SOUTHEAST ASIAN INVOLVEMENT
What was your involvement in the Vietnam War?
My little involvement with the Vietnam area, or era was when we would fly down from Japan, I was in Japan at the time for a deployment for six months. We would fly down to the Philippines Islands and out of the Philippines we would fly our patrols in the Gulf of Tonkin. And we would be flying up and down the coast of South and North Vietnam. And we would do radar surveillance and visual surveillance of everything that was kinda happening in the Gulf of Tonkin off the coast, keep track of all the ships, see if they looked subversive or whatever, warships or whatever and just put them into the command control center, that information. So that was basically my involvement in the Vietnam War.
Tell us about what you saw in the Philippines
I can tell you that what little we did get out in town to have a cold beer or whatever, it was a rude awakening for somebody who had never been out in the world very much because you would walk across the – we’d walk out the front gate and go into town which was right next to the gate.
You would see all these, I’m sure they were poor, but, kids, just little kids walking around bare feet and shorts and a little tee shirt maybe and the dirt streets and things like that.
Oh one other thing I am thinking about is when we would land in the Philippines, it was at a base called Sangley Point, it was across the Manila Bay from the town of Manila. We’d land there and we’d clean out our airplane from our box lunches and things that we had and our garbage. We’d throw them into trash cans that were alongside the runway and you’d watch these little Philippines kids, poor little kids. They’d go head first into these 50 gallon dumps looking for an apple core or whatever. Just to get something to eat or salvage something whatever it would be. That was a rude awakening for me, I had never seen that before.
So, we did the same thing one time we went for an R-n-R trip over to Hong Kong for 5 days. Same thing happened in Hong Kong. We went around to the, one day we stopped at the, what they call a floating restaurant in Hong Kong. Which is a very famous big boat that is a restaurant and you take a little kinda small ferry boat that would hold like 5 or 6 people over into the bay to get onto this boat to have your dinner. And all these little kids in the sand pans these families, and you would look down and the whole family would live on this little sand pan boat. They would have a fire there on the boat all the kids they would live, born and died there I guess.
But, a lot of the tourists there would take a coin and throw it into the water and these little kids would dive into this very murky water to try and retrieve these coins. The water was not clean water, I’m sure all their sewage and everything would just dump right into this Bay. So it was very icky to think about these little kids doing that.