Force Recon in Vietnam & Is WW3 Actually Possible? | Bing West

Jack Murphy (0:01)

Hey, everyone. Welcome to The Team House. I'm Jack Murphy, here with tonight's guest, Bing West. Bing served as a Marine Corps Colonel, and went on to have government positions such as serving as the Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs during the Reagan administration, and is the author of many, many works. A lot of boots on the ground accounts that he did from traveling to war zones and writing about them. One of the more pivotal works of his is The Village, which I believe we'll talk about, but it's based off of your experiences in the Vietnam War, and reminds me actually in some ways of Jim Gant's work, One Tribe at a Time, in the sense that the work is widely well-regarded, and everyone agrees this is how it should be done, but then we do something totally different.

So Bing, thank you for joining us on the show.

Bing West (0:57)

It's my pleasure, Jack.

Jack Murphy (0:59)

So let's start at the beginning, because I really want to talk a bit about your service in Vietnam. Can you tell us about how you came into the service, why the Marine Corps, and what your pathway was?

Bing West (1:15)

Well, I was born in 1940, so I missed the Civil War and World War I, but I got the others. So my uncles, two of my uncles were platoon commanders in the Marine Corps, and they were on Guadalcanal, and then they come back from the island, and I was two or three, and my mom was having another baby, so she sent me up to the attic where they hang out with their group.

Then she thought, well, they're my brothers, they're the babysitters.

The group, whenever they were coming home from the battles, they didn't know how to explain to their parents what they were doing, so they stayed in the clubhouse they had in our room, in our top of our house. So between the ages of three and seven, I was raised by Marines. Different groups of Marines would come in, I was filled with all the stories, and my mother said she knew something was really going on when the Battle of Okinawa was going on, and both my uncles were in the battle, and she was scared to death. And I had a favorite blanket that I used to hang on to. And she said, you have to do something to help Uncle Wellie and Uncle Tommy. And she said, with that, I opened up the window and threw the blanket out and said, that's for the dirty yellow baskets. And then she knew something was going on up in that attic. And when I got out of college and I was supposed to go to law school, I walked down to the cell station in Boston to get on the train. And they had said, Marine Corps recruiting across the street. And I walked over and walked in and said to the captain behind the desk, I'd like to join the Marine Corps. He said, well, it's very rare I see somebody come in with a suitcase. You're really in a rush, aren't you? And that's how I joined the Marine Corps. It was ingrained in me.

Jack Murphy (3:06)

So you didn't have to get drafted into the war. You were ready to go. Yes.

Did you go in enlisted then?

Bing West (3:16)

No, I went to OCS. I was a grunt. I had a platoon. And then in 81, knowing me in a mortar platoon. And the war was in 66, 65, and 66, just heating up.

And the Marine generals knew they didn't know how to fight it, which was really interesting.

And I had some education in writing. And they said, lieutenant, we'd like you to go out into the combat with the different units, because you're a grunt, and then write them up. So other lieutenants and sergeants going over will know what the firefighting is all about. So I wrote the first book was called Small Unit Action Vietnam, where I took 12 firefights I had been in all over the place with different units and put them together and tried to explain what was happening, what was happening, what was happening. And one of them, we went into the DMZ, we being a Force Recon, five of us, we were deep in the DMZ, and it was the summer of 66, and the North FIATs were attacking, but they were assuming that we wouldn't go into the demilitarized zone. And we found an entire battalion. I mean, we were there looking at them, and they didn't know we were there. And we hit them with everything we had. We must have dropped 200 rounds of 105 and 155 before they found our position and came up. And then an F-8 was going up north to drop on a bridge, and he dropped two 2,000-pound bombs and just sheared the... scared the hell out of us, knocked us down. But that was the end of those coming after us, and we got out the next day. So I saw a lot of the heavy action, and then they sent me into a village, which was quite different.