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I still remember ‘Cinderella Foods’ from Georgia,” he says.īut he still carries the P-38 can opener used for Spam, the meatish canned food, and fondly recalls rock-hard hardtack biscuits called “John Wayne cookies.”ĭouglas says he was spit on at St. “It was good duty, edible food there, too. His company was attached to a stevedore unit, “very loosely,” he says. “We watched a movie that first night,” he says.Īt Vung Ro Bay, “we thought maybe we would take on provisions. Suddenly, there were hot showers for the exhausted soldiers, air-conditioning in the 100-degree weather, toilets that flushed and food that didn’t come right out of a can. Though the ship was listing in the storm as much as 25 degrees, Douglas says, bilge pumps soon cleared the well decks for bringing in amphibious vehicles. It was the USS Cabildo, a Navy dock landing ship, and it picked up the stranded soldiers. Waiting for rescue, they finally saw a speck on the horizon, growing slowly bigger. We fired out a few times because we knew Charley was out there,” Douglas said.ĭuring the South China Sea’s Typhoon Bess, tent poles swayed in the wind, and sand flew everywhere. You were on yellow alert, sometimes red alert,” he says. In World War II, soldiers saw an average of 40 days in combat.Īt Wunder Beach, “everywhere we went there was concertina wire. You had to.”ĭouglas cites figures that in Vietnam, soldiers served in combat an average of 240 days. “We were so young, we could have been nailed every time we went to the latrine,” he says. What was supposed to be a four-man crew became a two-man crew. “Like everything else the Army does, they overloaded it, carrying bombs and every kind of supplies,” he says. Once in Vietnam, Douglas manned a transport that was supposed to carry 60 tons per run. He said he was glad to join a transportation unit after going through amphibious engineering training in Virginia. “They asked me, ‘if your glasses washed overboard, you wouldn’t be able to navigate, would you?’ I didn’t want to go into Marine Corps and become a Marine corpse.”ĭouglas was interested in diesel engines, and an Army recruiter on South Neil Street in Champaign told him, “‘You know, the Army has a navy.’ It really piqued my interest.” The Rantoul native enlisted in December 1967 at 18, after first trying to get into the Coast Guard. His “Vietnam 365 and a wake-up,” to leave, ended with a transfer to military police, then a return to civilian life in a native land where the war had become increasingly unpopular.
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“For three days, the weather got worse day by day,” he recalls.Īt other times in the war, he delivered “everything from napalm to baby food” to troops just south of the North Vietnam border. Soldiers heated barely edible ham and lima beans on engine exhaust manifolds while hunkering down. Winds ripped through Army tents and shanties at 85 miles an hour in September 1968, Douglas recalls. Charles Sunder, whose men took the beach in 1968.ĭuring Typhoon Bess, the Wunder was going under. 4 Steve Douglas remembers about being stationed at logistics base “Wunder Beach” - nicknamed for Col. RANTOUL - You know you’re in a typhoon when you have to jam your knees into the sand just to stay upright.