The 2017 golf tournament of the USMCCCA Foundation (Florida Chapter) will be held Friday, April 28 with a 12:30 p.m. shotgun start at the Sherman Hills Golf Club, near Brooksville, Fla. The Tournament, now in its 13th year, enables the USMCCCA Foundation to provide grants for the Injured Marines Semper Read more…
Dale Dye returns from Vietnam.
By Dale Dye
It’s time to sober up and evaluate this thing. Back here in The World there’s a little elbow room, a little space that’s not filled with specters of an old and controversial war. There’s been a day or two to fight through the roiling brain mists that engulfed most of us on the return engagement to Vietnam, so there’s no balm in shirking. What we need now are insights and inspirations, florid vocabulary that will instantly and accurately convey the nature and depth of strange, otherworldly sensations. What we need is a nuclear detonation of trenchant phrasing to describe the raw emotions we felt practically every waking moment during our return to ancient battlefields in a country long past the war that nearly destroyed it fifty years ago.
Indeed. But as Jon Fogarty fronting CCR reminds me, I ain’t no fortunate son. So we’re doomed to take it as it comes. And what comes first for those of us who last saw Vietnam as a war-ravaged third-world country is an instant realization that the societal worm has turned in Southeast Asia. You can call it the triumph of capitalism, you can call it empirical evidence that communism is, was, and always will be a failed social model for everything except UN desk-pounding and May Day Parades. What you can’t deny – assuming even a modicum of objectivity – is that the Vietnamese are generally thriving and pounding down the road to a commerce-based meritocracy.
Dale Dye and Mike Stokey at RVN cemetery. Photo by John Riedy
by Dale Dye
Day Four of The Great Ghost Chase gives me a case of the staggering willies even before the bus rolls out of Danang headed north on Vietnamese Highway 1. Our course runs through the once-infamous Hai Van Pass that meanders as it climbs toward the far north. Then – somewhere up around 1500 feet – it twists into a series of radical switchbacks. And it’s up there where the road contorts like Lawrence Welk’s old accordion (okay…google it…he used to be a popular polka music guy on early American TV) right up around that point is where the North Vietnamese Army used to ambush truck convoys from the jungle-covered high ground above the Hai Van Pass. The convoys were called Roughriders with machine gun-festooned gun trucks rolling at front and rear of the cargo haulers. Marine Corps Combat Correspondents hitchhiking rides up to infantry units in areas like Phu Bai, Hue, Quang Tri and other killing fields closer to the DMZ hated the Roughriders. Granted riding a Roughrider was easier than humping hills but those heavy machine guns doing recon-by-fire played hell with nap time.
Our bus has no machine guns but there is a bad-ass dragon amulet swinging from the rear view mirror, so we figure it’s OK to relax. And when that happens war stories come bubbling up like swamp gas. Nobody wants to talk about the blood and guts stuff. Or if they do nobody is going to listen very long. That’s the kind of thing that makes you wheeze, gag and moan with night-sweats. Better to focus on the funny stuff…like the tine you were stranded with a broken down six-by overnight at the Hai Van Pass with only a .45 pistol and a bent tire iron to fight off hordes of marauding enemy. Yeah…well, maybe it wasn’t hordes. Maybe it was a couple of rock apes that scared the hell out of you and refused to retreat despite firing off every round of your pistol ammo and then grabbing the tire-iron from the panicky driver to do close-quarters battle with mountain specters. I’ve heard it all before, so it’s easy to tune out and contemplate some of the mysteries that confront us on this return to Vietnam after a half-decade of swearing we’d never return to the Land of the Lotus Eaters, The Nam where we all first learned to embrace the suck. (more…)
1st Division ISO Snuffies:(l-r) Eric Grimm, Richard Lavers, Robert Bayer, Michael Stokey, Frank Wiley, Dale Dye. (Or as Julia Dye knows them, Rafter Man, Rick, Ding, The ARVN, Lurch, and Daddy D.A.). Not shown is Steve Berntson. Photo by John Riedy.
(Ed. Note: Dale Dye and other CC “Snuffys” returned to Vietnam this week. This is Dale’s first installment):
An emergency room physician circulated among the survivors. His diagnosis was quick and easy: Terminal culture shock. If the moment had been some jangled parsec in the psychedelic sixties he’d have called it a bad acid trip, but the Doc knew where and when he was even if the shocked Veterans kept claiming if couldn’t be Vietnam, the war-ravaged turbulent country they’d left behind nearly 50 years before.
It started the moment they began to unwind from 17 hours jammed inside a turbo-jet tin can that roared out of Los Angeles, through Hong Kong and into Danang, headquarters of their old 1st Marine Division where most of them served as Combat Correspondents in the bloody gut of the Vietnam War at various times ranging from 1965 to 1970. Giving them the bored bureaucrat stare at passport control were guys in familiar olive-green uniforms festooned with red collar tabs. The last place most of them had been so close to uniforms like that was up on the Demilitarized Zone—at places like Con Thien, The Rockpile, and Khe Sanh. Back then the uniformed Vietnamese were carrying AK-47s rather than rubber immigration stamps.
If you read the January Leatherneck (and you should have) there was a piece on AllMarineRadio which was fascinating. You watch/listen on your computer/iPad/i/phone/tablet, et al. I contacted Mike McNamara thinking he would be an interesting addition to our San Diego conference as he lives in the area. He will Read more…
Thanks to CC Cid Atwood we learned that globetrotting Bob McEwen was hospitalized in Bangkok and had to be flown home in an aerial ambulance. We checked in with Bob’s daughter Megan Britt, and received the following info: Hi Jack – Against my wishes, Dad and a friend were on Read more…
CAMP PENDLETON — With sought-after strategy comms expert Helio “Fred” Garcia among the speakers, the First Marine Expeditionary Force public affairs office convened its second annual Communications Summit at Camp Pendleton earlier this week. MEF PAO Lt. Col. Chris Perrine credited his deputy, Maj. Staci Reidinger, with pushing the concept Read more…
On The Road: Past USMCCCA President and current Conference Emcee Fred Lash (standing) and wife, Donna (r), were lunch guests of National USMCCCA Executive Director Jack Paxton (2nd from l) and his wife, Pat on Sunday in the Villages, FL. Fred and Donna, Springfield, VA were on the way to Read more…
HOMETOWN BARBER IS NEWEST MEMBER — Ray Adams, a combat correspondent at Camp Lejeune and on Okinawa in the late 1980s, retired from the Corps after a successful line recruiter tour in 1998. Now, he cuts hair in national president Keith Oliver‘s hometown of Eustis, Fla. Ray well remembers working Read more…
Chuck Beveridge
Chuck Beveridge, ‘laissez les bons temps rouler!’
One of my personal heros, Chuck Beveridge, passed away just a day before the 241st birthday of his beloved Marine Corps last November at age 90.
At the time I met Chuck, Mike LaBonne, Sally Pritchett, Bill Rowe, Charley Rowe, Angie Peraza, Angel Arroyo, Daryl Bennett, Mike Waters, Mike Rosas and a host of other Jarheads were running the nationwide Toys For Tots campaign from the 4th Marine Division/Wing Headquarters office in the 9th Ward of the Crescent City. We were located right next to one of those levies that gave way during Katrina.
The city was dirty, violent, wildly adventurous, filled with tourist traps and local joints known only to Gods and Cajuns. Chuck fit right in.
He was a living legend to us youngsters back then since most of us never knew an Iwo Jima “graduate” and, while he was all that, Chuck was also self-effacing, gregarious, creative as hell, a businessman with a great sense of humor and his own man living by his own rules.
What did we know about the Old Corps? As it turned out, nothing. Chuck broke the mold of the by-the-book Marines running our lives back then. He wasn’t a ‘Nam vet and he wasn’t some pompous ass flaunting heroics of a bygone era, though he certainly could have been had he chosen that route. After all, we were impressionable kids without knowledge of the hell he went through on Iwo and other island hoping campaigns in the Pacific Theater.