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COL. John Ripley Interview

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COL. John Ripley Interview 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 majors 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 Royal Marines – 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 Vietnam 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 United States 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 major 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 Colonel 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”.
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