John A. Adams ’71 Center for Military History and Strategic Analysis. Cold War Oral History Project Interview with Col. John Ripley by Cadet Shelby Sears, June 25, 2004

©Adams Center, Virginia Military Institute

About the interviewer:

Cadet Shelby Sears Cadet Shelby Sears (’05), from Louisville, Kentucky, is a Corporal in the

USMCR and in History at VMI. He desires a commission in the Marine Corps upon graduation.

Sears: Your service overall?

Ripley: Served as an infantry officer for 30 years commissioned service, five years active duty prior to that. Enlisted in 1957, commissioned in 1962. Graduate of the Naval Academy and retired in 1992.

Sears: At what point did you get your orders to be advisory?

Ripley: I was serving a tour with the British – this is in 1969 to 1971 – and on return from there I was due another overseas job. Actually at the end of 1970 the units began disappearing altogether from and the only way to get back to Vietnam was as an advisor. I wanted to go back to Vietnam. I didn’t want to go to Okinawa in a non-combat job, so I talked to my folks in Headquarters and they accommodated me and gave me a job in country.

Although we had no organized Marine Corps units when I got there, the Marine Advisory Unit definitely was and we certainly had combat related jobs. We didn’t have any command jobs.

None of the advisors were commanders but as a field advisor you were in a battalion with

Vietnamese marines and it was as close as it could be to what I had done before.

Sears: What training did you go through? 2

Ripley: In my case they tried to give everyone some degree of formal training. We had both a small course at Quantico exclusively for Marines and Navy doctors, people like that. Then the

Army had a course called The M.A.T.T.A. Course and I can’t remember what that stood for. It was more formal and a longer course. That was at Ft. Bragg. I didn’t have the benefit of either one because I was coming out of England and stopping off here in the and going straight in country. They couldn’t afford to delay me that long. Frankly, it didn’t make a whole lot of difference to me. When I got there the only benefit would have been better language skills, but

I quickly learned what I needed and everyone there spoke either French, which I was capable of speaking – by no means fluent – or English so it didn’t make a whole lot of difference. I’m glad I didn’t have to go to the school.

Sears: How much language did you know?

Ripley: None really. I mean I had remembered certain phrases from my period there as a rifle company commander, but that was grossly inadequate. That was nothing more than, “halt”, “get your hands up” and “get down on your face,” and things like that, but it took me a little while to pick up some of the more useful terms with my battalion.

Sears: How much language do you think you returned with?

Ripley: I actually had a good working knowledge, not necessarily of Vietnamese but a combination of French, English and so many of the people that I dealt most directly with – my radio operator, the battalion operations officer, the battalion commander, individual company commanders on occasion. We made ourselves known very easily and yes, I did use Vietnamese terms, but they would always accommodate me. They would generally want to speak with me in

English to improve their English, as opposed to me trying to learn Vietnamese.

3

Sears: When you first got there, what were your initial reactions to see these people that you would have to be with for a full year?

Ripley: I had seen Vietnamese Marines before. I had never really operated alongside a

Vietnamese Marine unit when I was there in my earlier tour as a rifle company commander, but I had seen them and I had also seen them in training, or Basic School. I was impressed. I was very impressed with their aggressiveness – all the qualities we look for in a leader, mostly aggressive, physical ability and all of that and they had it. They were very focused on taking the fight to the enemy, but I hadn’t seen any of the Vietnamese Marines themselves and so that was a little bit of a surprise. I say a little bit because the officers, as opposed to this Marine Corps – our Marine Corps – were on a radically different level, social level than their enlisted Marines.

Keeping in mind the fact that this is the Orient, they are very distinguished by classes and the enlisted were almost exclusively peasant class. There was no middle class whatsoever that we would identify as a middle class. The idea that one of them could become an officer was just so remote it wasn’t even a consideration and yet they were good, they were awfully good, but they didn’t have anything to compare with what we normally recognize as the way units should be, so I was, I guess I was a little surprised when I saw that. I didn’t know there was such a huge rift

(social and educational difference) between the officer and the enlisted marines and yet the respect between each was noticeable, commendable.

Sears: Sounds colonial.

Ripley: Very colonial, yeah. Very colonial, very, well almost a replica of what they had learned from the French, but because these guys were Marines and we had been with them at that point for what – maybe seven years or something, not quite that long – but they began to see the way we operated and they respected the way we operated and I could see changes in a far closer relationship between the leaders and the led. This vast separation, certainly in operations, did 4 not exist to the extent that it did in Army units. The leaders associated more directly with the

Marines.

Sears: Do you remember how they perceived you initially and how that changed?

Ripley: Well, they always – by the time I arrived they must have had a dozen prior advisors in the battalion, so they had a caution I would call it, a cautionary reluctance to simply accept you as knowing your stuff. Your reputation preceded you. You were represented to the battalion by really, the general staff would hear from our senior Marine advisor what kind of officer you were, what your accomplishments, whether you had the ability to help them and do the things they wanted. They paid enormous – too much – attention to rank there and the result of that was, no matter how good you were, rank put you in a certain class.

I was at the time – at the beginning I was a captain – I was a captain the whole time. I was selected for around Christmas of that year, but I wasn’t promoted until I left there. So, the mere fact that I was a captain almost established in their minds that I probably didn’t know as much as a major. Truth is I had more combat experience than almost anybody in the whole doggone unit. I’m talking about Americans. Considerably more than some of them and therefore they could see – after we operated days and weeks and months – they could see that I was very experienced and I was in a position to give them advice, to help them, to do things that would overall enhance their ability to operate and I could always get them close air support or direct fire.

I was able to get them helicopters and this, that and the other, so very quickly they saw, “hey this guy knows what he’s doing, he’s helpful, he certainly has the credentials we expect in our own leaders, and in a very short period of time”. I would say within a month, I was considered a very hot commodity. This was made even more so by the fact that before I arrived in my battalion, 3rd

Battalion, I had served initially as an assistant brigade advisor and while doing that, I was directly involved in a couple of operations that were very visible, and I sort of earned my spurs on those and they knew that I knew what to do in combat. 5

Then I would serve as a replacement advisor for a battalion that lost theirs – that was for about a month – and while I was on that operation, even that battalion – 5th Battalion – we went out on a pretty long operation out in the Khe Sanh and they could see my abilities on that particular thing, so I had already established a reputation by the time I transferred to my battalion and they knew and they were satisfied. They didn’t come up and tell me this, but they were clearly satisfied that they were getting somebody with requisite, if not considerable experience.

Sears: I read in the advisory that Miller did, that the Vietnamese commanders were very proud and they were often difficult – not demanding – but he found himself suggesting that they do things. Did you run into similar situations?

Ripley: Yeah. We had what amounted to a humorous method of doing this. We would – in my case, I would say to my counterpart, the battalion commander, “perhaps it would be a good idea if before we launch this company, we use preparatory fires over on this flank and give them a little bit more safety as they approach up this corridor”. Maybe it was in a jungle or maybe along a road or whatever, and they would sometimes be reluctant to do that because they just didn’t have

(Artillery) as available as we did, and every time they would ask for some kind of fire support, they would almost do it with some hesitation because they weren’t sure that the mission would be approved and they were also concerned that their boss, the brigade commander, would say, “wait a minute, this guy is using up too much artillery” or something like that. Some ridiculous thing, from our standpoint that was ridiculous, but it was a real consideration for them. They couldn’t be seen as disregarding the order of the fire support that they had and so by my suggesting it and getting him a plan, that would give him some reason to give me credit, which meant that if it went wrong he wouldn’t have to take the credit for it. What would happen anytime, I would suggest something like that, he wouldn’t give me a direct answer. Rarely would he say, “okay, that’s a good idea.” What he would normally do is nod his head, look at a map and we would never really make eye contact and he would just commiserate there for awhile and then 10 minutes later, or 6 perhaps longer he would call me over and say “just now I have good idea” and he would repeat the whole bloody thing back to me almost verbatim. He would just say “yeah, we do this – we do this because troops might have very good protection over here” and sure enough, they would go ahead and end up doing it. We did this on a regular basis and I can’t ever remember one instance when he didn’t say, “yeah, good idea – let’s do it.” I would never suggest anything that was really outrageous, but he was very committed to doing things and paid a lot of attention.

Sears: How often did you get back to Saigon or get liberty?

Ripley: Well, they had a rotation schedule and I guess I can’t remember exactly what it was. My battalion – I went from one battalion to the next. I mentioned I had to cover for a guy that was evacuated and I was at that battalion for, as I recall, a month – maybe longer – and so by the time

I had gotten to my battalion they hadn’t rotated; they were relatively fresh, so I didn't go back to

Saigon until – good heavens – half way through my tour. I only rotated back one time. Did that answer your question? Some guys were back there on a regular basis. Just luck of the draw, I guess. My battalion was only there once, so I got to see Saigon then.

Sears: I read Lawrence of Arabia, the Man and the Motive about Lawrence of Arabia and there is an interesting part of the book where he comes into Cairo in the robes of a sheik – a different uniform – and found himself at odds because he wasn’t Arab and he wasn’t English.

Was there a similar feeling for you at all?

Ripley: There is a bit of a dilemma there. As it turns out, because we were separated on a number of occasions, meaning because we were on a fire base and we were the only people there, I had an assistant, Jim Johnson – great officer – and we were the only two Americans in the whole area and we would generally stay together, which meant Jim had to be close to me and

I was close to the battalion commander, but that was okay. If he had to go back down to his

Bravo Command, he would do that. His counterpart was the battalion executive officer. 7

You raise a very interesting fact and that is: if there is not another American there, you get a little bit – you almost go native. I can’t say that I was lonely, because I had a radio and I would talk to my American advisors – generally, they were about five to seven miles away from me. We were out on some outpost and that is as the crow flies, but the actual idea that they could get out to where we were – they could have been 500 miles away for that matter, because once you left, once you got out to where you were going you were virtually out of the picture totally. There was no way anybody was going to come and see you and visit you. That’s not where we were. We were in a way, way, way inaccessible area. For example, we had Brigade Headquarters over at

Charlie 2 on the road and we were up at these Alpha positions – “Alpha 2, this is Charlie down here” – I was at Alpha 2 and Alpha 4 which are the four northern most bases here. Well, although you look at a map and you say that’s not too far away, it was like being in a different state, for heaven’s sake. The road – the only way you could get up that road was with an armored convoy and you had to rush up that road and generally fight your way up and fight your way back in some cases, so once you got to where you were going, you were isolated and the result of that was, you rapidly adapted to being on an outpost. It really wasn’t a big factor that you weren’t with these other Americans close by. It just – I’m speaking in a personal way – it never really bothered me that I wasn’t surrounded by a bunch of Americans. I was perfectly comfortable being with my battalion. As I mentioned, I had another assistant who worked there with me, and he and I got along well and it didn’t bother me at all. Now, when it came time for us to get our mail or to go back to the Headquarters – I’m talking about the brigade headquarters or even all the way back to the division headquarters – I was glad to be there, no question of that. It was very, very enjoyable to get back and have some normal food, although that was nothing more than C-rations, but it was a very pleasurable thing to be back amongst your friends and play a game of poker or something like that.

Sears: Do you find yourself defending your reputation of a Vietnamese Marine?

8

Ripley: On occasion you’d find this wasn’t a regular sort of thing, because there were just no other Americans there. We were in the far north, as you can see there. There were Vietnamese

Army units – the 3rd Division – which was a Vietnamese Army division, and they had Army advisors and we would rarely see these guys. They were always behind us somewhere. There were no other American units and if there were, that would have been an occasion where you would have to defend what the Marines were doing, saying or doing. Your Marines. We just didn’t have that situation, so to answer your question, no I never really recall saying to someone,

“my men are good and don’t say anything derogatory.” They had a great reputation.

The Vietnamese Marines had a magnificent reputation. They were part of the National Reserve.

Only two Units in the National Reserve – the Airborne and the Marines – and on many occasions throughout the whole war, they protected the Palace; they were the reaction force that was sent to protect most of their joint general staff, and one Battalion was not permitted in Saigon – the 4th

Battalion – because they are the ones who performed the coup on President Ngo Dinh Diem and they had to stay out at Vung Tau, which was over on the coast. We on the other hand were very close by and we were considered part of the National Reserve. I would simply summarize all that and say that Vietnamese Marines were good to us. I never really felt the need to be around

Americans, although I would on a regular basis, of course, but it was just never a factor for me. I was very comfortable doing what I was doing – they were good to me and they just made me feel welcome and couldn’t have been better.

Sears: Switching gears a little bit. How did was the adjustment to being an advisor with less control/no control over…

Ripley: That was difficult. Yeah, you would see things happening – I mean, you can’t avoid this.

You would be in a fire-fight, you would see things happening and your immediate reaction would be to do something – to do what your instincts told you to do based on, in my case, my previous experience there commanding a rifle company for a year and I just knew that this, or whatever, 9 should be done, and not to see somebody doing that would be tough for me. Now there were plenty of opportunities for me to say either to the battalion commander or directly to one of the company commanders, “you gotta get moving, you can’t stay here any longer, you gotta move – I mean, we’re being attacked. There’s enemy running around our left flank and you gotta get the hell over there.” And of course the battalion commander would either be standing right next to me saying the same thing, or he would be on the radio and I would say to this guy and then, when he got off the radio, I would tell him, “I just sent the 2nd Company further out. They have to move, we can’t wait any longer. The enemy is heading right at us.” They accepted that, too. I was careful not to do this in a deliberate way. I didn’t want the reputation of trying to command them, but I certainly couldn’t sit around and watch things happen and not participate to the extent that it was reasonable to participate. Couldn’t let bad things happen really. That was the real issue.

Sears: Did that assumption of command ever backfire?

Ripley: I never really would have said that I was assuming command. Now yes, I gave some very direct – I’ll call it emphasis to do something. I would never and I could never really order someone to do something. Take your platoon over there. Guard this end. I might put it in terms of, “this is what we’re going to have to do. We’re going to have to get a platoon over there and guard that entrance or that avenue of attack or we’re going down, and you just happen to have good company on that flank, so – guess what – you better get a platoon out there,” and if the

Battalion Commander weren’t standing right next to me, I would make sure he heard what I said.

But I was extremely careful. I believe we all were extremely careful never to assume that we knew more than they did or to remove from them the chain of command that they rightly should have had.

Sears: Did you spend most of your time in ICORPS?

10

Ripley: All of it.

Sears: All of your time?

Ripley: Well, when I got in-country they sent us down to the Delta for what they called a backseat school. Really what it was, was an opportunity to see how Army Air worked, which was a little bit different from the way we operate, and we became essentially a FO Airborne. That would have been about a week, but I immediately came back and then went straight north and spent my whole time there. I’d been as a company commander. I was the only one in my battalion that had been on every single firebase in the DMZ area. Every one of them. And I knew every single trail. I knew every single position. I knew everything. I knew it all, and so by default they knew this, and I would always end up telling them where we were going and what the dangers were of the particular location and what we better consider if we were fighting in that area there. I became the sort of the preliminary Intel on particular areas.

Sears: Was that frustrating to have been operating the same area and taking the same ground?

Ripley: I would have to tell you there were occasions. I remember one in particular: the case on a place called Bong Ko Ridge. I had been out there when I was a company commander five years prior to that and here we are assaulting a position – a hill - that my company had fought up in 1967. Here we are going up the same bloody hill and we pass the same fighting holes and in one or two locations there are the skeletal remains of the enemy from the previous trip up that hill, and I thought, “this is crazy.” I’ve done that. I did this five years ago and here I am back doing it again. So there was some frustration in the fact that we had lost good Marines the first time around and here we were doing the same doggone thing again, and in this case the Vietnamese

Marines, but it still appeared to be a heck of a waste.

Sears: You had been there before. Was it difficult coming back again, being fired at again? 11

Ripley: Actually, this is going to sound somewhat callous. I sought this duty; I really wanted it and I never really – being totally honest – I never really had a desire to do the advisory job. I wanted to be with a Marine rifle company and a Marine rifle battalion. There was no question of that. I was very keen to do that, but as you heard me say earlier, there were no more Units in- country, so by default, if I didn’t go to the advisory unit and become an advisor, I would not have been able to go to Vietnam. So I was happy to do it and once I arrived and once I saw the nature of my duties, I was particularly happy, because I was quite involved in operations, attacking the enemy, doing the things that I had done as a company commander. I was very happy about that.

It would be false to say that I didn’t miss being with Marines. I very much wanted to be with

Marines – U.S. Marines – but these guys were a very near equivalent. Just as aggressive, felt the same way about taking the fight to the enemy. It was almost a replica of the units I had seen.

Small in stature, not physically able to do what your average Marine could do, but very loyal, very dedicated and boy, they were good. They really knew what they were doing. Who are we to challenge how well they performed their duties, when they’d been doing this for much longer than we had, but they did. They did a great job.

Sears: Col. Ray mentioned that it was a small mercy for a commander or someone in a role to not have to take casualties of blonde haired, blue-eyed guys with family at home and said that was a small mercy for him. Was that a similar thing for you?

Ripley: The Vietnamese battalion commander?

Sears: No. He said at the end of the day all your casualties were Vietnamese and that was that you didn’t have to send letters home or…

Ripley: That was radically different. You’d get in a fight. It would be just as major a fight as it had been on your previous tour. Same intensity. Same preponderance of enemy and you go 12 through the whole thing and at the end of the day you were still operating; everything was okay.

You’d lost some damn good Marines, but yes, they weren’t Americans and you certainly didn’t have to write any condolence letters. Now I will quickly say that you felt doggone badly about some of the Marines you lost. It wasn’t as if you could depersonalize yourself and remove this feeling. You wouldn’t have come as close to them as you would American Marines in the same action, but you grieved the loss of these people. No question.

Sears: Col. Ray also mentioned that they are very fatalistic.

Ripley: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah they were. There was almost an even split, at least I was told this, in our battalion of Buddhists and Catholics. The Buddhists in particular – I don’t know if this is a part of their religion or ethnicity or something but they were quite fatalistic. Whatever happens, that happens. Now that is dangerous, because you tend to accept things that you shouldn’t. If you post a sentry and you have preconceived that this guy is going to die anyway, then you won’t do as much to protect this man and value the job that he is doing for you. Probably guarding an avenue of approach the enemy could easily use and you just don’t value that. So there is a lot of danger in that. You’ve gotta see people as equals and as capable of doing what your own

Marines would do and that raises the issue of, “well they can’t really do as much as your Marines do.” I would agree with that, but I would quickly say that it is predominantly equipment oriented and not physical oriented. They could do a heck of a lot that we could do and more. We moved through the jungle at a much faster clip than I remember going through as a company commander. And I had a magnificent company. They always knew where they were. We could read a map and great without much effort at all. Very good people by comparison to these

Vietnamese Marines.

Sears: Your major actions – of course there’s Dong Ha.

13

Ripley: I was involved when I was with the Vietnamese Marines. I have a total of 26 operations in my record book, which I believe is a record. I don’t think there are any other Marines that have that many operations. These are the ones for which they award a Battle Star and during that long period of time, we did just about everything one could imagine in the way of ground combat, in the way of all the sorts of things you expect of being in battle. We did soup-to-nuts. We did everything. Even things that I couldn’t do when I had a Marine Corps rifle company. For example, we had a hell of a lot of Army helicopters. We could do a combat assault using sometimes 30 helicopters. We could never do that in the Marine Corps. We just didn’t have that many helicopters. So I learned a lot from that aspect.

I did not lament in any way being there or the fact that I was again in some degree of harms way.

To me it was invigorating; it was what I wanted to do. It was the whole reason of being a Marine.

I know that probably sounds like a warmonger to most people but truth is you join the Marine

Corps to be a Marine. Marines do one thing extremely well and that is fight our country’s enemies and that is why I joined and I was getting to do it, so I was a happy camper. It was what

I wanted to do and I got a heck of a lot of operations while I was there. We were generally engaged with the enemy every week – not necessarily every day, but definitely every week we would have some sort of activity and the one difference than the U.S. Marines in that respect – with the use of helicopters we had far, far greater mobility to get places and to react to an enemy attack or something like that. The ones that we had with the Vietnamese Marines – yes, we had helicopters. I could get helicopters for certain things but these were planned operations. There was very little opportunity to get a bunch of helicopters instantaneously on a reaction to whatever the enemy had been doing. It just was different and so although my first tour I didn’t use a lot of helicopters – in fact very little for combat assault – we used the hell out of them for medevac and emergency re-supply, which was just about the only use of the helicopter for us, and it provided us a heck of a lot of action. When I was with the Vietnamese Marines, I’ve already mentioned I was operating in the same area I had operated in over and over and over on my first tour. All of that area and every day offered something new. Every day offered something that required your 14 attention. Certainly required your alertness for the obvious reasons of ground combat, but you never had a dull day. There was something happening in a threatening way almost a couple of times a day, it seemed like.

Sears: After Dong Ha and after the Easter Offensive, were you celebrated among the

Vietnamese Marines?

Ripley: Well they were a great help to me. (Just turn it down – I have to tell you a little about this.)

I was extremely well trained before I got there. I had gone to all of the top schools. I’ve been in

Ranger School for the Army and then to jump school and also scuba school and British Marine

Commando Course, and I really had a very in depth knowledge of special operations and in particular demolitions, and so none of them had even a modicum of training compared to what I had. I’m not sure any of them had any training at all. If they did, they sure didn’t come forward, so when I was able to successfully get to that bridge and destroy it, there was pandemonium.

These guys had thought that I had achieved some kind of miracle. Well, a lot of people called it that. It was not easy by any means and it was certainly not unprotected [the bridge] by the enemy. The enemy very badly wanted that bridge and to have gotten through it and to have done all that was a pretty major effort, but it was something that I knew would be possible if I was damn lucky. I knew I could do it. I knew I could drop that thing, but I wasn’t too sure about being able to get up under that thing, get all the explosives in place, get the detonator started, or the fuses started for the detonators or even better, work the electrical detonators in which I couldn’t find initially and get out of there. I just didn’t see how that was possible. In my heart-of-hearts, under absolute perfect circumstances, I would get the explosives up into the steel, but I didn’t know how in blazes if I was successful in doing that, I was ever going to get out of there. The enemy had just gone all over the north bank and could pretty much see what I was doing when I appeared on one end or the other. So I just looked and I gave up hope. I just thought, “Boy, this is not going to be as easy as it looks.” It was anything but and yet I was successful along with Maj. Smock, 15 who helped me tremendously. Had it not been for Smock, I never would have been able to do a lot of that.

So I guess the point here is the Vietnamese were simply unqualified for this job. They didn’t have engineers along with them, which Marine units always do. They didn’t have any of those and the mere fact that their advisor, who wasn’t even technically one of them, did have this kind of capability and did know how to drop a bridge. The fact that he could do that and help them – they became immensely congratulatory and happy about it. They were just like kids. I mean, they could see the tanks; they could see all the fire. In fact, they were firing back while I was under the bridge and sort of kept the enemy off my back and then when it finally blew, it just seemed so excruciatingly long before, it was a timed fuse detonator that blew it up – not the electric – and when it all happened these guys just became unglued. They just ran out, they were running in the streets, they were cheering, they were just having a fit and they all were extremely complimentary. I don’t really know all they were saying, but the one thing I do remember is they were cheering and shouting as I finally got back “[phrase in Vietnamese]” which is “Captain

Crazy.” They called me that and they were just so effusive and happy about it and should have been.

Things were pretty grim that morning. We thought we were going – we were told, we were given an order which was also quite memorable and I never had heard it before – and the order translated into English was “stand and die” and I thought “boy, that’s an order I’ve never seen before, stand and die.” In other words, you are going to stay here and you are not going to give up, which in my personal opinion was a very valid order. That’s what you’re there for. You are not going to lose and we didn’t.

I guess I’m kind of rambling here, but the good news is I brought a skill set there that was not available without me and it permitted me to do what everybody wanted to do in the effort of stopping the enemy. The mere fact that I knew all of this stuff, that I had been involved in 16 demolitions in three different schools and I simply knew what I was doing – that was a very big factor. I could never remember – I should say this and just get it on record – I could never ever remember anyone ever being upset with something I’d ask for or some of the recommendations that I would make to the battalion commander about what we ought to be doing – we’re not sending patrols out over here, and how come you have people goofing off over here and you don’t have patrol out. Simple questions, but there were people who didn’t do it. I enjoyed it.

Sears: In your opinion, Sir, what makes a good advisor?

Ripley: What makes a good advisor? Oh gosh. We’re training advisors now down at Quantico and I spoke to a class down there about a month ago. You could produce a laundry list of character traits, leadership traits and values, principles and say, “Okay – these are the things you have to be equipped with.” Well, these turn out to be the same things that we equip all of our leaders with and if they didn’t have them, they wouldn’t be leaders. Simple things, but you probably know every one of them. There are 14 leadership traits, and how many – ten principles

I believe, eight principles. All of these things are deeply installed in the average leader. In this case Vietnamese.

But all of the things, even if we didn’t join them and help them, they would have known this is important. We can’t leave this bridge here. We would like to keep on it, hold it until our forces arrive or whatever, but we cannot let this bridge go. We’ve got to find some way to protect it and then conversely I show up and the situation changes and the opposite is true. We have to drop this bridge. We can’t save the damn country unless we drop this bridge. After that happened the

Marines were wildly enthusiastic. They were extremely thankful to me. They knew that I had the skills to do this and they very, very much appreciated it being done – very much. They made it very clear to me, all be it in Vietnamese, but I think I understood what they were saying and it was just a magnificent experience to have that happen.

17

Sears: Sir, for Corp. Sears and a lieutenant of the future – what lessons are to be passed on?

Ripley: I tell you what I’m going to do. I’m going to give you a list. They are called, “Lessons

Learned.” I have given this lecture a hundred thousand times. I gave it down, oh gosh, 20 years ago at least, at Quantico to the Command Staff College – actually, everybody who was there at the time, they all filled the place and I went through the whole thing. They – days, weeks, or maybe even months later – sent me a list that they had put together in the school called,

“Lessons learned from this particular incident,” and I’ll give that to you. I’ll get that right now as a matter of fact. All of the traits, all of the principles, all of those things came to play in this. Things like decisiveness, which is the most critical in my opinion – most critical principle of all. You have got to make a decision. You cannot sit here and try to figure it out, because you never have what you need, you never have enough people, you never have time. You’ve got to make a decision.

Decisiveness was terribly important as you will see. I list that here.

These are the ones that this Unit – that the Command Staff College actually sent to me and they wrote this and these are the ones they consider valuable: the need to be prepared to deal with the unexpected. Mentally attuned and therefore flexible. Have a readiness mindset. The arrival at Dong Ha of multi divisions, hundreds of tanks, artillery, anti-air, SAMS, 57mm was an unrealistic consideration not even a week before the invasion. That Capt. Ripley and his Marines were able to deal with it at ______, one Battalion in itself was a miracle. The ability to fight and survive overwhelming odds. The requirement to remain aggressive and positive.

Here is one I really like: the wonderful lesson, perhaps the very best of all – paying attention.

Just listening to what people are training you for. I can give you a dozen examples of things that I didn’t really find all that interesting or important in my mind when I was at a particular school,

Basic School or someplace like that, and then 10 years later, boy-oh-boy, did I need it and it just was so critical at the time that the example that they used here is demolitions. Knowing exactly what to do, which is important in demolitions, doing the wrong thing – you’ll be gone, but they 18 made a whole point of talking about that, because somehow I had been in three different circumstances – Ranger School, Force Recon and the Royal Marine Commandos – where I served with their equivalent of Force Recon called SBS. All of those Units used demolitions and I just, I had an interest in it and I paid attention and if I hadn’t paid attention I would never have been able to pull off this operation. So that was a wonderful, wonderful lesson.

The value of fitness. I talk about this a lot. I just gave a lecture to the whole Basic School a week ago today. In fact right now and I talk about the fact that a Marine has to have a feeling about fitness that is almost the same feeling that you have about your religion. It’s nothing you wear on your sleeve, it’s nothing you walk into a bar and talk about, although we do talk about fitness and running and things like that, but it’s something you do because you gain so much internally from it. Physically, you gain from it that’s obvious, but you gain something way beyond the physical gain. It’s something that we do and we become so accustomed to it, that it’s a critical part of our whole persona. If you don’t get your run in today or if you don’t do something that equates to exercise, you feel like you’re cheating. That’s the way I feel. I feel like I’m cheating somebody or

I’m doing something ill begotten. I’m stealing or some doggone thing. My wife laughs at that.

She says, “You know you’re crazy.” But I would come home and say, “You know I had to go, or I did something,” or maybe I even ignored it but then I’d say, “I’ve got to get out of the house. I’ve got to go out and do a run,” and she would say “Why?” and I would say, “Because if I don’t I have this overwhelming feeling of guilt for not going out and PT’ing today.” I think every Marine has that understanding and if you didn’t have that understanding, you’d never be a good Marine. You just have a feeling that, “This is me, this is part of me – it’s a terribly important part of what I am and what I’m doing,” and like I tell the lieutenants at TBS, you know the Marine Corps doesn’t say to you, “We’re going to teach you how to do this and do that, fitness wise. That’s your responsibility.” You have to give to the Marine Corps a very fit body, because we’re going to use that body and we’re going to expect you to do all the things that you are supposed to do and it’s your responsibility to keep that body in prime condition. It’s not the Marine Corps’ responsibility. 19

That’s yours and if you’re not doing that, then you could easily be charged with dereliction of duty, because you are damaging government equipment. Same thing.

And then on the back here, as you can see, a lot of these apply to – exclusively to – the bridge.

Mental endurance, positive attitude – as I say, some of these involve only the bridge, but a lot of them you could apply to any situation, because the purpose of this group that I talked to was to say “How do the lessons of this particular incident apply to anything we are going to do in the future, in our own lives? How will that come across? What will it do for us?” So that’s the way they filtered through and came up with those “Lessons Learned” and, as I said, they produced that themselves and eventually it has made its way around the Marine Corps a thousand times. I have people sending that to me now – talking about it.

Sears: I think that will do it, sir.

Ripley: Well, I tell you what I can do. Maybe if you like – I don’t want to burden you with anything

– but I’ve got a couple of papers and what-not that people have written that might be of some use to you, and if they are – great. You can use them if you like.