The rubber raft tactic

Another story from my Navy days that is still mostly true.

“We got a message from Saigon to use ship’s boats for boarding junks that have fish nets out,” the captain said.

“We don’t have boats,” the executive officer pointed out. “All we’ve got are rubber life rafts.”

“Okay, we’ll use the rubber rafts.”

Our minesweeper’s job in Vietnam was to board and search local coastal traffic, mostly fishing junks, to block North Vietnamese arms shipments and Viet Cong tax collectors. We did this by bringing each junk alongside the ship so that our boarding party could hop aboard to search for weapons and bad guys. But if the junk was trailing hundreds of yards of nylon fish nets, that was a problem because the nets could get tangled in our ship’s screws. So using ships’ boats was a good idea. If, that is, we actually had boats.

We inflated the rafts and organized boarding parties. Each raft carried an officer, a petty officer and two paddlers. We practiced deploying the rafts and paddling around the ship. My guys weren’t good at paddling and our raft kept going in circles.

A couple of days later we got a chance to try out our new boarding routine. At sunset, we spotted a fishing junk a few hundred yards away with the telltale floats of streaming fish nets. We stopped the ship, put a raft in the water and the boarding party clambered into it. Happily, it was not my team’s turn to board.

It did not look much like a military operation. Our shipboard uniform in the tropics was cutoff shorts, t-shirts, ballcaps and sandals. The Navy relaxed its grooming standards in Vietnam and most of our guys wore beards. So our armed boarding party looked like well-fed predecessors of today’s Somali pirates in an inflatable raft.

It was quiet as the boarding party paddled into the mist. The petty officer in the boarding party was an outspoken engineman with a sonorous voice and colorful vocabulary, and as the raft receded into the darkness the sound of his cursing grew fainter and eventually died out.

We waited anxiously on the deck as the ship rolled gently. The boarding party had no radio and would fire a flare pistol if they ran into trouble. After about 45 minutes we began to hear the engineman’s voice, faint at first and then an audible stream of profanity as the raft emerged from the darkness.

It had taken longer than anticipated to reach the junk because paddling the rubber raft was slow going. The Vietnamese fishermen had settled down for the night and were alarmed when our heavily armed thugs scrambled aboard their boat. An inspection quickly confirmed that this was a law-abiding fishing junk. The disappointed boarding party released the disgruntled fisherman and began the long paddle back to the ship.

We put the life rafts away and never spoke of this again.