Ray Talsma served in Vietnam as a member of the United States Naval Construction Battalion, or the Seabees. The name Seabees is a shortened form of “Construction Battalion” or “CB’s,” which became the Seabees.

Ray’s draft number was 39, so when Ray was 20 years old, he enlisted in the navy reserve in the fall of 1968. Rather than be drafted into the infantry, he enlisted in the navy. He went to boot camp at the Great Lakes Naval Training Center near Chicago. Boot camp did not seem hard to him – it was not harder than farming in his mind.

After his first two weeks of boot camp, he got a check for $50. He had to use that money to pay for some things like haircuts, which were 50 cents each.

After boot camp, he was able to come home for a couple of months and then in June 1969 he was sent to school in Port Huenene (Wan een ee), which is the main Seabee base in the United States. It is located in Southern California. He attended school there for about six months, until November 1969.

Originally he had thought he would join the navy and serve on a ship the way his brother Glen had. But he found out that he really didn’t like spending time on the water, so he signed up for the Seabees instead. He put down that he wanted to be a builder, but that did not matter to the navy. They decided he should be a mechanic, so he was sent to the Mobile Construction Battalion (MCB) #10 where he was trained to be a mechanic.

He then went to Camp Pendleton, north of San Diego, where he had advanced training with the marines. They needed this extra level of combat training because they would be working in potential conflict zones.

In January 1970, Ray flew to Vietnam in a C141 Air Force plane. He and the other sailors were strapped in jump seats in a plane that was really a cargo plane. It was a long flight. They made a stop in Hawaii, where they almost didn’t land because the landing gear was stuck. The flight crew poured oil in compartments that apparently lubed the landing gear because eventually the landing gear opened and they could land.

Ray remembers that they had breakfast at Wake Island, which is a Pacific Island controlled by the U.S. and is often used as a refueling stop. From there they flew to Da Nang, South Vietnam, arriving at about 2 a.m. Ray remembers that the hills were lit up and he could hear the bombing and the guns. He wondered, “What in the heck did I get myself into?”

The next morning they took a bus to Phu Bia which was a town way up north, south of Hua, to Camp Wilkenson, where the Seabees stayed with all their supplies, equipment, lumber, and so on. They were right next to the 101st Airborne and a helicopter squad.

Ray recalls that there were helicopters coming and going all the time, and sometimes they were medevac helicopters.

It was quite a dangerous situation. They had mountains around them to the west and south. They had a perimeter that they had to guard 24/7. Every once in a while they would get called out because the enemy was getting close. That meant they had to get in the trench and wait for the sun to come up.

The first couple of months he worked in the shop and then he was put on a field truck and had to fix machines wherever they broke down. When he was doing field work, meals were not quite as good as when he was working at their base station. Meals Ready to Eat or MRE’s are edible and keep a soldier from starving.

Ray kept one MRE, which he still has. It is three small tin cans of food – one of which was a can of beans and franks, one is a chocolate nut roll, and the other is labeled B-2 unit, which was a bread product. There is also a plastic pouch that contained cigarettes, matches, chewing gum, toilet paper, instant coffee, a cream substitute, sugar, and salt. Those eight items were all stuffed in a 2.5 by 5 inch pouch that was less than an inch thick.

In between working on machines, every fourth night they would spend four hours on guard duty. In addition to working the field repairing equipment, Ray also did a lot of work at the Fu Bai airport, where they regraded and laid asphalt on the runways.

“We were all over the war zone – in the thick of it,” Ray said. He did not ever experience any combat himself, but there were plenty of times that they were on high alert and spent the night in a trench. He also saw the dead Vietcong laid out after the battles were over.

Ray served on the advance crew that built the Quang Tri bridge. The bridge was 900 feet long and about 30 feet wide. It was all 2×8 dimension lumber on edge, coated with creosote. “That was a lot of lumber and it was a messy job for the builders,” Ray said. The Quang Tri bridge was blown up in 1974.

Ray also worked at the main base near there. His job was to keep 400-plus pieces of equipment – whether water pumps, loaders, bulldozers, cranes – operating. There were 50 to 60 mechanics that he worked with there.

Ray Talsma spent about 9 months in Vietnam, working as a mechanic in the Navy Seabees.

The sugar-like sand was a challenge to work in. The equipment got stuck regularly.

Ray served in Vietnam until October 1970. While some of his co-workers came back sooner than that, he was part of the delayed party who had to haul equipment back to Da Nang where it was either loaded on ships to be brought back to the U.S., or it was deemed “junk” and was ground up for scrap.

His job was always to get and keep the equipment running – much of which was old and well used. “Some of it was junk,” he said.

In Vietnam, cigarettes were $2.10 a carton. He bought a carton, but ended up giving the cigarettes away. He did smoke the cigarettes that came in his MRE’s though. Beer was a dime a can and pop was 15 cents a can. They used “funny” money to buy those things. Sometimes the “currency” would change. They never used real American dollars to buy things.

Ray recalls that they were paid $2 a day extra pay because they were in a combat zone. He thinks he earned about $300 a month.

Ray also spent some time on Tammy Island, which is east of Hue. He did not have any opportunity to go on any day trips or see any sites, but they were able to get some rest and relaxation on that island. They could swim in the South China Sea, and there were shows they could go see.

They stayed on the army base there while the navy base was being built. Ray and one other mechanic slept in the shop. Ray remembers that it was really dark in the shop and at night he could feel something walking on his blankets. So he rigged up a light that he could switch on when he felt that. Imagine his shock when he found that it was rats that were walking across his blankets as he slept! The next day he made a trap to catch rats – which he said were as big as cats – but there was never a shortage of the varmints.