Barefoot at the Wake

Dressed in their best white shirts, the dozen Viet Cong leaders assembled at dusk in a mud-walled house in the little Delta village of An Lac Thon to mourn a fallen comrade. Only the afternoon before, their district propaganda chief had been killed by a raiding party of U.S. Navy commandos. Now, as they gathered in silence, a security guard of 40 men kept watch in the rain outside, and another 50 Viet Cong waited only 100 yards away. All the guns seemed hardly necessary. As they do with many a Delta village, the Viet Cong considered An Lac Thon to be their own, to the extent of maintaining there a small cemetery for their dead.

Suddenly the silent wake erupted in pandemonium. Helicopters whirled in upon the village. Out poured 36 South Vietnamese in camouflage tiger suits, feet bare and guns blazing. Accompanied by U.S. Navy Lieut. Bernard F. McMahon Jr. and yelling at the top of their lungs, the raiders charged into the gathering and kidnaped ten of the Viet Cong brass. Then they fought their way out past the remaining Viet Cong and, with the aid of hovering helicopter gunships, reached waiting river boats over a mile away. The attacking force's casualties: none.

Reception Committee, The funeral assault was the first publicized exploit of a new kind of force operating in South Viet Nam's Delta: the Prews, or Provisional Reconnaissance Units. Informally advised by U.S. Navy officers and made up largely of former Viet Cong who have defected, the Prews are primarily night raiders who slip into territory in which the Viet Cong feel secure, turning the enemy's hit-and-run tactics back on him. "We operate where the Viet Cong haven't been bothered before," explains McMahon. "They don't dare sleep in their houses any more. They sleep in the fields." His favorite story is of the Viet Cong who came back to his hut at dawn with his rifle slung over his back, whistling at the mischief he had done that night, only to find a reception committee of Prews waiting for him.

Prews are now operating in each province of the Delta IV Corps, and all are volunteers who know the terrain well. At first the Prews dressed as they pleased, but after a few instances of being mistaken for Viet Cong by U.S. helicopter gunners, they adopted tiger suits or the black pajamas of simple peasants as uniforms. Their exploits have not only crimped the morale of the Viet Cong, but beefed up that of the government's regular forces. And their effectiveness cannot always be measured by a single night's work. Two days after the Prews had crashed the propaganda chief's funeral, nine frightened Viet Cong from the raided village, including the regional chief, turned themselves in to the government as Chien Hoi defectors.

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