Military Bases in Vietnam 1963 – 1975 (REVISED)

hi, i was ammunition technician and lived at camp monahan from 4/1970 to approximately 10/1970. i remember that we shared monahan with bulk fuel unit, neither of our groups living where we worked, for obvious reasons. remember also that monahan was slightly south of a compound with pow’s, military police, and k-9 kennels. slightly south of monahan was a arvin (south viet army) bootcamp. south of them was a river. our side of the river was safe, the other side was best left to the infantry. if you locate the airfield on a map, go to the south end, there is a road going west, that is identified as ql 14. monahan was probably a couple miles, if we were hitching a ride, the truck would stop, and we had a couple hundreds of yards walking to the left, or south. not looking at map now, but i believe that if you continued just past the drop off point, there was an intersecting road that ran to the north.  my first night at monahan was first night in nam, and in the middle of the night there was a helluva boom that shook the ground. i ran to the bunker, and after a minute, realized i was alone. went back and everyone was sleeping soundly. next day they told me that we shared the hill with a 155 artillery piece, and that there was a low cloud ceiling that night which had the effect of magnifying the report on the ground. i don’t know if they were a part of monahan, or if they had a seperate camp that butted up to ours. i know it was a usmc piece, not army. in my months there, one pucker moment for me was when there were a couple of booms in the middle of the night. a disgruntled guard had gone to the mess hall to get midrats. (with a 2 man post, you could call in and get permission to send one man to the mess hall and get a couple of crappy sandwiches and some coffee to take back.) apparently, he thought he was deserving of an extra sandwich, the mess sgt. thought differently, the guard returned and threw one grenade thru the backdoor, which was the storage room for commercial sized cans of tomato sauce, beans, etc. he threw another grenade under a 5 ton truck parked just outside the door. the mess sgt was wounded seriously enough to get shipped to japan. the truck had ten flat tires, and the entire drivetrain, including engine were destroyed, all the cases having cracks and leaking oil. one other night time boom was a 122mm rocket that was apparently a short round that was meant for the nearby airfield, i think they got several at the same time. we had one guy that blew his own self up accidently, was critically injured and got sent to hospital in japan. story was that he was on guard tower in ammo dump and was hauling up a laaw round that had been in the ammo dump explosion the previous year. it was a 330 acre dump and exploded for 3 days. u-tube videos look like atomic explosion. anyway, he was in the tower and pulling up the unstable laaw round on a rope, and when he was bringing it into the tower, it exploded. i understood that he intended to throw it off of the tower and see if it would explode. i’m sure that the arvin boot camp to our south was hit with 4 or 5 mortar rounds one night, there may or may not have been a last round that landed just inside of our southern perimeter. i think the enemy mortar team was close enough to get accurate fire on the arvin camp, and sent their last shot in our direction, too far to be accurate, but just to let us know that they didn’t like us either. i remember that monahan had a movie area, like a drive in, but with benches instead of cars. there was plenty of beer. on a few nights you could watch the cobra gunships pounding a nearby ridgeline with mini guns, it think it was called hill 200, and was a separate ridge extending from hill 327. it was nothing less than surreal to be drinking a beer, watching an outdoor movie, and at the same time watching a night time series of mini gun attacks, with two cobras taking turns, one diving in attack with a spotlight and a stream of tracers, then banking up while the other began his run, all of it within a mile away. there may have been other stuff that happened there that i’m unaware of. i do understand, found just recently that monahan was completely leveled when the ammo dump blew up in 1969, so when i arrived in april of 1970, i was living in a newly constructed camp monahan, the seebees having done the construction. i got dysentery immediately after arriving at monahan, lost 20 lbs because i didn’t want to go to sickbay and maybe be accused of malingering. sickbay was an armored personnel carrier that i think had been damaged beyond repair in the earlier years when it was a still contested piece of property.          can’t think of more to write. i’m old, not good at website communication, may not ever find this website again, so if you reply here, i may not find it. my mail address is steveb601@hotmail.com. happy to answer anything that i’m able to.

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