To the editor:

In his otherwise fine article on “Jack” Elliot (“Jack Elliot: Remembering a ‘Swift Boater from Thomaston, Maine, WWF August 2008) Harry Gratwick notes that LCDR Elliot served on PBRs but he errs in calling them Swift Boats. That term-which Senator John Kerry, a former Swift Boat officer, unwittingly helped to popularize-was applied, informally and affectionately, only to the so-called PCF (“Patrol Craft, Fast”), the navy’s coastal patrol craft. Though they operated together from time to time, PBRs and PCFs were two very different animals.

In the mid-1960s, the U.S. Navy introduced two classes of small craft specifically for use in South Vietnam. The PBR (officially, “Patrol Boat, River”) was a heavily armed, shallow-draft, fiberglass-hulled, cabinless craft designed to operate inland, in narrow canals and rivers.

With a powerful water-jet drive, which would not foul in the muddy tropical shallows like screws and rudders, the highly maneuverable PBRs could turn on a dime at full bore. Operating in large groups or in a “section” of two boats headed by an officer in one boat and a senior enlisted in the other, PBRs did, indeed, go in harm’s way, and many were lost, along with many brave crewmen.

Aluminum-hulled “Swift Boats” (PCFs), on the other hand-104 were built for the navy by Sewart Seacraft of Louisiana, using an existing design for an offshore oil rig service craft-were longer (at 50 feet, 1.5 inches) than PBRs, deeper of draft (at 4-plus feet, fully loaded), and designed for overnight coastal patrol, with bunks and a small cabin. With two large propellers and rudders and powered by two honking General Motors (“Jimmy”) 430-hp diesels, the “Swifts” could plane at 32 knots under light load (low fuel and ammunition), the apex of the rooster tail meeting nearly a full boat length astern. Like PBRs, Swift Boats were also heavily armed, but generally worked alone in a coastal patrol “box” about 10 miles by 20, with one junior officer (an “officer-in-charge,” or OINC) and a crew of five enlisted men-and often a South Vietnamese naval officer/interpreter.

Operating from five coastal bases under Commander, Task Force (CTF) 115, Swift Boats conducted around-the-clock surveillance as part of “Operation Market Time,” boarding and searching every floating thing in their patrol areas. We pulled up floorboards and generally irritated the (usually innocent) native fishermen, many of whose ungainly little craft, with big eyes painted at the bows, doubled as their homes. If a boat failed to stop (a rare occurrence), he was warned three times and then fired on. By mid-1968, assisted by aircraft, Coast Guard cutters farther offshore, and the PCFs’ excellent, high-resolution Decca radars, the “Swift Armada” had all
but pinched off Vietcong infiltration by sea. By early 1969, PCFs, though built for deeper waters, were penetrating the crazy-quilt maze of Mekong Delta canals and rivers, and several Swifts were lost. At least one was stranded on a river sandbar, a sitting duck for Vietcong crossfire and B-40 rockets. I knew the OINC.

A moot point, perhaps. The distinction may seem trifling, but not to those who served in the “brown water navy.” I think LCDR Elliot would agree.

 

A. E. Norton
CDR, USN (Ret.)
Former OINC, PCF-42, Cam Ranh Bay, South Vietnam

Isle au Haut, ME