The Box - Marc Levinson [97]
Cam Ranh Bay was the largest natural harbor on the Vietnamese coast, but it was not an easy place to build a logistical complex. It had no infrastructure, and the shifting sands along the shore were hospitable neither to earthmoving equipment nor to standard construction techniques. Aside from the harbor, the location had one important feature: there was no South Vietnamese facility at the site. The dismal performance of the Vietnamese-run Saigon port preoccupied U.S. officials at the highest level, so much so that Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge personally discussed port problems with South Vietnamese premier Nguyen Cao Ky in July 1965. These efforts made little headway: control over the port was too lucrative for top South Vietnamese generals, who resisted U.S. proposals that a new port authority should take over. The port at Cam Ranh Bay would ease those problems by being entirely a U.S.-run operation, free of Vietnamese corruption and inefficiency. Some top U.S. policymakers even envisioned a model community surrounded by industrial parks and residential subdivisions instead of the usual bars and brothels. The fastest way to get the port up and running was to bring in a DeLong pier, a three-hundred-foot barge with holes through which pilings could be driven into the harbor floor; the barge could then be jacked up on the pilings to the desired height above the water. The navy located a DeLong pier in South Carolina, towed it through the Panama Canal and across the sea to Cam Ranh Bay, and anchored navy ships in the harbor to provide temporary electrical power—and the port was in operation. By December, merchant ships were arriving directly from the United States, and more DeLong piers were under construction.8
Yet the supply problems kept growing worse. Every month, 17,000 additional U.S. troops were landing in Vietnam. Each 830- man infantry battalion hit the beach with 451 tons of supplies and equipment, each mechanized battalion 1,119 tons. Feeding, clothing, and arming the troops after arrival was using every ship the MSTS could lay hands on. By Thanksgiving 1965, 45 ships were being worked in Vietnamese ports—and 75 more, loaded with food, weapons, and ammunition, were holding off the coast or in the Philippines, where they were sent to avoid the higher pay to which merchant seamen were entitled while their ships were in Vietnamese waters. “Ten first class ports in CONUS [the continental United States] are shipping material to SVN [South Vietnam] as fast as they can—we have four second-class ports to receive it,” the head of the military’s trucking branch complained. When the defense secretary and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff visited Vietnam in November 1965, they got an earful about logistical problems. “Our ports are jammed with ships and cargo,” the head of the First Logistical Command told them. Life magazine ran photos of Saigon port congestion in December, and a visiting congressman advised Westmoreland to place more emphasis on the ports. The logistical mess in Vietnam was starting to become a political embarrassment at home.9
Washington demanded solutions. Under heavy pressure, the South Vietnamese government agreed in late 1965 that the United States could build a new deepwater port, appropriately called Newport, in Saigon, so it could move military freight away from the downtown docks. The Pentagon simplified the supply chain by overruling navy objections and making the U.S. Army responsible for supplying all allied forces in Vietnam, including the famously independent Marine Corps. And, on orders directly from the secretary