 The only thing that brings me back to this day yet is diesel fuel smells. I can look at the pictures and it doesn't bother me. But the diesel fuel takes me back. I reported on board the Christian via helicopter out of Saigon. It was an interesting trip. They flew over one area where they somebody seen something and they decided they ran open fire with their machine guns. Okay, take me home now. The ship was ARL 38 and its primary job was to repair the riverboat. They would pull up through our barges, would be lifted up out of the water, put on frames on the barges and be worked on there for repair. We've seen a lot of the same guys out of the riverboat that come in for repairs and go back up the rivers. A week or two later they'd come back and all shut up and fix them again, send them back out again. We still did watches for our shifts and rotated through the day and the night. We either carried a 45, a M16 or a shotgun, but you also had to throw, I think, six percussion grenades every hour. The hard part about that was when you had a lot of boats tied up alongside the barges. You always had to call over each ship with very little lighting, carrying grenades and then toss them off the sides. You didn't have a schedule tour. It just worked because there was really nothing else to do. You could spend 12 hours working or longer if you wanted to. In the evening there was always a movie on board, what we called the movie deck. Spent some time reading, writing. Everybody would exchange tapes and record large tapes. Later in my tour we had a new recreation officer and he got us some fishing equipment, so I spent a lot of time fishing. You had to kind of find a way to entertain yourself because there wasn't a lot. First night we were up the rivers. We got in late afternoons at Anchors. It didn't seem like there was anything different than an oil station. Not except that the shorelines were real, real close. I mean, to many of us it seemed like you could almost throw a rocket across the rivers. But we anchored and everybody went about their duties. They had a boat on the barge already to go to work. That night around 10 o'clock we were hit with a mine. Somebody came in and had asked me to go get some batteries for them. And as I went back into the storeroom, it was when we were hit. The mine I actually watched it come through. It came through about 10 to 12 feet in front of me. They bothered to tell them that I got the word. That's enough. Go to General Quarters. It's a reaction thing. My biggest fear when I ran up to my battle station, the whole top deck of the starboard side was lined with oil. We'd just gotten resupplied. And I'm thinking if somebody hits this whole ship, it's gone. I mean, it's amazing. They were able to get it stabilized and everybody could get down there and shore up the hole so we could get it back out of there. You have to call it good luck because it went through Sick Bay. There was nobody in Sick Bay at the time. That movie that was shown, The Good, the Bad, the Ugly, was a well-known movie and there was a lot of people wanting to see it. There really wasn't anybody in the area where the explosion hit. It went underneath the officers' birthing areas and nobody was injured up there. It went through halfway through the ship. There was just nobody there. It was just very, very fortunate. I never really thought about when you keep doing all these trainings that that day would ever happen and you wouldn't think about it anymore. You knew what side of the ship to go up on. You knew where to go to report. You knew what you had to do when you got there. It happened pretty quick and everybody did exactly what they had to do.