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Life in a Bee Hive . . .  Seabee-style.

Life at Camp Shields was not all bad . . .  in fact it was quite nice.

Here's a brief look at what life was like at our beach resort.

Camp Shields had everything any New Jersey or Cape Cod beach town had. Our village on the beach had a library, barber shop, three restaurants, four bars, a general store, three garages and a filling station, a water system, phone network with operators (male only), police force and even a small security army, a bank, school and all-denominational church, a bakery and post office, gift shop, garbage collection service and sewage system (the honey bucket team). We had a complete medical and dental facility, a taxi service of sorts, a travel agency, generator and ice plants, hardware store, supply and lumber yards, even our own beach-side resort. We even had our own weekly bulletins and a monthly newspaper.

     By mid-summer we had installed a powerful MARS short wave radio station, connecting our ‘Bees with their folks at home (more on this later).

     The barber shop, with two chairs and only one barber, was one of the few places in camp with air conditioning.  There was only one style of cut, short, but the shop was always full. I figured it was the air conditioning. Next door was a gift shop, run by a local Vietnamese business woman and her teenage daughters. They sold Vietnamese-made handicrafts, fabrics and Vietnamese clothing to send home as gifts.  You could drop off uniforms for an off-base Vietnamese tailor to make adjustments, sew on new rate insignias. There was a Korean laundry and dry cleaning service that would pick-up and drop-off twice a week. To that extent, it was like being at home.

     While we did complain, we had it a whole lot better than the grunts in the combat units. We got daily showers, three squares, a bar, and we didn’t get shot at—much. The Marines and Army soldiers had to hike into the bush with a 40-pound pack of equipment, carrying food and water for three days, maybe a week. They lived in the bush, no showers, trudging through muddy rice paddies. They slept on the ground, were eaten by bugs and leaches, dined on C-Rations, and drank muddy water that was supposedly “purified” with pills—Oh, and they also get shot at and blown-up.

     We all shared the heat, the noise, dust, the shits and the petty harassment from those above us.

     Life for a Seabee in our camp ain't half bad.

Click on one of the  photograph below to launch a slide show of our camp's luxurious facilities.