contained a motley assortment of "pocket battleships,"
amphibious landing craft, armored troop carriers, mine sweepers, air-cushion vehicles, patrol
boats, and rubber rafts, all well-adapted for warfare in shallow waters where tight turns,
islands, sand bars, swamp grass, fish traps, low bridges, mines, and enemy-installed obstacles
restricted maneuvers. Support forces afloat provided command, control, and integrating
communications, air-conditioned barrack ships replete with sick bays, surgery wards, and
water purification plants, plus supply, maintenance, repair, and salvage facilities. Web-
footed infantrymen fervently wished for man-portable bridges, individual water wings, and
similar amenities that were nonexistent or in short supply, but they benefited from flexible
tactics that creative thinkers concocted explicitly for close combat where stream banks were
slick as well as steep and adversaries concealed in dense vegetation could see and hear
assault troops well before they arrived. °~
Category Three: Tidewater Forests. Veterans of combat in tidal forests near Buna on
Papua New Guinea's Coral Sea coast recall towering trees that made it impossible to see the
sun during daylight hours or the stars at night. Creeks constituted tunnels through mangrove
RI~GIONAL PECULIARITIES 1 25