Vietnam Photo--Tugboat

Lots of traffic on the river. 
 

Vietnam Photos--Street Scene

 This would be another photo from somewhere in Saigon.

Vietnam Photo--Houses

 

Vietnam Photo-River Scene

 IIRC we went over a bridge or two and by a river on the route from Saigon to Long Binh. Always interesting. 

Vietnam Photo--Men of the 69th Signal

Here's Thorn, seen earlier eating a brownie, and Dave Williams, seen earlier with me getting ready for R&R. 

Unfortunately I flipped the slide when I scanned it, as you can tell when trying to read his name.

A group of us in the barracks.

 A picture of me outside the MARS (Military Amateur Radio System, which provided radio calls back to the world) site for which the 69th Signal men were providing electricity.  The line of vision is towards Bien Hoa airbase, site of a Vietcong attack on amunition dumps.  The sandbagged bunker behind me was significant in my memory. 

Vietnam Photo--Men of the 69th

 I believe he's eating from a Care package my mom sent.

Vietnam Photo-Cathedral

 

This was in Saigon; I'm assuming a Catholic cathedral. Ngo Dinh Diem, the president of South Vietnam after the 1954 settlement which ended France's colonial rule, was a Catholic.

Vietnam Photo--Street Scene

I liked the conjunction of the traffic mostly of bicycles with the Esso station. This would have been in the outskirts of Saigon, IIRC.

Vietnam Photo

 This was a building in downtown Saigon. We didn't often drive through the city. When I first arrived in Vietnam before I got the camera, when I was running a generator it was at the MAC-V headquarters, IIRC. 

Vietnam Photo

 

I don't know any background to this statue--who or what it memorialized. Given the location and the time, my interpretation is it honors Vietnamese soldiers who fought for the French or the Republic of Vietnam (i.e. South Vietnam).

Vietnam Transport

 Many of the photos I shot were during trips between Long Binh and the company's HQ near Tan Son Nhut.  All were 35 mm slides; I forget the type of film but many didn't hold their color so I've tried to adjust using Google Photo tools.

Changes in the Blog--Vietnam

 Over the years this blog has changed some.  Without going back and reading early posts, I think I wrote extensively on FSA/USDA, a focus which has declined over the years.  I think I've always been cautious about offering opinions, but I've become more political over the last 5 years or so.  I've rarely discussed personal matters. 

I'm changing a bit--having started to review some of the photographs I accumulated over the years I think some might find them interesting, particularly those from Nam.

I may have mentioned I spent 11 months 11 days in Vietnam during 1966-67 as a generator operator assigned to the 69th Signal Battalion. Shortly after I arrived I bought a SLR Pentax and started taking some picture. My company HQ was at Tan son nhut (airport)  in Saigon, but by this time I was stationed at Long Binh, a logistics base some 12 miles northeast of Saigon. My group ran generators for a communications center, which was located a bit outside the base's perimeter (I think; ignorance of the bigger picture was standard in the Army then).

This was late in my tour, as the communication center has now been enclosed in a building.  I'm reading (not sure who snapped the photo) by one of the two generators.