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The Seabees of 71 Learn How to Fight!

Crawling on frozen ground at the Davisville Training Center was far from what we would face in tropical Vietnam

The Marine Drill Instructors Camp LeJune help Alpha Company Equipment Operators master the M60 machine gun.

War Games in the North Carolina Woods.

A platoon of cold and shivering Seabees were lying on frozen ground squinting down the barrel of their M-14s, getting used to the sights on the barrel, the trigger pull, the kick, and noise. This was just one of hundreds of exercises we went through in preparation for our combat duty in Vietnam–a place as unlike this freezing gray New England landscape as one could imagine.

     As the units’ journalist, historian and scribe I had to complete this training with the rest of the men in the Hotel Company—but I got to carry along my camera. This two-week training was an introduction to the weapons of war. We learned how to heave M-61 grenade—and duck. We fired our rifles, the .45 caliber service pistol, grenades launchers. We learned to watch out for the back blast from a 3.5 anti-tank rocket launcher (Bazooka).  This firing exercise was the last day of Week One. Earlier that week found us in a classrooms back at the base, listening to and watching a Marine Sergeant show us how dismantle, clean and reassemble our own M-14’s and the  M-60 machine gun—until we could do it blind-folded. There were classes in combat formations, hand-to-hand combat, map reading, camouflage, silent hand commands, and lots of war stories by the sergeants who had recently returned from Vietnam.


The Seabees are a Navy unit, like the Marines. Most of the building the Seabees do is for the Marines, but in Vietnam, we would be building and repairing things for the US Army, Marines, Air Force, the Korean and Vietnamese Army, and the Vietnamese civilians in the villages near our base.

     Since, we would be in the combat zone, we might occasionally be called on to defend what we were building, as well as ourselves. So off we went to spend three weeks with the Marines in Camp LeJune, NC.  They knew how to fight.

     In January, the entire battalion boarded half a dozen C-130 transport planes and flew to the Marine’s training facility in North Carolina.  We left cold, snow-covered New England, looking forward to a balmy time in the South. We didn’t get it.  We were met with snow, rain, mud, and more cold. In the retelling of our LeJeune story at bars and future cocktail parties, these three weeks will take on glorious and grand proportions. Here is an accurate account of those January days in the southern pines of North Carolina—just for the record.


Welcome to Mudville. Basic Combat Training

Advanced Combat Training with the Marines

War Games in the North Carolina Woods

Click on any photograph above to read and see more . . .

Excerpts of stories from Seabee71 In Chu Lai

The Book:

SEABEE71

IN CHU LAI

A 350 page memoir of a Navy Journalist's 14 months with the Seabees.

Photographs and text copyright © 1967 and 2019 by David H. Lyman

That afternoon, the battalion arrived at what was to be our campsite and we began setting up. I found a spot for my two-man tent and made camp. I dug a drainage trench around my tent, to keep any rain from getting inside and soaking my nice, warm, down-filled sleeping bag. I had an extra pair of dry socks, a fresh tee-shirt and my “douche kit.” I was all set.  

I pitched in to dig the latrine, a slit trench, what would serve as our public toilet. This was a ditch, a foot wide, 2 or 3 feet deep, by ten feet long—over which you straddled, your pants and skivvies down around your knees, hoping for the best. Once done, you were required to shovel some of the loose dirt over your deposit.  Revealing yourself over the slit trench was best done at night, for the privacy darkness

The first night we stood watch and waited for the enemy to attack. Nothing.          

     Our camp site had the air of a circus setting up. There was a perimeter to establish, machine gun nests to build, the EEGs and the RM’s, strung communications wire through the trees from the CP, (Command Post) to Alpha Company’s machine gunners, who were busy digging in and setting up their .60 caliber machines. The rest of us dug foxholes, unloading trucks and stacking supplies. The cooks set up a field kitchen and began preparing to feed us. We ate C-rats for lunch. There was no shower, and you had to shave holding a mirror in one hand, the razor in the other, your steel helmet full of cold water hanging from its strap on your tent pole.