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derivative filename/jpeg
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363-03960 to 363-03965.pdf
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Digital Object Identifier
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363-03960 to 363-03965
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Title
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From Iwo to Da Nang Continuing Seabee Saga
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Description
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Reprint of a National Observer article titled "From Iwo to Da Nang Continuing Seabee Saga: With Their Old Friends, the Marines, They Battle Enemy While Building Bases" for a Seabees press release
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Date
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1966, June 27
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Subject
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United States. Navy. Seabees; Vietnam War, 1961-1977; Construction projects; National observer
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Location
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Washington, D.C.
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Coordinates
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38.9072; -77.0369
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Container
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B65, F12
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Format
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press releases
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Collection Number
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MS 363
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Collection Title
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Beverly Deepe Keever, Journalism Papers
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Creator
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United States. Navy. Seabees
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Collector
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Keever, Beverly Deepe
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Copyright Information
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These images are for educational use only. To inquire about usage or publication, please contact Archives & Special Collections.
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Publisher
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Archives & Special Collections
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Language
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English
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extracted text
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UNITED STATES NAVY
CONSTRUCTION BATTALIONS
CIVIL ENGINEER CORPS
100TH ANNIVERSARY
MARCH 2, 1967
SEABEES
IN
ACTION
SEABEES
25TH ANNIVERSARY
MARCH 5, 1967
"No problem, sir,
The Seabees are smoking cigars!"
I
THE NATIONAL OBSERVER - 27 JUNE 19661
DEPARTMENT OF THE NAVY
NAVAL FACILITIES ENGINEERING COMMAND
MILITARY READINESS - SEABEES - CODE 06A
WASHINGTON, 0. C., 20390
202 OXFORD 77177, 77178
U.S. NAVY CONSTRUCTION BATTALIONS
"CONSTRUIMUS, BATUIMUS- WE BUILD, WE FIGHT"
" CAN DO !"
CIVIL ENGINE CORPS
100TH AN ERSARY
MARCH 2, 1967
THE NJJTIONJJL OBSERVER
Vol. 5, No. 26
MONDAY, JUNE 27, 1966
'Boom Boom' Schloesser: Grizzled pro.
He's
q6 and
SEABEES
25TH ANNIVERSARY
MARCH 5, 1967
Price 25 Cents
a great-grandfather.
From lwo to Da Nang;
Continuing Seabee Saga
A Seabee who recalls lwo Jima.
a rock crusher, read: "Your tax dollars
at work. This road built by the seabees
for the convenience aml comfort of the
United States Marines ."
S~den,1.y a shiny clean Huey hel!copte · swooped down in their midst in
a s rl of hot dust. Out stepped Lieut.
D A NANG, SOUTH VIETN AM.
Gen. Victor H. Krulak, commander of the
Not long ago, some grimy, shirtless sea- Fleet Marine Force, Pacific, who had
bees here were carving a road through come to inspect the Hawk antiaircraft
dense jungle growth near the crest of Mon- batteries on the mountain and to check
key Mountain, a sheer, 2,ooo-foot peak on the road's progress.
named for the outsized baboons who prowl
After a quick briefing, the general sinits flanks, along with Viet Cong probers. It gled out a young Seabee on the edge of
was 130 degrees Fahrenheit in the bak- the group and asked with a straight
ing sun, and perspiration was streaming face : "How do you tell these Seabees
from the Seabees' salt-caked backs. Their ,..f.r,_om~,.th.e.,b.a;;;b,ioo.o..
n.,
s?.,'.,'...,...,_....,_ _ __...
weapons, as always, were close at hand.
"No problem, sir," the Seabee shot
A crudely lettered sign, propped beside back. "The Seabees__,;_;__;_.;;;;..;;,;,::;,,;;,;;,;,;...are smoking cigars."
With Their Old Friends, the Marines,
They Battle Enemy While Building Bases
The admiral just dropped around
to chat the other n ight.
Sai d he, 'Now boys you're here to work,
but you've been trained to fight.
So i f there's any trouble, don't stop
t o put on your jeans . . •
Just drop your t ools and grab your guns
-and protect those poor Marines/'
-OLD SEABEE SONG
_____
.__
CD
The Primary Job
Seabee skipper, 'Andy' Anderson.
The general looked arouna him : Every
Seabee in sight was smoking a cigar.
The general smiled, climbed into his
Huey and was gone.
'Rough, Tough, Loyal'
The young man's insouciance was 1n
the best Seabee tradition. During the second World War, Rear Adm. o. o.
"Scrappy" Kessing said of the Seabees:
"They're a rough, tough, loyal, efficient
bunch of men who don't give a damn
for anything but doing the job and getting the war over."
The same can be said of the 5,000
Seabees here in South Vietnam who have
been quietly building a reputation as hard
workers and hard fighters (one Seabee
has been nominated for the Medal of
Honor); for being, like their forerunners,
masters of improvisation and "scroungers" of materials and equipment to get
the job done.
Seabee enlisted men are members of
the U.S. Navy's Mobile Construction Battalions or "MCBs," of which there are
seven in South Vietnam: Four here in
Da Nang, two in Chu Lai, and one in
Phu Bai. There are also a number of
Seabee technical assistance teams-"the
Navy's Peace Corps"-eomposed of one
officer and 12 enlisted men, working in
isolated hamlets, building bridges, digging wells, training the villagers 1n construction techniques, and carrying out
other civic-action programs.
These Mobile Construction Battalions
are self-sufficient units geared to move
at a moment's notice: They contain their
own medics, paymasters, chaplains, and
the like; they carry their own light.
construction equipment and weaponry.
Once the battalion reaches a job site,
they dig and man their own bunkers,
they patrol, and fight beside other U.S.
troops when the occasion calls. Their primary mission, however, ls to build: Air
strips, piers, cantonments, roads, field
hospitals, covered storage areas.
Each Seabee-be he steamfitter, steel
worker, "construction stiff," plumbermust undergo Marine combat training so
that he can, if he must, fight to protect
what he builds. Partly because of this,
the Seabee enlisted man more closely resembles. the U.S. Marine than he does his
counterpart in the fleet Navy. Then
again, the Seabees' comradeship with the
Marines has deep roots, stemming back
to the violent island battles of the South
Pacific during the last World War. Theirs
is an enthusjp.stic mutual admiration
society.
Early In May of 1965, Seabees landed
with the Marines on the blinding hot
sands south of here, at a spot the Marines were to name Chu Lai. Working
night and day, the Seabees laid down
a tactical airstrip of aluminum planking.
Within three weeks. Marihe fighter planes
were whistling dO\Yil the metal runway.
screaming into the air just above the
heads of Seabees toiling at the far end.
Because dysentery is such a serious
problem, the Marines try to establish.
whenever possible, temporary, cementfloored mess facilities, even in the midst
of search-and-clear operations. Consequently, the Seabees often find themselves building these pedestrian structures while fire fights rage all around
them.
A few weeks ago, a group of Seabees
volunteered for such an assignment in
the foothills north of Chu Lai where the
1st Battalion, 5th Marines, was heavily
engaged with the enemy.
Tanned from a working vacation.
-National Observer photographs by Peter T. Chew
Eyes on the Viet Cong.
'Everything Was Going Off'
"Our second morning on the job, the
Marines trapped 200 Viet Cong on the
far side of the hill where we were )>Uilding the galley," recalls Bill Haven, a
Seabee builder first class. "From 8:30
till noon, everything was going off: Mortars, recoilless rifles, howitzers. I had
trouble with the- men-they kept wanting
to lay down their hammers and get in
the action."
Haven is a tough 21-year Seahee vet-·
eran from Bluefield, Va., with a chiseled
face turned black-tan by the sun. Yet
even for the likes of Haven, the heat
was almost unbearable on top of the tinroofed structure at high noon.
"We took dozens of salt tablets all day
long and every night our backs were
white with salt crust."
Ensign John Wilkinson tells of leading
a Seabee work gang to repair an eroding
air strip at Kham Due, a U.S. Army
Special Forces camp 60 miles west of Chu
Lai, near the Laotian border.
"I had read every word of The Green
Berets," said the spirited young officer,
CD
"
The motto is only the truth.
" and Kham Due was it ir, e very detail :
A triangular-shaped fort with sandbagged
walls nestled in a little valley high up
in the mountains with peaks sticking up
on all sides.
" We dug in with some Nung guards
outside the main camp. It was foggy for
the first few hours every morning and
it was rather hairy out there when there
was firing. In order to get sand for the
runway, we had to drive down the mountainside to a stream bed. First we put
out guards in the bushes all the way
down. Then we 'd race down, load the
sand as fast as we could, and come flying back up."
Ensign Wilkinson and his men completed the job in three weeks, digging
mortar pits and extra-deep bunkers for
the Special Forces' men in what little
spare time they ·had.
In March of last year, there were 500
U.S. Marines in South Vietnam, controlling
an eight-square-mile region around the
airstrip here. Today the more than 50,000 Marines of Gen. Lewis Walt's 3rd
Amphibious Force control hundreds of
square miles, including the mass of the
population that lives along the coast.
To support these men, four Seabee battalions of Capt . Nelson R. "Andy" Anderson 's 30th Naval Construction Regi-
ment. (plus private contractors) are fast
transforming the port of Da Nang.
The U.S. Naval Support Activity, a
logistical unit, will spend nearly $100,000,000 in Da Nang this year, dredging
three deep-water piers, constructing LST
ramps in the Tourane River, building
acre upon acre of Butler building covered storage areas.
You find Seabees everywhere you look,
involved in an infinite variety of jobs.
At the base of a high, bunker-laced hill,
which gets constant Viet Cong attention
on the far side, Seabees are building a
6,000-man amphitheater, a 1,000-man motion picture theater, an enormous swimming pool, Post Exchange, and other recreational facilities for the Marines fi ghting nearby. The Seabees have built a
400-bed air-conditioned field hospital, Butler buildings, mess halls, " hard-back"
tents by the hundreds, LST piers.
The Nightly Forays
Chief Petty Officer Claire Hazen, Jr.,
of Mobile Construction Battalion 10, was
working last week with a group of men
in one of the hottest spots hereabouts,
headquarters of 2nd Battalion, 9th Marine
Regiment, which sits in a patch of woods
13 miles south of Da Nang.
Every night the Viet Cong slip in and
mine the dusty dirt road that winds from
Route 1 to the headquarters. And every
morning, the Marines sweep the road and
dig out the mines. Even so, mines have
blown up two trucks and a generator, ana
partially disabfed a tank m recent weeks.
The headquarters area is a nastylooking place , pocked with holes leading
to underground tunnels that were once
used by the Viet Cong. When the Marines,
took possession, they removed six booby
traps, and the men still move cautiously
down the center of the paths.
Two huge Marine tanks stand a quarter-mile away along another woodline,
their barrels facing a sweep of open fields
where most of the Viet Cong harassment,
has been comipg from . Yet there they
were the other afternoon : Hazen and his
men, hammering and sawing away in the
bright sunshine, constructing tropical huts,
shower facilities, and a mess hall, creating a little enclave of sanity and permanence for the Marines.
"As soon as we get the floors down,"
Hazen noted with satisfaction, "the
Marines move in off the groLnd; they
don 't wait for. us to get the roofs on."
'Subject to Sniper Fire'
A Seabee flag floats over Vietnam .
" Each of these hamlrt ~ arouncl here.
I'd say, has 2 or 3 or maybe 10 or 12
Viet Cong," said the colonel. "We just
killed seven of them today. How do we
know they are Viet Cong? The only way
we can tell they' re VC is if they commit
a hostile act. When they shoot at us, we
consider that a hostile act. In the daytime, we give them the first shot."
The colonel, an unsmiling, serious man,
turned toward Chief Hazen. " The Seabees
are doing a fabulous job for us. No other
way to describe it."
Chief Hazen, mightily pleased, went
back to work.
Another Seabee unit, Mobile Construction Battalion 1, which occupies a beautiful white sand beach on Da Nang Bay, has
had some interesting times lately. By
day they work, by night they man the
bunkers and watch towers that ring their
compound. Today's Seabees are far
younger than their forerunners In the last
war-they average about 23 years of age
-and some of the Seabees In these bunkers must still be In their teens.
Ready for an Attack
Just about every night, the Marines'
"Whisky" and " Kilo" artillery batteries
nearby shell the ridgeline of an adjoining
mountain . Flares arc through the air. On
the crest of one of the hills last week
camped a gang of Seabees from MCB 1,
there to build a Hawk missile site for the
Marines. The two Marine batteries have
them bracketed so that they can have immediate fire support in event of a Viet
Cong attack.
The other day, the men of MCB 1 wi tnessed a characteristically ghastly little
incident of Viet Cong terrorism. Seabee
Lieut. Frank Adkins describes it this way:
"About 3:30 a.m. , we heard explosions
in the trash dump outside the gates where
there are one or two pieces of equipment.
Three ARVN soldiers were living out there
in a tent with a 17-year-old mentally retarded boy.
"The Cong slipped out of the hills ,
caught the four guys sleeping, and th rew
grenades under their cots. The blast killed
them all, throwing one through the air,
his undersides torn out.
"We found the 17-year-old about eight
paces outside the tent, lying face down in
the mud. His elbow looked as thou gh a
meat cleaver had carved it off.
"One of the ARVN had taken grenade
fragments in the head and chest : He had
four separate holes in his forehead-as
though someone had driven them with a
ballpoint pen.
"It had been raining, and when we
reached them, the nlood had collected in
a concave section of tin; it was drippinis
like a pink waterfall. The first of ou r
guys to reach the scene got sick. There
were four dud Chinese grenades lying
about. It all happened so quickly. The
vc got away."
' Chief Hazen and his men live In tents,
with slit trenches nearby, into which they
dive when sniper fire gets intense . "We
are subject to sniper fire all the time ,"
he says. "The Marines are making a big
sweep."
Lieut. col. William F . Donahue, the
Virginian who commands the Marine unit,
relaxed on a makeshift chair in the old
stone house that serves as his HQ. He
Help for the Villagers
was wearing a T-shirt and fatigue trouThe Seabees cannot figure out the Viet
sers. In one corner, a creaky old fan
sti.rred up the muggy air.
f'"ng's re asoning: E xcept th~ t the Sea-~
CD
-- NatioMl Oh~erver photographs by Pet~r T. f"hew
Seahee equipment rolls ashore from landing craft at the big U.S. Marine ba se at Dn Nang .
bees and the Marines have grown close
to the people in the local villages through
their civic-action programs. The Marines
are treating the villagers for bubonic
plague, which is nearing epidemic proportions. The Seabee doctor and dentist
of MCB 1 also take care of the local people, and the South Vietnamese appear to
appreciate it. Perhaps the Viet Cong were
trying to tell the villagers something.
Every morning a little South Vietnamese boy and his sister join a bunch of
other children by the camp wire fence to
ask for candy and food, and to joke with
the Seabees. "Their left hands were cut
off by the Viet Cong," says Lieutenant
Adkins, "because their parents refused
to pay their •taxes.' "
For all their hard work, the occasiona I
grisly JJ.ttle vignettes of terror and suffering they witness, and their moments under fire, the Seabees' spirit is high. Which
is even more remarkable when you consider that, as yet, they have no recreational facilities: Da Nang has been off.
limits for months.
One night last week, a group of MCB l
chief petty officers got together in a tPnt
beside the beach and broke out a few
cases of beer.
Most of them were in their late 40s or
mid-50s. (MCB 1 boasts one enlisted man,
Ray C. "Pappy" Crittendon, a Negro from
Richmond, Va., who is 66 years old, and a
great-grandfather. He was 42 years old
when he first joined the Seabees in 1942.1
There was Elbert "Boom Boom" Schloesser, a bearded, wise-cracking man whose
nickname derives from the fact that he ,
like Captain Anderson, was an underwater
demolition man during the last war, and
explosives are the love of his life. There
was Bob Teel and his monkey "Sam,"
who is quite a character in his own right.
Sam bares his teeth angrily at everyone
but Teel; he smokes cigarets and laps up
warm beer.
Time to Sing
There was Joe "Doc " Cassidy, a medical corpsman, and half a dozen others .
And they sang songs with verses like :
" Oh mother dear, won't you write our
congressman and get me out of this . .. ,"
and other songs whose words don't bear
repeating.
On a recent Sunday morning, Captain
Anderson drove me up Monkey Mountain
in his Jeep. The captain is wise and he
has seen a lot of war. I asked him how
this particular war was going. His answer
surprised me.
"If you want my personal opinion,
which is all I can give you-I'm not sure
we haven't already won it. You know the
British had it won in Malaya two years
before they realized it. Nobody comes out
of the bushes to tell you they're licked,
:·ou know. Now the situation could change
overnight, like it did in Korea. But I'm
not convinced that we can't starve 'em
out of the woods."
Then his sharp eye caught something
of more immediate moment-a rock
crusher by the side of the road that had
broken down. Like his Seabees, that rock
crusher is supposed to be operating seven
days a week. Some one would doubtless
get a rocket from the captain in the morning for not having it repaired.
It's to be hoped that '.lle Viet Cong,
peering through their binoculars at Captain Anderson's men hard at work, sometimes get discouraged. If they don 't, they
sl1nu]d.
-PF,TER
T.
The United States Navy Seabees warmly thank THE NATIONAL OBSERVER for permission to reprint this exclusive story !
CHEW
DEPARTMENT OF THE NAVY
NAVAL FACILITIES ENGINEERING COMMAND
MILITARY READINESS - SEABEES - CODE 06A
WASHINGTON, D. C., 20390
POSTAGE AND FEES PAID
DEPARTMENT OF THE NAVY
OFFICIAL BUSINESS
CIVIL ENGINEER CORPS
100TH ANNIVERSARY
MARCH 2, 1967
SEABEES
25TH ANNIVERSARY
MARCH 5, 1967
