Swift Boat Skipper: Stories from the Vietnam War
by Robert H. Bradley III
December 2024
338 pages

Swift Boat Skipper is a memoir written by Rob Bradley about his service as a junior officer in the U.S. Navy during the Vietnam War. His purpose is not only to give a personal account of his time in South Vietnam but also to counter what he calls the “despicable” depiction of U.S. sailors on Swift Boats and River Patrol Boats in the 1979 movie Apocalypse Now.

The book is based on hundreds of pages of letters he wrote to his parents and a diary he maintained during the war. And, in many ways, Swift Boat Skipper is not only a memoir but a history of those momentous times in the latter half of the 1960s and first half of the 1970s.

Bradley enlisted in 1966 shortly after graduating from Williams College in lieu of going to law school. After completing Officer Candidate School in Newport, Rhode Island, he was assigned to the USS Savage (DER-386), a destroyer escort radar picket ship whose home port was Pearl Harbor. On the Savage, he was deployed twice to the waters of South Vietnam as part of Operation Market Time, whose primary mission was to prevent the North Vietnamese from sending arms and supplies to the Viet Cong fighting on the Communist side in South Vietnam.

Bored with offshore duty in a large ship, Bradley volunteered for a dangerous job as skipper of a Swift Boat. He attended Swift Boat School in Coronado, San Diego, California, and was then deployed to Coastal Division 12 operating out of Da Nang, South Vietnam.

In his detailed coming-of-age story, we see a boy become a man, as he meets the challenges of leading men in a time of war. As a young naval officer, he quickly learns the vital importance of attention to detail, the lack of which can imperil one’s shipmates. He also describes the importance of accountability and taking responsibility for one’s actions and that of one’s subordinates. Bradley writes that a junior officer in the U.S. military in any branch of service carries more responsibility at a young age than most people can imagine.

Coastal Division 12 Swift Boats patrolled largely along the coast, but one of their key missions in 1969 was the perilous patrols in the Cua Dai River Basin. Many men were wounded, and a seasoned lieutenant was killed. Driving his boat upriver during the day and also at night was pretty much like being a target in a shooting gallery. The Viet Cong targeted the Swift Boats with recoilless rifles and AK-47 fire.

Additionally, the North Vietnamese Army brought sappers to the Cua Dai, who placed unexploded 250-pound and 500-pound bombs submerged in the river as command-detonated mines. Bradley describes in great detail an incident in which he stopped his PCF 24 around 15 feet from a submerged mine, which exploded and rained down water and sand on the men and “rocked the Swift crazily from side to side” but did no damage. Bradley calmly ordered the boat to back out of the narrow stretch of river under enemy fire. No one on board was killed or even injured.

Partway through Bradley’s tour of duty, the Vietnamization of the War began. Coastal Division 12’s primary mission changed from trying to win the war to training South Vietnamese officers and sailors to take over the Swift Boats. As he had endeavored to learn as much of the Vietnamese language as he could, he was given the task to oversee the training of these Vietnamese officers and men and ultimately the transition of the Division’s Swift Boats into the permanent command of the South Vietnamese Navy. This was a difficult and often discouraging task due to subtle cultural differences and the lack of motivation on the part of many trainees. American officers’ influence over the Vietnamese sailors was limited because they technically were not under American command.

In looking back at the Vietnam War, Bradley sees it as just one of two wars and many smaller conflicts in the Cold War against the global Communist juggernaut, which began in 1948 and ended with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. In his view, the soldiers and sailors who fought in Korea and Vietnam deserve the same recognition and accolades as the so-called “Greatest Generation” who fought in World War II, as their bravery and honor was the same.

Doug Vassos lives in Massachusetts.  He is a friend of the author of Swift Boat Skipper, Rob Bradley, who is chairman of New Boston Post.