Greetings all,
Here is a Vietnam war era incountry made P.R.U patch from my collection.This particular unit operated around Quang Tri and the Ben Hai river,which was an important landmark in the partition of the country into a northern and a southern zone along the 17th parallel by the Geneva Accords of 1954. The demilitarized zone (DMZ) separating the two parts extended about 5 kilometers (3.1 mi) from either side of the river. Many of the P.R.U's in this area were led by American Marine advisors,possibly because of the large USMC presence in the northern section of South Vietnam.I can only imagine these tough little units saw alot of action so close to North Vietnam.
The P.R.U's (Provincial Reconnaissance Unit)were a CIA sponsored "action arm" of the Phoenix Program.Contrary to popular opinion,the P.R.U's were not solely assassination teams.Although it sometimes proved unavoidable, killing a suspect was not the primary intention of PRU operations. Rather, in the words of John Mullins, an American PRU adviser, “prisoner snatches were key. You can’t get information out of a dead man.”
Here is some info that I gleaned from the Rand Organization:
Although PRU operations continued until the end of the war in 1975, their greatest level of activity occurred during 1967–1972.Operating in all of South Vietnam’s provinces, and never numbering more than 5,000 men, the PRUs were in essence an intelligence-driven police force—better trained, equipped, and paid than the South Vietnamese National Police, and with a highly specialized mission, to be sure, but a police force nonetheless. To help ensure that individuals were not targeted for personal or narrowly political reasons, multiple sources of information were required before an operation could be launched.
Units served in their native provinces, giving them a depth of knowledge about local conditions unmatched by any other South Vietnamese government (let alone U.S.) forces. “Successful PRUs,” according to a CIA study, “developed [their] own sources of information, such as defectors, informants, and personal contacts in contested areas.” As American adviser John Walsh recalled, the PRU members “knew their territory intimately . . . . We advisors came to rely on their knowledge of who lived where and what their loyalties were.”
The Phoenix intelligence centers, the National Police, the Special Police Branch, and other agencies were supposed to provide the PRUs with intelligence, but the PRUs typically gathered, developed, and exploited their own intelligence. According to Andrew Finlayson, another American adviser, “seventy-five percent of the time, the PRUs did their own targeting: ‘This guy’s sister is pro-VC, he comes to the market and is buying way too much food,’ etc.”The PRUs had informants in nearly every village and hamlet, and they also relied heavily on family members and friends to provide information. This self-generated intelligence was of much higher quality than that provided by U.S. or Vietnamese agencies.
A typical PRU was made up of five 18-man teams, which were in turn broken down into smaller units for operations at the district level. To maximize the element of surprise, operations most often took place late at night or early in the morning. Operations were of relatively short duration, rarely lasting more than a few hours. Although the units were led by South Vietnamese, American advisers helped plan operations and typically accompanied PRUs in the field. U.S. involvement in planning and carrying out “snatch-and-grab” operations was invaluable. With American advisers accompanying their operations, PRUs had access to air support when they encountered heavy resistance. The ability of Americans to call in helicopters to quickly evacuate the wounded helped sustain PRU morale. Finally, direct participation in field operations helped American personnel gain a first-hand appreciation of strengths and weaknesses of the units they were advising. Although the PRUs obtained excellent intelligence, their American advisers exercised tight control, frequently rejecting proposed operations if they deemed intelligence inadequate.
Most PRU recruits had previous military experience, often in elite South Vietnamese military units, such as the Marines. Many had lost family members to VC violence, and revenge often served as a strong motivating factor.Thanks to the CIA’s largesse, members of the PRUs were well paid by Vietnamese standards, but it would be a mistake to characterize them as mercenaries, as some critics have: “Most were professional soldiers, they liked soldiering, and they were nationalistic. And they had scores to settle with the communists,” recalls Finlayson. Generous pay, specialized training from the CIA, and relatively low casualties contributed to high morale. Careful CIA control over the selection of PRU leaders helped ensure the generally high quality of unit commanders.
The PRUs’ American advisers also frequently had a military background. Indeed, until the late 1960s, most of the American advisers were serving military officers detailed to the CIA, which lacked the manpower to support what had become a nationwide program. Still, the number of advisers was small relative to the overall number of U.S. military and civilian personnel stationed in South Vietnam. As of May 1970, 102 U.S. military personnel and five civilians were advising the PRUs. Whether civilian or military, all PRU advisers fell under CIA operational control, with a chain of command extending down from the agency’s regional officer in charge and to the agency’s province officer, who oversaw PRU field operations.
Some info about the Phoenix "program":
In June 1967, in an effort to centralize and better coordinate anti-VCI operations, Ambassador Robert Komer, the director of Military Assistance Command, Vietnam’s (MACV’s) overall pacification program, Civil Operations and Revolutionary Development Support (CORDS), won approval for a CIA plan to establish a program called Intelligence Coordination and Exploitation (ICEX), later known as Phoenix.
The central element of coordination was Vietnamese, as the Saigon government provided the bulk of the manpower. This program was known as Phung Hoang, named after a mythical Vietnamese bird somewhat similar to the phoenix. Phung Hoang was not an independent bureaucratic entity; rather, it was a structure of coordinating bodies composed of the numerous agencies involved in the anti-VCI campaign. Phung Hoang was created by decree in 1968, and by 1970, these coordinating committees were organized at the national, regional, and provincial levels.These committees included representatives from the National Police, the Special Police Branch, the National Police Field Force, the Chieu Hoi amnesty program, the RD cadre, the Military Security Service, the military intelligence and current operations staff (G2 and G3, respectively), the Provincial Reconnaissance Units (PRUs), and others.
Most of the coordination under Phung Hoang took place at the provincial and district levels. At these levels, a somewhat more formal entity consisting of the Province Intelligence and Operations Coordination Center (PIOCC) and the District Intelligence and Operations Coordination Center (DIOCC) was created. These centers had (or were intended to have) a physical presence and a staff of detailed personnel—they were not merely committees that met occasionally. In addition, Province Interrogation Centers were established to provide a central location to question captured or surrendered VCI personnel, who were technically civilians.On the U.S. side, the advisory effort for Phung Hoang was the program actually named Phoenix. Phoenix was backed by two U.S. agencies: the CIA and MACV. Both provided funding and advisers to Phung Hoang, although they did so in different ways at different times.
CIA support for anti-VCI activities was most substantial in the early years of the Vietnam War. As the cost of the campaign increased, the agency’s ability to support it declined.CIA support to Phung Hoang thus tended to be concentrated at the PIOCC level, as even the large CIA country team based in Saigon simply did not have sufficient personnel to staff the hundreds of DIOCCs.MACV, in contrast, was well endowed with both personnel and resources. Phoenix activities fell under the aegis of MACV’s CORDS organization, and MACV therefore could draw on the thousands of American officers in Vietnam to staff the DIOCCs. By 1970, more than 700 advisers were serving in Phoenix, with military officers making up the majority of personnel.
For more info on the Phoenix Program here is a link to a well written PDF that can be saved to your computer:
http://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/occasional_papers/2009/RAND_OP258.pdf
