General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: My Message To The Forum And Why I Am So Critical Of The GOP [View all]Jackpine Radical
(45,274 posts)Mine was about 300,000 smaller than yours: 565*****.
2d Bde-right. I was at Jane for a while just before Khe Sanh. They moved us & our heavy equipment up from Qui Nhon to Da Nang via an unarmed, decommissioned LST with a Japanese crew. Da Nang and Hue were just blown apart from Tet. This was March '68.
I remember being at Evans when they hit our ammo dump with a 122mm rocket. The dump at that moment had about 3 times the normal amount of munitions stored in it, in anticipation of Khe Sanh. It produced an amazing display of fireworks--tracers popping, artillery flares of various kinds, etc. I was sitting on a sandbag bunker about 3 clicks from the dump, which was near the other side of the perimeter, watching the show. Then there was an immense BOOOOOM with a ground shock wave, and the sky lit up as a roiling mushroom cloud sprang upwards. I somersaulted backwards off the bunker & the first coherent thought I remember was "Migod, I been nuked!" I was thinking about all kinds of crazy things like the fact that there is a nuclear round for the 8" gun. Did they have one in that ammo dump?
Well, it wasn't a nuke. It was a 50,000 gallon tank of helicopter fuel that blew. There were 3 more of those explosions that night. Some military genius had located the ammo dump and the POL point (Army talk for the fuel depot) right next to each other.