Snubby in Vietnam

My ground pounding Vietnam combat veteran Marine uncle Eric died late last year from cancer (agent Orange?), I know he was receiving VA benefits for it but he would never talk about anything except leave in Saigon and that he was happy to be back. Thanks to all over there with him.
 
SF Vet, your narratives and pix are of, I believe, remarkable historical significance, even worthy of a book ! If you don't mind, would you share the info on the slide scanner you're using -- I gather the original plan of using a slide scanning company was unsatisfactory? Thanks for your time and efforts to educate us !
 
musket44, thanks for your kind thoughts. I use a MAC laptop, hooked to an older Epson V600 photo long bed scanner. When my wife and I attended a National Geographic photographer course a decade or so ago, I asked the instructor how they did their slides for their magazines; back then it was before high resolution digital cameras. He told me they got tired of scanning their own, and started sending their slides off to a company called Scan Cafe, who will do whatever you send them, pics, movies, slides, prints, negatives. Return the to you cleaned, and scanned with high resolution gear, on a Disc or a flash drive. Really high quality, and not very expensive.

But now I just use my own V600, has a plastic tray sort of thing, clips onto the bed, chose in the soft ware what it is I am scanning, chose the resolution in DPI, scan, move to my picture album, tweak if necessary, and then post to a free site, Post Images, from which I can then attach a link in my posts. So easy, "even a cave man can do it." Believe, me, I am no Geek.

Here is the workhorse of small US outlying posts, a C 7 Caribou. Capable of pretty short landing and takeoff, with good cargo capacity. After about four or five days in processing at the MACV compound in Saigon, hopped a ride down to Can Tho, the big capital of the Delta, IV Corps, and later hitch hiked a ride to my first assignment, mid Delta, the Captain John R Tine compound, named after a KIA officer lost in that area a year or so before I got there, me in Oct of '71. Getting around the Delta was very informal. Just mosey over to a flight OP's area, and ask around if anyone had anything going my way. Usually involved hop scotching around here and there, and getting dropped off at some way point.

So climbed on this C7, which soon landed at a deserted PSP airstrip by a river, and I hopped off with my rifle and pistol, (and probably no ammunition yet,) and my little handbag. The Caribou turned around, and took off. I was totally alone. No greeting US, no local troops, no villagers, nobody. I felt kinda lonely, wondering if I had gotten off at the wrong place, and would have to find my own way to Cau Lanh, my first place, a MACV compound.

I just stood there, hot and sweaty, wondering if I should get all tactical and pretend to be armed, in case some roving VC group happened along. But soon a jeep pulled up and I hopped in and was soon at my little compound. My war had begun.

All the best,.... SF VET
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SF Vet, many thanks for the scanning info -- you've given me a good reference point from which to get started. It appears to be a time consuming effort, so being selective seems to be a prerequisite ...

Just as an aside, I had an Army aviator tell me, many years ago, that the Army wouldn't let any pilot over 30 years old fly the Caribou because it was just too much tail for anyone over that age -- I'm sure his tongue was firmly planted in his cheek !!! (P.S. -- one needs to look at the plane from the side to get the politically correct jist of his remark).
 
I was sent south to An Xuyen province for my second six months "in country", after turning down a staff position in some HQ somewhere in MACV; I don't recall much more than telling my then higher that I wanted to stay out. I was comfortable with that sort of life, and besides, I was beginning to plan to somehow, in a few years, begin a career in medicine when my four year commitment for my ROTC scholarship at Nebraska was up. That was a year or more away. I was living on ten bucks a month, just my rice and soy sauce expenses. Army provided anything else I needed.

So wandered down to the Song Ong Doc District, joining a Major and SFC, who were in the process of tearing down their quarters and moving inside a newly constructed "outpost." I replaced a departing Captain, an intelligence officer. Shortly after my arrival, the Major went to Hawaii to see his wife, got sick, and with the drawdown, never returned. So I moved into his District Senior Advisor slot, sort of funny, actually, because I had only one staff, SFC Tom C. He and I got along fine. He always stayed back when I accompanied the operations, on radio relay. He was into Harly "Choppers" back home.

I didn't really have much to do, as there wasn't any "advising" I could do to teach the seasoned, experienced, and in that TOC, dedicated Vietnamese team. Mostly I just filled out the early sort of computer forms, I think they were called the HESS system, a way to tabulate how the pacification and "wining of the hearts and minds" was going in my District. As I recall the questions were stated so that the only way to answer them was in a positive, reassuring way. I couldn't add that the VC had just beheaded a village chief a Klick up river, or that 20 or so local militia had just deserted their post just down the river, and "gone over", weapons and commo and all. Or that one of the posts just across the river had been overrun, and the troops and their wives and girlfriends and kids there had all been killed.

Probably pretty much the same sort of optimistic evaluations that were sent up in Iraq and Afghanistan. You want to know how things are going, ask the Lt's and Sergeant's. The colonels will tell you what you want to hear.

My little compound had a small "cafe" where I often had lunch, some Ramen, with peppers and some flecks of fly spotted pork, made by pouring boiling river water over the concoction. It was really good, salty and spicy. The kids were the wait staff and the kitchen crew, mud floor where the discarded food was dumped, and I could get a Beer 33, chilled with river ice, with the melting ice letting the debris settle to the bottom of my glass.

Life was easy, relaxed with an occasional adventure, and I was quite happy, and the place seems like home to me. Partly because no one was telling me what to do. Life for me was pretty "low intensity."

Here, our little cafe. Several of the young girls were war orphans.

By the way, I still really like ramen and rice and soy sauce, but my wife has greatly curtailed that for me as my blood sugar acts up with that much carbohydrate.

All the best... SF VET
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Buck 110 and our arsenal

This pic is a bit "cheesy". but the back story is illustrative of what life was like on my little two man Advisory team, deep in the Delta. SFC Tom C and I did not have any US issue rations or food; we had a Vietnamese widow who did our housekeeping and cooking and cleaning. We called her CO', which is Vietnamese for a single young woman. She went to market every day for our chow, and cooked it fresh, or what passed for fresh down in the village market. We did not have refrigeration, as we ran our generator only in the eve. Usually some sort of duck or market pork, with lots of rice and soy sauce, and lots of candy from our PSP field support packs.

I shot this pic of me holding up a steak with my faithful Buck 110 open on our hootch's table. One day, a chopper dropped by, and tossed off several nice steaks for us. Don't recall if something they did on their own on a fly-by, or something sent down from our HQ up in Camau. Up there at the US compound, they lived the life of Riley, great food, entertainment, (movies and strip shows), AC, while the two of us lived a step up from the Vietnamese in our little compound.

It was such an amazing thing to actually have steak to cook on our little outdoor grill, that I just had to take a picture of the whole exciting event. Never happened before or after. I was so used to our near vegetarian diet when I got back to Bragg that it was some time before I could make myself even swallow American food. Hard to explain how I just couldn't make myself eat anything with protein. Took a while.

Here, on our table, we have rice, a bottle of rot-gut soy sauce, bread, and hanging on our wall our loaded rifles and an M79, with a bandoleer and a satchel of grenades for SFC T. And a pic from the Rise Shaving Cream girl. When I look back over my slides of our home life, I note that almost always in our home I was shirtless. I didn't have any shorts.

Now, I am working with my big smoker to become a Pit Boss, and have my short rib rib recipe just perfect, will be doing two racks this weekend.

Guns and knives are a man's basic essentials.

all the best, SF VET
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My Dad (just passed away last month at age 90) took two knives with him to Vietnam. A Case and a Buck. Upon his return, he swore that he would never buy another Case knife, since it rusted and the Buck didn't.

He stuck to this, and never bought another Case knife, even though I tried to explain to him numerous times over the years that the Case was CV and the Buck was stainless.
 
SF VET said:
musket44, thanks for your kind thoughts. I use a MAC laptop, hooked to an older Epson V600 photo long bed scanner. When my wife and I attended a National Geographic photographer course a decade or so ago, I asked the instructor how they did their slides for their magazines; back then it was before high resolution digital cameras. He told me they got tired of scanning their own, and started sending their slides off to a company called Scan Cafe, who will do whatever you send them, pics, movies, slides, prints, negatives. Return the to you cleaned, and scanned with high resolution gear, on a Disc or a flash drive. Really high quality, and not very expensive.

But now I just use my own V600, has a plastic tray sort of thing, clips onto the bed, chose in the soft ware what it is I am scanning, chose the resolution in DPI, scan, move to my picture album, tweak if necessary, and then post to a free site, Post Images, from which I can then attach a link in my posts. So easy, "even a cave man can do it." Believe, me, I am no Geek.

Here is the workhorse of small US outlying posts, a C 7 Caribou. Capable of pretty short landing and takeoff, with good cargo capacity. After about four or five days in processing at the MACV compound in Saigon, hopped a ride down to Can Tho, the big capital of the Delta, IV Corps, and later hitch hiked a ride to my first assignment, mid Delta, the Captain John R Tine compound, named after a KIA officer lost in that area a year or so before I got there, me in Oct of '71. Getting around the Delta was very informal. Just mosey over to a flight OP's area, and ask around if anyone had anything going my way. Usually involved hop scotching around here and there, and getting dropped off at some way point.

So climbed on this C7, which soon landed at a deserted PSP airstrip by a river, and I hopped off with my rifle and pistol, (and probably no ammunition yet,) and my little handbag. The Caribou turned around, and took off. I was totally alone. No greeting US, no local troops, no villagers, nobody. I felt kinda lonely, wondering if I had gotten off at the wrong place, and would have to find my own way to Cau Lanh, my first place, a MACV compound.

I just stood there, hot and sweaty, wondering if I should get all tactical and pretend to be armed, in case some roving VC group happened along. But soon a jeep pulled up and I hopped in and was soon at my little compound. My war had begun.

All the best,.... SF VET
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Click to expand...
SFVet's photo displays something that may not be recognized by those who were not exposed to the practice. The aircraft is on an improvised runway made by laying PSP (perforated steel plate), a heavy-gauge rolled steel sheeting with interlocking sections that can be laid down on soil with little or no other preparation to provide a durable surface for aircraft operations.

Combat engineer units could create a functional LZ (landing zone) for cargo aircraft like the C119 Caribou or C130 Hercules in very little time with nothing more than a grader or bulldozer and a few pallets of PSP. I'm sure there are still many acres of southeast Asia covered in the products of American steel mills producing PSP by the shiploads.
 
My little compound, deep in the Delta, was just south of the U Minh Forest, where Rocky Versace, who was later awarded a posthumous MOH, and several other US advisory personnel were captured in '63, and held until their escape in '68. One of these was Nick Rowe, later author of the book Fife Years to Freedom. One of the Vietnamese interpreters on the 'chopper that picked him up, not killing him when they realized Nick had a beard, something Vietnamese do not, was later one of my two interpreters. Son, my interpreter, told me that when then picked up Lt Rowe, he was unable to speak.

Anyway, my compound was alongside a small river, the Song Ong Doc, ie, River Mr Doc. I have no idea who Mr Doc was, past or present. The river had a lot of commercial traffic, small ferries, barges, small sampans, and of course, me in my Boston Whaler, with two Johnson 40's, two, because I could usually keep one running. I actually got pretty good at tweaking the carbs on the fly. Since the Vietnamese mechanics up in Province, at Camau, typically used metric fasteners instead of SAE, parts were always vibrating off the motors. My Whaler was pretty waterlogged from the holes in it. The Local VC often stopped river traffic for taxes and supplies.

Sometimes, in the evening, on a slack, easy day, some of us would go down to the river and just shoot some of our firearms. I had an assortment of SMG's, but not enough mags to make them
useful in the field. I just cannot for the life of me recall ever carrying or shooting my issue M16. But I did carry my issue 1911 wherever I went, and out on op's with the Vietnamese.

Here, a 2nd LT officer, the compound intelligence officer, is shooting my 45. I can make out my name, COPPLE on the green armory tape on the slide. I actually did shoot my sidearm often, and still like to shoot my 1911's in IDPA competition. Here, the slide is in full recoil, but even blowing up the picture, I can't find the ejected case somewhere in the pic.

I kept my 45 well oiled because it was an old WWII handgun, and the parkerizing was worn off, making it very susceptible to rust if I din't oil it down pretty much every evening,. My last day when the chopper was inbound to pick me up with my little gym bag with my earthly possessions I went down to the river to fire off my several mags, and sure enough, the first round was a squib! I turned it in to ordnance up in Saigon along with my M16, telling the armorer that a round was struck in the barrel.

By the way, about 15 years ago, I "got into" reloading for my pistols and rifles, and by now I think I have "rolled my own" about 40K times or more. I was out shooting a new SIG this AM, learning to shoot with an optic, my first such. Yesterday, was out with the same SIG, and my 357 Henry Lever, of course, I haven't bought any ammunition in at least a decade.

All the best... SF VET
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At the risk of annoying our friend SFVet (which I do not intend at all), I will share a few more memories of my time in Vietnam.

Photography was a common hobby and interest among US forces. Excellent quality cameras and equipment was easily obtained at very low prices via PACEX, the Pacific theater area service of the Army & Air Force Exchange Service with outlets on most major military installations and providing a catalog ordering service rivalling anything Sears or Montgomery Ward delivered, back in those days. Top-of-the-line 35mm SLR cameras by Asahi Pentax, Ricoh, and (a relative newcomer with many great products) Canon (as well as major European brands). Major base camps and HQ areas offered photo lab facilities for servicemen pursuing photography as a hobby, we could process our own film and use good printers if we had access to such areas. Films from Kodak and Fuji were readily available thru PACEX and processing/printing could be had at minimal costs with mail service.

Lots of jokes, particularly in the outlying bases and combat units, about American GIs being "tourists with guns", constantly photographing everything and everyone around them. A trip to Da Nang, Cam Ranh Bay, Saigon, or other major installations showed more GIs with cameras than M16s. Every unit seemed to have a few wannabe professional photographers, and it was not unusual to see photos published in Stars & Stripes (the military newspaper) with credits to individual soldiers.

My point, such as it is, is that we were mostly kids, adolescents and young adults, just beginning to figure out what life was all about and how we might fit into the big picture.

My personal favorite was the Asahi Pentax SLR, thru-the-lens focus with light metering allowing easy settings for correct exposures, and interchangeable lenses for just about any use. Served me very well for many years until I upgraded to a more modern camera about 1990 or so. My personal interests led me more toward wildlife photography than other uses.

More rambling, done for now.
 
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Outstanding thread as posted by several of us RVN Veterans. Our unit was responsible for “ turning over” vehicles, equipment , shops and tools to “Marvin the ARVN”. We delt mostly with their officers and few Sgts. that could speak english. Will leave it at that. Centuries of war had “ worn down” Vietnamese society….
 
Oh no! This old thread ain't going away yet.

Interesting visit with a VA doctor couple weeks ago. He made a comment on field conditions in Vietnam, probably based upon the popular conception that it was always a hot steaming tropical jungle experience. I shared with him my recollections of huddling under a poncho in the bush, monsoon rains pouring down 24 hours a day for weeks at a time, overnight temperatures dropping into the 40s, teeth chattering cold, praying for dry socks and underwear, getting back to a base camp and having the skin of my toes slide off with my rotting socks, infected rashes in the armpits and groin (I think the GI diagnosis was crotch-rot).

Yeah, heat and humidity were the usual expectations, but monsoon season brought along some new experiences.

Went to Vietnam at 18 years old, 6 feet tall, 145 lbs, handsome, dashing, probably irresistible to women. Came home at 19 years old, 128 lbs, fully capable of humping a 60 lb. rucksack and full load of weapons, ammo, steel pot, and flak jacket while running 5 miles in rough terrain. Furrs Cafeteria offered all you can eat for $3.95, but I probably put them out of business.

Being a natural-born slow learner, I managed to repeat the experience the following year, finally getting back to the US a few weeks before my 21st birthday, still too young to vote or order a beer in a bar in most states.

Fast forward to the 1980s, watching Army recruiting advertisements on television enticing another generation with slogans like "It's not just a job, it's an adventure!", and "We do more before 7AM than most people do all day!". Almost made me want to run down to the recruiting office and re-up.

More old memories.
 
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