[Vision2020] Taking the Delta

[Tom Hansen]

Courtesy of today's (November 11, 2011 - 11/11/11) Moscow-Pullman Daily News with thanks to Roger Falen

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Taking the Delta
By Brandon Macz, Daily News staff writer | Posted: Friday, November 11, 2011 12:00 am
Tom Anderson spent 20 years of his life with the Navy, and still has a deep affinity for boats, but after three tours in Vietnam during the '60s and '70s, that's one voyage he says he would never want to make again.
A Virginia native, Anderson, 73, now lives north of Moscow with his wife, Claire, whom he met in 1962 - more than three years after joining the Navy - while stationed in San Diego.
By the time his call to Vietnam came in 1965, Anderson had started a family, and had to leave his wife and two sons for the Gulf of Tonkin aboard a warship. There, he coordinated with military aircraft as they made their way across the water to where the battles were taking place on land, as well as making sure the returning aircraft were not of the unfriendly variety.
"We had to watch for pilots that got shot down," he added. "We picked up some of them."
When he returned to the United States, Anderson took a teaching position with the University of Idaho's ROTC program prior to his second deployment. While there was a strong movement against the Vietnam War across the country, Anderson said he got off easy in Moscow.
"We got a lot of cowboys in Idaho, and there weren't a lot of protests at the university," he said. "There were a few."
While his undergraduate work had been in math and science, the military insisted he get into political science to obtain his master's degree while teaching at the UI. After retiring from the Navy, he made his way back to Moscow, where he taught algebra for 15 years at the junior high.
"We didn't find a place we liked better than this one," said Anderson.
His time on shore ended in 1968, and Anderson's second, and most dangerous, tour in Vietnam began as commander of the River Division 531, a 30-year-old lieutenant in charge of 10 river patrol boats charged with cutting of the Vietcong's supply routes on the Mekong River.
The Mekong River Delta region in the southwest portion of Vietnam is full of little tributaries, and Anderson's division was the first to have the honor of patrolling them.
"These little boats could go into these little canals, unfortunately," he said, adding the waterways were patrolled 24/7. "The daytime wasn't so bad. They'd wave at you from the bank and grin at you with no teeth. And then at night they'd shoot at you. It was hard to know who was friend and who was foe. We had pretty itchy trigger fingers, especially at night."
The patrol boats were equipped with three 50-caliber machine guns and an M60 machine gun plus a grenade launcher.
"With four guys on that, that was a lot of firepower. As soon as we heard anything at night, we'd fire back with everything we had. Sometimes we got them and sometimes they got us."
Eventually, he said, they would use military intelligence to determine where the Vietcong would be crossing along the river and set up ambushes by leaving at dusk and setting up under overhanging foliage.
"We were a little more successful," he said. "We'd catch them."
All that heavy firepower would have life-long consequences for Anderson's hearing. He now wears a hearing aid. At the time, he said, the troops would laugh it off.
"We figured it would go away," he said. "It never does. It just gets worse."
Sailors were given extensive first aid training, said Anderson, because for a man injured in a battle on the river, the battle would first have to end and a clear area would need to be found for a helicopter to come in for a medical evacuation.
"If you got hit out there on the boat, you took care of your own," he said.
Anderson said half of the men under his command sustained injuries in varying degrees of severity - some died - and five of his 10 boats were destroyed.
"You just kept going," he said.
A major victory was stopping the Vietcong from taking the city of Tay Ninh, Anderson said, by blockading the river.
"They hit us, but they couldn't penetrate," he said.
Of the Vietnam War as whole, he said, "We won the Delta. We had that place pacified by 1972. But up north was a different story."
After a year patrolling the delta, Anderson returned home only to be sent back to Vietnam again in 1971, this time on a light cruiser as head of the ship's operations department that dealt with communications.
He then spent three years in Washington, D.C., as a liaison officer for the U.S. House of Representatives. During that time, he watched the Vietnam War end.
"That was hard," he said. "That's when they brought (John) McCain and all the POWs back."
Anderson said McCain's return was part of his charge, often conferring with McCain's father, about his location as he made his way back to the states.
In 1975, Anderson returned to the water for two years as captain of a destroyer on the Mediterranean Sea.
He went to work at the Pentagon in the political military strategic affairs office until his retirement in 1979. He said he didn't care for the position, and was happy when it ended. He had even received a calendar from the Moscow Chamber of Commerce that he used to count the days until he could leave.
Anderson moved back to Moscow, where his son, Jon, and his wife, Tina, also live. His oldest son, Ken, lives in South Carolina and also retired from the Navy. He had two tours in Iraq handling explosives disposal.
"We were glad when he retired with all his fingers still hooked on," said Anderson.
Anderson said he plans to attend today's Veteran's Day ceremony that begins 11 a.m. at the Eastside Marketplace where he can talk to fellow veterans, many of whom he knows through the local chapters of the Military Officers Association, the VFW and the American Legion.
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Pro patria,

Tom Hansen
Moscow, Idaho

(WETSU, John Wiggins and Dale Roderick - March 17, 1970)
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