When Sergeant First Class Chuck Carroll became the platoon sergeant, he opined that it was a shame to have the South China Sea so close at hand and to not have a boat. If we were in from the field, we usually spent Sundays at the beach, anyway. Through a group effort, that problem was solved.
Mike Thompson, Jim Graves and a couple of others took a 2 1/2-ton truck to a Vietnamese supply point. They stopped at the gate, showed the Vietnamese guard a set of travel orders and pointed to a stack of pontoon boats. He waved them in, and they loaded one of them onto the truck. Just for good measure and to make it all ‘official,’ they had the gate guard initial the travel orders on their way out. I have heard other versions of this that say a trade of some sort was made, but this is the first-hand version.
The next task was to make improvements to the basic pontoon boat, which some would say resembled an aluminum whaler. Where the materials came from either is lost to history or was never disclosed. There was certainly some of that ‘augmentation’ going on somewhere. The boat got a plywood deck and cabin on the front, complete with roof and a windshield from somebody’s ¾-ton truck. They got someone in the 313th motor pool to weld them up a trailer, and someone went to Cam Ranh and traded two sundry packs for two 25 horsepower outboard motors. Where the sundry packs came from is one of those many supply mysteries, as they were not issued to units such as ours. (A sundry pack contained ten cartons of cigarettes, candy, razors and other niceties which were not otherwise available in the jungle.)
So, the platoon had a boat with motors and a trailer with no wheels. Larry Marty and someone were driving past the airstrip one day and spotted an unattended flight line fire extinguisher, the kind that is towed behind a truck. They hooked it up and towed it behind their own truck, with the Air Police in lukewarm pursuit. The perps got the extinguisher into the storage room in the back of the club just before the APs came through the door to the club. After a couple of beers on the house, the APs left, and the Snake Platoon had wheels for their boat trailer. When the platoon left Nha Trang a couple of years later, the fire extinguisher was still sitting in the corner of the club. The boat was christened the “Helen Marie” after Chuck Carroll’s wife.
We got some recreational equipment from Special Services, and some other items were sent from home. There was a foot locker lined with a plastic poncho that, with some ice purchased in town, served as a substantial cooler. Besides just riding around, there was also snorkeling, fishing and even water skiing. War is hell, after all.
Soon after the Helen Marie was determined to be seaworthy, several of the platoon’s leadership were out on her in the South China Sea. Captain Richard Sakamoto took off his glasses and jumped in to see if he could touch bottom. As he neared the bottom in the clear water, he reached out to touch what he thought was a brown rock. In response to the instant pain and gushing of blood from his arm, he returned to the surface, where he learned that the brown rock was actually a sea urchin. After bandaging the wound, Sam Kemp suggested he should try again now that he knew what to expect. He passed; he didn’t want to get his new bandage wet.
Later someone traded a bottle of liquor, which probably cost about three bucks, to an Air Force NCO for a sailboat. It was one that you sit on top of rather than inside of, had a capacity of 4 or 5 guys, and had an iron keel that slipped through a slot in the hull. At least it did have an iron keel. One day the sailboat flipped onto its side one Sunday afternoon and the keel slipped the wrong way through its slot. Gravity took it to the bottom of the sea. The Helen Marie was in the area and towed the castaways back in towards the beach. Somebody tried to replace the keel with one cut from plywood, but that did not work, so the sailboat just sat in the yard for the duration.
They also traded another bottle, again on the Air Base, for a runabout, but they never got it in working order. I’m not even sure that they ever tried to.
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