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
Enter John Murphy—a fifty-plus year-old, former construction company owner back in the States. He’d re-enlisted in the Seabees as a IPO EO1, for only one purpose, to help the Vietnamese rebuild what the war was destroying. He got his wish. John lived in the villages where he worked, and I got him to write about the experience.
John Murphy lived in Tan Ky at the construction site for a few weeks. He rarely returned to camp, so every few days, a truck with building materials, supplies and Murphy’s food arrived from our base. I would often join these trips to photograph the progress and talk to Murphy into writing a story. His vivid reports, with my photographs, were in each month’s newspaper.
A few of our ‘Bees would volunteer to spend a Sunday at Tan Ky helping Murphy, but it was the Vietnamese villagers who were Murphy’s regular crew. Old women shoved sand, gravel, and cement into an ancient concrete mixer, then cart the wet mix to the foundation in pails. The kids pitched in, carting water in pails from the well to the site. The market took a weeks to complete, with a concrete floor, a thatched roof, and no walls.