DA NANG -- North Vietnamese Army (NVA) frogmen made two suicidal attempts recently to destroy the Da Nang river bridge.
    To escape detection by the bridge security guards, the frogmen used crude snorkel breathing devices, enabling them to swim inches beneath the surface of the river.
    Early one morning the first two-man team--with their faces painted purple for camouflage in the darkness--floated a wedge made of bamboo poles down river with the current.
    On the end of each fork of the bamboo wedge was a five-gallon water can filled with plastic explosive.  The divers had also tied themselves to the raft and to one another.
    "The wedge was probably designed to be tied around one of the concrete supports beneath the bridge," said LCpl. S.M. Broussard (Cincinnati, Ohio), a member of the security guard.
    The enemy divers never had a chance to tie their raft.  When they surfaced near the bridge they were sighted by Marines of the 1st Military Police Bn.
    "The swimmers must have thought that they had floated past the bridge," Broussard said, "and stuck their heads out of the water to see where they were."
    The Marines opened fire with automatic weapons as the frogmen disappeared beneath the surface.
    "The lights on the bridge shine straight down into the water," Broussard continued, "and everybody is experienced at spotting objects floating in the water.  We have orders to fire at anything that looks suspicious."
    Marines in a patrolling gunboat, unable to locate the enemy, tossed 30 pounds of TNT into the river.
    "The concussion from the explosions kills everything in the water," Broussard explained.  "TNT is more powerful than a hand grenade and has a larger killing range."
    The point was proved the following morning when the Marines discovered two enemy bodies floating in the river.
    That night, two more teams of divers were sighted in the identical circumstances and received the same welcome.
    Marines pulled three enemy bodies out of the water the following morning.  The fourth diver was captured by the Marine patrol when he came walking out of the water.
    "We were patrolling along a river bank," said LCpl. Peter A. Gazzana, (Milwaukee, Wis.), "when suddenly a form rose up out of the water and came walking onto the river bank."
    "He looked tired," Gazzana said, "as though he had been swimming for a long time."
    The patrol turned the diver over to interrogation authorities, who found out that he was the sole survivor of the unsuccessful attempt to blow the bridge.
    "We didn't know at the time that the man was an NVA," Gazzana stated, "but we had been given orders to bring in all suspicious Vietnamese for questioning.  That frogman was without a doubt the most suspicious-looking one I've ever seen!"
    Further information from Broussard indicated each of the enemy frogmen was armed with a diver's knife and wore NVA equipment, including snorkels, pistol belt, bandages and a belt buckle with a large star in the center.
    "The explosives attached to the raft would have been more than sufficient to have blown up the bridge," Broussard continued.
    Marine explosive experts discovered that the fuses on the explosive charges were designed to detonate instantaneously.
    "It was a suicide mission," Broussard concluded, "and if the bridge security has anything to say about it, it always will be a suicide mission to try and destroy this bridge."