Saturday, February 13, 2010

Bad Weather, Not much activities...Let's talk about the past




I was in the Navy, but when I was in Vietnam I was assigned to "Defense Communications Agency - Southeast Asia Mainland", or as the military liked to call it, "DCA - SAM". This was a Joint Service outfit, meaning it was supplied with people from all four services, Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines. You would think we belonged to all four services, but the fact was, we belonged to none of them. Therefore, we had no military base, no barracks, no chow hall...no anything. Everything we had was attained by begging, borrowing, or stealing. Yes, stealing. We did a lot of that.We made arrangements with the Navy for me to stay with the Navy people in their billet, which was about 2 miles from the base in downtown NhaTrang. When I tell people I stayed in a hotel while in Vietnam they think it must have been a nice one. Well, here it is, painted Navy grey. The rooms were quiet luxurious, too. Here I am eating my dinner. Room service sucked! You'll also notice the mosquito net over my bunk behind me. It was very necessary. As a matter of fact, I know this sounds healthy, but I sprayed bug spray all over my net before retiring for the evening to kill all the mosquitoes inside the net, then crawled in quickly. This was a typical dinner. Some can of stew or soup from the canteen heated up over a sterno stove in your room. If you were the first one to take your shower in the evening, the water was fairly warm from the tank on the roof heated by the sun. That was if there WAS water. Not only was there very often not any water, but sometimes when you were in the shower, all soaped up, the water went off. Well, at those times you ran over to the other rooms to see if you could use their shower. No they didn't have water either, but you could turn on the tap and get a little water to drain out of the lines. Sometimes that was enough to get the soap off! Sometimes there were 3 or 4 guys running all over the place trying to find enough water to rinse off. Yep, a luxery establishment. Notice how clean the streets are? By the way, my room was on the bottom floor, far right.

2 comments:

Mary Lynn's Blog said...

No wonder you're so easy to please around here!

Judith Bowman said...

Another reason to cheer when your plane hit the ground in the good ol' USA.