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By Root 892 0

There were no cranes and few forklifts, leaving almost everything to be handled by muscle power. Ships carrying military cargoes, commercial cargoes, U.S. foreign aid, and food relief shipments competed for one of only ten berths. Once a vessel unloaded, its cargo often sat for days on the dock. Military recipients often did not know that they had freight coming. Commercial importers were accustomed to leaving their goods at the port as long as possible to put off the payment of customs duties. Cargo theft, much of it orchestrated by South Vietnamese generals, was so widespread that U.S. military police rode shotgun on the trucks taking cargo from the docks to military warehouses. Long port delays worsened the shortage of U.S.-flag ships that had forced the MSTS to activate the rustiest merchant vessels in the government-owned reserve fleet. “Military cargo requirement [sic] as of this date have been met only by accepting delivery of the cargo at dates later than desired,” the agency’s acting commander admitted in May 1965. Lacking warehouse space, army and air force commanders treated cargo ships as floating warehouses, making shipping problems worse. “Saigon just became a burying ground,” a high-ranking naval officer recalled. “Ships would move up the river and they would stay, and stay, and stay, not be offloaded. The Army would argue that the press of war was such that they couldn’t get the stuff ashore. Air Force didn’t bother to argue, the ship was there, period, we’ve got it and when we are ready we’ll let it go.”4

Confusing everything was the decision by the Joint Chiefs of Staff to run a “push” supply system. In contrast to a “pull” system, in which units in the field would request the supplies they needed, the push system required supply experts back in the United States to decide what to send. The Army Materiel Command shipped more than one million automatic resupply packets, providing equipment and spare parts based on assumptions about how much a normal unit in the field would require. Supply depots in California made similar judgments about needs for food, clothing, communications gear, and building supplies. The supply experts “had never had grease under their fingernails,” a top army general groused, and from a distance of thousands of miles they had no actual knowledge of the rapidly changing situation in the field. Nor were they familiar with Vietnam.5

In terms of getting supplies to the field as quickly as possible, the push system was a success. Spending by the Army Materiel Command, the agency that bought the army’s weaponry, soared from $7.4 billion in fiscal year 1965 to $14.3 billion the following year as ammunition, weapons, building materials, and vehicles were pumped into Vietnam. What finally arrived there, though, was always unexpected and often unneeded or unwanted. Food supplies flooded in, then were suddenly cut off when it became clear that there was far too much on hand. Conex boxes, the five-ton steel containers favored by the military, would arrive with mixed loads of weapons, boots, fatigues, and assorted odds and ends, leaving quartermasters without enough of any one item to outfit their units. Troops on the ground often ran short of provisions and essential supplies.6

A month before the Joint Chiefs had given final approval for the troop buildup, William Westmoreland, the U.S. military commander, and James S. Killen, head of the U.S. foreign aid mission, had agreed that the best way to keep Vietnam supplied was to expand the port at Da Nang, a small city 430 miles north of Saigon. The concept was that Da Nang could receive ships arriving directly from the United States, diverting traffic from Saigon. This plan could not be executed quickly; Da Nang had shallow water and no cargo-handling equipment, and the main landing ramps for LSTs were in the middle of a major street. In April 1965, Westmoreland recommended that the United States instead focus on developing Cam Ranh Bay, 300 miles south of Da Nang, as a “second major deep water port and logistics complex.” Defense secretary Robert