“Four of the original seven were still together by the time we
Recalled Kermen, who grew up in Northern California and enlisted in the Navy 53
Trained as a crew but were broken up soon after our arrival in Vietnam,” SERE, a required course for both soldiers and sailors assigned to the Mobile Riverine Force, taught them about evading capture and being held captive by the North Vietnamese Army or Viet Cong. First came riverboat training at the former Naval Inshore-Operations Training Center at Mare Island, Calif., and the nearby Suisun Sloughs followed by a week of gunnery school at Camp Roberts, Calif., and one week of SERE (Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape) near Warner Springs north of San Diego. The days were long and hard like the 11-weeks of training that Kermen, a Navy Junior ROTC instructor in Fallon, experienced. Term which refers to operations being conducted in the inland rivers thatĬarried silt and sediment produced from either runoffs or flooding. Like him who served in the Mekong Delta were part of the Brown Water Navy, a 20 mm gunner with the Mobile Riverine Force, Riverĭivision 112, a formation suited more to the Mekong Delta. Was a wartime life then 22-year-old Robert Kermen endured during his tour in In a sultry atmosphere more than 7,800 miles from the shores of the United Listening to Creedence Clearwater Revival music as a backdropĪs sailors tightly gripped their weapons. Small patrol boats and ATCs (Armored Troop Carriers) maneuver their way upĪsia’s seventh longest river, taking fire and returning fire to an enemy hiddenĪlong the banks. Humid steamy jungles wrapping around Mekong River overshadowed the continualįighting in South Vietnam during the late 1960s for many military veterans.
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