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The Battalion

Like Most Seabee Outfits, Seventy-One had about 800 men, enlisted and officers. There were five Companies: Alpha, Bravo, Charley, Delta and H, or Headquarters.

     Alpha, our largest Company, includes dozer, scraper and grader operators, truck drivers, mechanics, rock drillers, quarrymen, asphalt and cement plant operators and road builders. Alpha Company also provided our base security once in country, with the guys standing 4-hour watches at night, at machine gun position around our permitter.

     Bravo, Charley and Delta Companies were made up of builders, utility men, steel workers, and other construction rates. These guys built vertical projects out concrete, wood and steel. They would be cutting up 2 by 4s, nailing up plywood, erecting steel building and installing metal roofs; they’d be rigged com wire, putting in electrical systems and lighting, fixing air conditioners and the generating and refrigeration plants.

     Most of the men, some 80%, in A, B, C and D companies were DPPOs, Direct Procurement Petty Officers. I’ll tell you about these chaps in a minute.

     Hotel Company, Headquarters, HQ,  would be full of men who had come from the fleet, from the regular going-to-sea Navy. They included: yeoman, personnel men, postal clerks, bursars, barbers, storekeepers,

cooks, corpsmen, even a journalist. Some of these fleet rates had no idea of what MCB meant on their orders. Could have been Nuclear Missile Command Boat or Naval Mine Control Boat?  They found out the minute they stepped off the bus in front of the Seabee sign at Davisville.

There were three distinct groups of personnel in our Seabee outfit: The officers, about 20-plus to them. They included Ensigns who had just finished OCS or an ROC program, and were as green as the rest of us. The older officers who ran things included Lieutenants Junior Grade (LTJG) Lieutenants (LT), Lieutenant Commanders (LCDR) and two Commanders (CDR), the CO and XO.

     Chiefs, these are older enlisted men who had been in the Navy for ages–there were about ten of them. They ran the companies and teams in the field. Then there were the rest of us enlisted guys (E2 and E3), from non-rated to Third, Second and First Class Petty Officers, (E-4, 5 and 6).

     We also had a Marine “Gunny,” a Marine Gunnery Sergeant, whose job it was to overseen our combat readiness, the unity’s weapons, security bunkers, convoys and the military side of our unit. Not only do the Seabees build things in a combat war zone, they are also training to defend themselves and what they build.

Seabee71 Companies march past the barracks in Davisville, RI, the fall of 1966.