Vietnam War

The Vietnam War is invoked as a military precedent for using dolphins not only in harbor security but also in operations against human divers. Through Jack Greywolf’s recollection, the war’s significance in the novel lies in the gap between the familiar public story of trained service animals and the concealed purposes for which some were deployed.

The War as a Military Precedent

Greywolf places the episode in the early 1970s, when dolphins were used to guard harbors at Cam Ranh Bay and intercept Vietcong frogmen on sabotage missions. The novel offers no broader account of the war; it draws on this specific example to establish that military use of dolphins had already extended beyond detection and protection into direct conflict with people.

That precedent matters to Greywolf’s explanation of the navy’s later programs. He distinguishes the operations publicly celebrated as successes from practices whose details were withheld. The Vietnam War thus enters the narrative as a history that complicates the seemingly straightforward image of dolphins serving alongside human handlers.

Cam Ranh Bay and the Swimmer Nullification Program

Greywolf identifies the Swimmer Nullification Program as part of the Vietnam-era record. In his account, dolphins were trained to interfere with divers’ equipment and were fitted with weapons. He also describes a later method in which they carried devices intended to kill divers. The account establishes that these animals were deliberately made instruments of lethal military force, while the novel does not present Greywolf as having personally served in the Vietnam operations.

His perspective carries weight because he speaks as an experienced naval dolphin handler. He explains that MKO was a codename for a succession of programs and experiments involving animals kept apart from ordinary systems; animals from regular systems could be recruited into MKO, after which their handlers might hear nothing more about them. Greywolf’s own service began with MK6, and he later took over MK7. His professional history frames the Vietnam example as part of a longer, concealed institutional practice, not an isolated curiosity.

Secrecy and Narrative Significance

Greywolf recounts this history to Leon Anawak while explaining what the navy’s official account leaves out. Anawak’s distress at hearing it marks the change in the conversation: dolphin military service can no longer be understood only through the language of training and successful operations. The Vietnam episode makes the hidden costs of those programs visible without turning the war itself into the novel’s subject.

The reference also sharpens a recurring conflict in the story between human control and animal agency. Dolphins appear as intelligent animals, but in this history their intelligence and bodies are appropriated for military purposes. The Vietnam War therefore functions less as a setting than as an unsettling precedent: it shows that the later secrecy surrounding naval animal programs has a history, and that the boundary between service and weaponization was crossed long before the novel’s present-day crisis.