Every Position on a River Monitor Ranked From Safest to Deadliest

#VietnamWar #RiverMonitor #VietnamVeterans Every Position on a River Monitor Ranked From Safest to Deadliest The monitor was never built to run. The Navy made it out of a Second World War landing craft: about 60 feet of steel, 11 men, four to seven knots with the armor on. It was built to sit in front of the riverbank and take what came, and every man aboard had a place on it. This was the Mobile Riverine Force: Army infantry of the Ninth Infantry Division carried by the Navy's Task Force 117 through the Mekong Delta from 1967. River Assault Squadrons 9 and 11 took their monitors up creeks no wider than a city street, from the Rung Sat swamps to the Rach Ba Rai on September 15th, 1967, the Rach Ruong Canal, the Song Ba Lai and the My Tho River near Dong Tam. This is the story of every position on that boat, ranked: the engine room under the well deck, the after turrets, the bow turret with its 40 millimeter cannon, the well deck and its 81 millimeter mortar, the conning station, and the last position, which is not on the monitor at all. It is the boat beside it, the one in trouble. Very little of the force survives today. One command boat, the Charlie boat C-18, is on display at the Naval Amphibious Base in Coronado, California, where River Assault Squadron 9 was first commissioned in November 1966. #VietnamWar #BrownWaterNavy #MobileRiverineForce #MekongDelta #RiverAssaultSquadron #9thInfantryDivision #VietnamVeterans #MilitaryHistory