South China Sea

Chapter Four



We left Cat Lo at day break the next morning, heading out into the South China Sea. We would be out of site of land for a time, so the Craft Master charted a course to the mouth of the other river (Mekong Tributary), the mouth of this river was nearly eight miles wide, and in some places less than five feet deep, and the mud underneath the water could have been 30ft deep, who knows.

On that morning the Boss, (Craft Master) said to me, “ Today you are going to learn how to steer by the Compass.” Now this compass was old, built probably in the early forties. Suspended in some kind of thick liquid, and she came around mighty slow, which meant that when the boat came around, you had to wait for the compass to catch up, and it was very easy to over compensate, and for that reason the wheel was on manual steering. About a mile out the seas got a little heavy, and we were not heading straight into the wind, consequently, every time we came up on a swell at an angle, the boat would slide off the swell, thus throwing us off course.

If you have ever tried to steer a car when the power steering goes out, then you have some idea of what it was like, heaving back and forth on that wheel. I was supposed be relieved after one hour, but he made me stay on the wheel all the way to the mouth of the other river, and by this time I was pretty much getting the hang of it, and plenty tired.

When we hit the brown water, I went on lookout, mostly to rest I think.

After about half an hour we came to a string of fish nets, anchored by bamboo stakes that looked to be stretched all the way across the river, but we were headed for a relatively small opening. On the left side of this opening was a straw hut mounted on stilts. There was nothing else for miles in any direction, but when we passed through the opening an extremely skinny old Vietnamese man dressed only in shorts came to the door of the hut, and waved to us, and we all waved back, except the man on the port .50, who had the gun pointed at him the whole time, but as far as I could tell, he was just a harmless old man. We passed him by and headed on up river. Awhile later as the river narrowed somewhat, we began to use landmarks as our bearings to stay in the deep water, and these landmarks had to be memorized for the next trip. Of course the Craft Master, and the guys who had made the trip many times before, already had, but the river was constantly changing, and once in awhile we would slide up over an underwater sandbar that we didn’t know was there. (I have a story about one of those times that happened about six months later while I was on the wheel).

Once in awhile there would be a very small village with the buildings on stilts right on the bank of the river. There would be small naked children running around, and women washing clothes in the river, but we saw very few men, and most of the ones we did see were old. We would sometimes speculate about where the young men were. Some thought that they were “Viet Cong” out somewhere fighting our people, and we watched these people very close, but they always waved to us, and we waved back.

Before dark we reached our next stop. We tied up at the PBR Pier, at the town of My Tho, (Pronounced “Me Toe”). We had our own winch & boom crane, so we unloaded their cargo of food and ammo.

When we were finished, we lit off the Webber Grills, and had New York Strip steaks with all the trimmings, and plenty of beer for supper.

(To be continued)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mekong_River