As a Lt Jg on the USS Rogers DD876 I was electronics officer and responsible for all secret and top secret communications.
In 1965 US Naval intelligence reports stated that any war in Vietnam was a BAD idea. One million men could be hidden in a square mile. Any war we fought there was doomed to defeat.
President Johnson had visited General MacArthur who told him sitting in his Waldorf Astoria suite, that the US should never, for any reason, ever get involved in a land war in Asia.
That advice was ignored
We were constantly being followed by Russian spy ships who, sitting astride our carriers monitored all our air operations for the North Vietnamese.
The Russians, by way of sailor Walker’s aid, were reading all of our secret communications.
“Mister Mann, look at this!”
That was obvious to me when the 7th fleet gathered twice for “Operation Candid Camera” where four carriers a command cruiser and 16 destroyers gathered twice for pictures. Each time the rendezvous coordinates were broadcast we found a Russian spy ship “Gidrifon” sitting there at sunrise.
One night I was OOD AND we were doing air control over North Vietnam, I was called into the CIC by excited sailers. “Mister Mann, look at this!”
What they showed me was a screen showing 4 aircraft that were unidentified and maneuvering south of Hainan at speeds in excess of 5000 miles per hour. We watched for a few more minutes until they zipped off toward Japan.
One last interesting story comes years later when I was visiting a small foundry in Ningbo, China. A man there had heard that I had been in the Vietnam war and wanted to speak to me.
He had been in the Chinese army when they invaded Vietnam in 1979. The Chinese lost 50,000 men in three months. “They kicked the shit out of us too.”
A friend of mine in Wrightsville fought on the ground there. He was a “tunnel rat” and fought gun battles in underground tunnels. His stories would raise the hairs on your neck.