Flight to Nam, and Back Home

     Word that the Pentagon has ordered civilian airlines to help transport people out of Afghanistan reminded me of my own transit to and from Vietnam. It was on board a commercial jet, with stewardesses and meal service etc. from Ft. Lewis Washington to Da Nang.

     That's where we learned our assignments in Vietnam for the first time. Mine was Quang Tri, about a three hour drive North (though honestly I don't remember exactly how I got to Quang Tri from Da Nang...chopper? Truck?) One way or the other I got there...as close to North Vietnam as you could get and still be in "friendly" territory.

 

     My first half-year was spent at a brigade newspaper.

     I took this photo as part of a story for that newspaper. The article was titled "Going Home". The photo shows a soldier in a C-130 military plane that would carry him from Quang Tri to...perhaps DaNang...where he would get on one of those leased commercial airliners to head back to the U.S.

     I cam across an excellent article from 2019 in The San Francisco Chronicle about the stewardesses who serviced those flights to and from.

"They’d usually start at Travis Air Force Base outside of San Francisco or McChord Field in Washington, picking up more than 200 fresh-faced, uniformed servicemen from the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines. From there the plane, often a stretch DC-8, would fly west to Anchorage, then to Japan, then to the Philippines or Vietnam, dropping the troops off at military bases."

 

     I was able to transfer to a joint services TV station (Armed Forces Vietnam Network) in Quang Tri for the second half of my "tour".

    My memory of my own flight in1971 from 'Nam back to the U.S. has faded. But I do remember I flew into the West Coast and then caught a commercial jet home to New York.