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The Seabees of 71 Learn How to Fight!

Crawling on frozen ground at the Davisville Training Center was far from what we would face in tropical Vietnam

The Marine Drill Instructors Camp LeJune help Alpha Company Equipment Operators master the M60 machine gun.

War Games in the North Carolina Woods.

A platoon of cold and shivering Seabees were lying on frozen ground squinting down the barrel of their M-14s, getting used to the sights on the barrel, the trigger pull, the kick, and noise. This was just one of hundreds of exercises we went through in preparation for our combat duty in Vietnam–a place as unlike this freezing gray New England landscape as one could imagine.

     As the units’ journalist, historian and scribe I had to complete this training with the rest of the men in the Hotel Company—but I got to carry along my camera. This two-week training was an introduction to the weapons of war. We learned how to heave M-61 grenade—and duck. We fired our rifles, the .45 caliber service pistol, grenades launchers. We learned to watch out for the back blast from a 3.5 anti-tank rocket launcher (Bazooka).  This firing exercise was the last day of Week One. Earlier that week found us in a classrooms back at the base, listening to and watching a Marine Sergeant show us how dismantle, clean and reassemble our own M-14’s and the  M-60 machine gun—until we could do it blind-folded. There were classes in combat formations, hand-to-hand combat, map reading, camouflage, silent hand commands, and lots of war stories by the sergeants who had recently returned from Vietnam.

The Seabees are a Navy unit, like the Marines. Most of the building the Seabees do is for the Marines, but in Vietnam, we would be building and repairing things for the US Army, Marines, Air Force, the Korean and Vietnamese Army, and the Vietnamese civilians in the villages near our base.

     Since, we would be in the combat zone, we might occasionally be called on to defend what we were building, as well as ourselves. So off we went to spend three weeks with the Marines in Camp LeJune, NC.  They knew how to fight.

     In January, the entire battalion boarded half a dozen C-130 transport planes and flew to the Marine’s training facility in North Carolina.  We left cold, snow-covered New England, looking forward to a balmy time in the South. We didn’t get it.  We were met with snow, rain, mud, and more cold. In the retelling of our LeJeune story at bars and future cocktail parties, these three weeks will take on glorious and grand proportions. Here is an accurate account of those January days in the southern pines of North Carolina—just for the record.

Welcome to Mudville. Basic Combat Training

Advanced Combat Training with the Marines

War Games in the North Carolina Woods

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Excerpts of stories from Seabee71 In Chu Lai