The Book:
SEABEE71
IN CHU LAI
A 350 page memoir of a Navy Journalist's 14 months with the Seabees.
Photographs and text copyright © 1967 and 2019 by David H. Lyman
This website is a companion to my memoir, Seabee71 In Chu Lai, published by McFarland Publishing in the fall of 2019.
The book, and this website, are an unofficial, un-authorized and at times irrelevant and irreverent look inside MCB-71, the Seabee Battalion I served with for 14 months, from August 1966 to early November 1967. Fifty years after returning from Vietnam, I've written this memoir in part to share with othjer Seabees and military personnel, and their families, what that war was like, for us.
This website includes short excerpts from the book, along with more photographs that I could fit into the book. I’ve added new material and stories from my fellow Seabees. The CO and XO’s son and daughter have each contributed a remembrance of their fathers. A few of the Seabees I served with have also added a few recollections.
You can see an outline of the chapters on "The Book" link above.
The book begins in 1963, when I joined the Naval Reserve to avoid the draft, and stay out of a fox hole in Vietnam. A few years later, 1967, that's exactly where I was, in Chu Lai, Vietnam—with a Seabee battalion.
But, before we get to Vietnam, the book follows Seventy-One through several months of training as the men bonded into teams and learn how to defend what they build. The Battalion arriving Vietnam in early April, followed by seven months of hot, grueling work in the summer of 1967.