Bob - The Navy Years, Chapter 15

Life at Work in Nha Trang

In this installment I'm going to show a lot of  pictures.  The daily grind of work and the things we did to keep busy.  We had 7 people in this office and we could always spare a couple of people at a time to do our landscaping projects.  First, the office we worked out of before and after our projects:

You see the air conditioner on the side of the building in the above pictures.  That is the air conditioner above me at my desk, so you can tell where my work station was looking at the outside of the building.

You'll also notice a mattress leaning against the wall.  As in all Military Offices, Somebody spent the night there every night.  The Duty Officer. Because I was the clerk and not one of those who coordinated the communication lines, I didn't have to pull duty.  Sweeeet!

We performed many projects to keep busy and beautify our surroundings and make it a safer place to work.  Often the air field would be rocketed from the hillsides behind the base. That's one reason that big cannon was set up at the Special Forces base that I mentioned earlier.  And, often we could watch Air Strikes on those hills when the enemy had been spotted.  Not belonging to any Service, we had to beg, borrow, steal, and trade for any material we had.  We tiled our concrete floors, even cutting out "DCA - SAM - NHA TRANG" in the tiles to really make it look spiffy!  I wish I'd gotten a picture of it.  But I was standing on those tiles in my Christmas Picture in the last post. 

We built a bunker and sunk it into the ground, sandbagging all around it and cutting a hole in the office wall so we would have access to it without going outside.  This came in handy when the base was under rocket attack!  I have a picture of me down in that hole, too.  I did my share of digging.  But the people in this picture:  Our Commander, Major Ray Lee with the shovel. Leaning on his elbows is Chief McReynolds, who was the one that had a broken thumb in the bombing.  And leaning on one arm, Capt Joe Antone, the one who had a piece of shrapnel go through his knee. This was long after the bombing, so you can see they'd recovered.  Chief McReynolds went home suddenly several days after this picture, accompanying his brother's body, who was killed.  Another project was to build a deck.  Why?  Because it was something to keep us busy and allowed us to watch the air strikes up in the hills, and afforded a good view around the base.

This work, plus seeding the sandy dirt in grass, watering it, then keeping the grass cut, kept us busy.  We also had a vegetable garden behind the building. I rounded the corner of the building one day going back to the garden and startled a huge lizard enjoying our vegetables.  This lizard was 4 feet long!  There were a lot of lizards over there.  The Vietnamese ate them.  You would often see a man walking down the road carrying a couple of lizards by the tail taking them home to skin and eat.

This picture was taken from the deck after completion.  You can see we were right next to the air field.  Notice all the barrels, each filled with sand, to protect parked aircraft from rocket attacks.

Looking the other direction from the deck, you can see an Air Strike going on in the hills behind the base.  It was kinda neat to watch those fighter planes diving and dropping bombs and pulling out of the dive.

So went the life at work in Nha Trang.  Coming up, my luxurious living quarters and the people I roomed with while in Nha Trang.

To be continued...............