Rick Holt's Adventures in Vietnam
Letters Home from Vietnam, 1971
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Long Thanh North
September 9, 1971
Thursday
8:35 am
Dear Folks,
I don't like that onion skin paper so I bought this in Vung Tau yesterday. Didn't write a letter dated the 8th. Oops, yes I did, I sent a note from Vung Tau yesterday, but other than that I didn't write one in the evening because we had a red alert at about 11 pm last night. The sensors have been picking up movement outside our burm for the last couple days. And supposedly somebody saw something last night so they called an alert. They did all kinds of firing but I didn't see any dead bodies. They even called in some artillery support. I was in a foxhole next to Bunker 1. I heard four rounds of artillery go whistling over my head one after the other. They all hit about 100 yards behind me inside the perimeter. I was about ready to crawl over on Charlie's side of the burm. I'm just glad that after that blunder they decided to cancel the artillery support instead of re-direct it. They would have probably started dropping them on my head. We finally got to go back in at 1 am.
The reason I'm not working now is that we started working two shifts today. The first shift goes from 7 am to 5 pm. And the second shift goes from 1 pm to the time the last ship comes in and we take care of it. Me and Kadramas will be working the second shift.
Well I went to Vung Tau yesterday. We flew a chopper there to have a modification taken care of. Davis didn't give me any special instructions, so I just took the work orders to the office and the crew chief and I headed for the beach. We walked to the gate and caught a ride on a lambretta which is a Vietnamese taxi. There is a picture of one filled to the brim with people in those pictures of the Red Beach traffic jam a long time ago. It's sort of a miniature 3 wheel truck. He hooked us for 200 pi each. That's about 75 cents.
We didn't bring our bathing suits so we swam in our fatigue pants. The water was nice, almost as good as China Beach, it's called Back Beach. It's not quite as big as China Beach.
I logged as door gunner on that trip up and back, since the gunner didn't come along. According to my count that's 26 missions. Actually more than that but operations only gave me credit for 14 in the first three months or so. I think I told you about that once before.
Didn't get any mail yesterday. I'm expecting those slides today I mailed away in August.
That wraps it up.
Rick