[DainBramage]

Yep not nearly as front row. I rode all over Saigon on my motorcycle or hitched on deuce and a half’s with GIs. Once I rode my little Honda onto the ramp at Ton Sah Nhut airbase and through a bunch of jets and got surrounded by ARVN troops .
They threw me and my motorcycle on the back of the truck and then threw me and it out at the front gate yelling at me in Vietnamese the whole time lol.
I was back the next day. The guards at the gate knew me so well they just waved me through when I pulled up !

[rlmorel]

Funny. In Yokosuka, I was too young to have an ID card until right before we left, so I used to go off-base by crawling under the fence, and when I came back on base, I would just walk right in past the Marines guarding the gate.

One day, they grabbed me and brought me into a little shack and interrogated me because I didn't have an ID card. (It is the little white enclosure just to the right of the gate on the image)

So, they had three of them in their white hats, short sleeved khaki shirts, and blue trousers with the red stripe surrounding me as I sat in a chair. One of them said "You don't have an ID card, how do we know you aren't a spy?"

Things like that...they were bored, they knew fully who I was (Because my Dad was in charge of base security at the time...he worked in the building in the back with the white columns. My house was literally right behind the large building...it was an old Japanese military parachute hangars they converted into living spaces) and were just having fun. One of them asked me who won the 1967 World Series...:)

Then, when I lived in Subic, the "All Hands" beach was right next to the NAS Cubi Point runway, and I used to walk up on the tarmac and walk around all the planes, following pilots around as they did their pre-flights...:)

How times have changed...