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
Seabee71.com
Outside The Wire : The Vietnamese I Met
Stories and photographs of the towns, villages and the Vietnamese people.
Click on an image to open the gallery.
As a Navy Journalist, I was expected to produce photographs to accompany my stories for publication. But photography, for me, has always been more than just journalism, it’s been a way for me to see, to experience the world, to record a moment, trap an impression, make a quick sketch of something I want to study later--to make Art. I hope my images enlighten, inspire, provoke or touch the heart of the viewer. Photography provides me with an excuse to enter the lives and worlds of others, to experience life to a deeper level than the casual tourist. A photograph allows me, or any viewer, to study a scene, a face, a moment, to dig out information not seen on first glance. Good photographs do this, great photographs continually mystify and enchant. I have a few photographs on my wall that I've looked at for 50 years--they still reveal new information.
I'd taken on, as a personal mission, to photograph the people, villages, fields and families round our Chu Lai Military Complex. As I didn’t understand the Vietnamese language, it would have to be my photographs that told their story.
Here is a sample of my
Vietnamese portfolio from 1967.
A few miles south of the perimeter, we turned off Highway One onto an unmarked dirt path, heading east, back toward the sea. It was Sunday, an afternoon off, and a bunch of us Seabees were off on another adventure, exploring the villages around our base. We'd stopped at a small hamlet to buy bottles of Tiger Beer from a small shop. Whenever we stopped kids flocked around the jeep, climbing onboard, and all over us. They jabbered on in a mixture of Army English, French and Vietnamese.
“You want bang-bang my sister?”
“You number One Seabee. Souvenir me cigarette?”
The young girls stood back, while the boys kept up a rapid fire dialogue, their hands all over us, then a boy would scamper off with someone’s wrist watch.
“Hey! That little bugger! He took it right off my wrist! Hey you! Come back here you little thief! Chop-chop.” Giggles would spread throughout the entire herd of kids. Wherever we went the kids were trying to sell us their sisters, coconuts, palm frown woven bowls, Cokes.
We drove through nameless hamlets, nothing more than groupings of huts, past farmlands alongside the Tra Bong River, people bent over tending their rice paddies and livestock.
Just another day's work for the fishermen of Hon Tra, a small village at the mouth of the Tra Bong River.