If anyone knows the address of some of the other ordnance guys please let me know.

Jesse

A bomb dropped from one of the jets on take off. It bounced down the runway and over a Seabee on a grader. The Seabees stopped working and moved out of the way when there were flight ops after that event. I suspect the grader operator soiled his pants.

After take off the A-4s would fly out over the ocean and drop their used JATO bottles. There must be thousands out there on the bottom. This is a beautiful area. My wife and I visited 5 years ago. I really expect to see resorts there in the future. The beach was and is spectacular.

One night we were alerted by a number of explosions and many many flairs. Some VC had placed explosive charges in the tail pipes of a number of A-4s. As I remember the loss was 10 to 20 planes.

The field matting had to be redone a number of time because of damage. When the rain came some of the supporting Laterite under the matting turned out to be clay. The clay would soak up the water. When a plane touched down they would disapear in a cloud of spray and mud. This lead to laying the runway several more times. The matting was interlocking and would have to be relayed the whole 7,000' to repair. The Seabees eventually learned how to pull out sections replace the damaged panels with new panels and slide them back into positions.

One night one of the Jr. officers painted in large letters, "Seabees can do." The area commander did not like this, so that section was pulled and replaced; the sheet in random order so the message could not longer be read.

Our guys worked 10 to 12 hours or more a day and spend atleast 4 hours a night awake in defensive positions. As a dentist I did mostly emergency dentistry, I had a drill powered by a foot peddle. I served on a couple of medical evacuations when the wounded were too numerous for our hospital.

On one flight the air was pretty rough and a young wounded Marine told me he was about to get air sick. I looked around and could not find a basin. I said, "Here barf in my hat." He said, "Sir, I could never do that." I returned, "You always want to barf on an officers head, This is a close as you will ever get." He did and I washed out my hat in a wash basin in the back of the plane. He was in a litter and if he had got sick, so would all the rest of the wounded. You just do what you have to do.

We also went into surrounding villages, during the day to do people to people dentistry and medicine. The Marines were kind enough to send a rifle squad with us. This was very rudimentary dentistry; but some I am most proud of because we actually were saving lives, the infections were so bad.

This was a long time ago but the story needs to be told.