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Showing posts from May, 2017

From Long Island To Vietnam And Pete's Dirty Flathead

In Vietnam, I was a clerk for an Advisory Team , which was boring. Every chance I got, I'd volunteer for jobs that were dangerous. I was twenty years old, stupid, but I got to see some interesting shit. These are photos taken with SSG Thorsen, when he was advising troops from the 821st ARVN Ordinance . ARVN stands for Army Republic of Viet Nam. After a nightly attack, we would go out and look at the mortar tail fins, and burst patterns, and figure out where the attack came from. Sometimes, the Viet Cong would forget to pull out the safety pin on the mortar round, and the round would launch, impact, then dig itself far into the earth, unexploded. We would dig these out, and destroy them. This was EOD: Explosive Ordinance Disposal . We would also destroy damp and outdated explosives, and captured explosives. We would often put it all together, in a big pile, usually in a bomb crater, if one was available. We would place blocks of C-4, a high explosive, in strategic places on