Tigers in Vietnam I was in Vietnam for only a year during the war and riding a river patrol boat, never saw a real tiger, but I did pick up tiger stories from some of the marine units we worked with. The NVA and Viet Cong were bad enough, but these poor jarheads also had… Read More
Tag: Vietnam
So much of our diesel submarine history will soon be edited down to data, numbers, and brief descriptions on Wikipedia. But the old converted World War Two fleet submarines were much more than that. Obsolete by todays standards, they were the first line of defense in the beginning of the cold war. Almost all were… Read More
My Return Home from Vietnam When I returned from Vietnam in 1969, I made three decisions. One was going to Woodstock instead of the “New York City Soul Festival”, another was getting out of the navy when my enlistment expired, and yet another was moving back to Detroit. Upon arriving in Detroit, there were other… Read More
How a submarine sailor ended up on a patrol boat in Vietnam During my tour on the USS Piper, the war in Vietnam escalated and became evening news. My next duty station was the USS Croaker, another GUPPY conversion. GUPPY stands for Greater Underwater Propulsion Power Program and was initiated by the United States Navy… Read More
Sea Store Cigarettes It’s no secret to us old salts that our survival kits usually included a pack of Lucky Strike or Camel cigarettes. Sometimes the packs were so old, the paper would have turned a dark yellow. In 1965, first during the U.S. Army’s Basic Training Course & later in Pre-Airborne Infantry Training, while… Read More
The President Is Dead Way back in 1963, while stationed on board the USS Piper, we pulled into the port of Djibouti, Africa as one of our scheduled Med cruise port calls. Djibouti, is a country located in the Horn of Africa in East Africa. It is bordered by Somalia in the south, Ethiopia in… Read More
Two true submarine stories… Once on the USS Piper back in 1962, we were operating with a group of navy SEALS. The SEALS had just been formed as a special forces group a year earlier from the navy Underwater Demolition Team or UDT. Usually the UDT teams were culled from the navy seabees or construction… Read More
