Rick Holt's Adventures in Vietnam
Letters Home from Vietnam, 1971

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Da Nang
August 19, 1971
Thursday
8:30 am

Dear Folks,

We're still flying and everything is still working good. They finally sent up another radio operator. They sent Claybough. I took him up with me at 6 pm last night and showed him what to do. He is supposed to fly by himself at 10 am this morning. So now instead of having 12 hours between flights we'll have 16 hours.

Seems to me a guy named Kelm took me up to show me what to do not very long ago. He had about 150 days to go at the time too. Wasn't long before he just faded away.

Read in the paper yesterday something about a big troop reduction. I'm not sure that would effect me or not. It said something about stateside troops only. But if I would get sent home from here early it might affect me. I might even get out of this mess earlier than I expected. I guess we'll just have to wait and see exactly what it means.

 I'm due to fly again at 2 pm this afternoon. The ground stations have been doing a lot of talk about taking over the relay but they can't seem to get their stuff together. It hasn't worked for them yet.

I wish I could tell you about a lot of the stuff I hear on the radios. It's pretty interesting. But this is full cipher operation and all that cool stuff is classified.

That's it.

Rick

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