This is me. One day I was wandering around the post and someone took my picture. I'm sure you'll recognize the sign, but I was not in SEAPC, I was with Detachment C.

This is also me. The guy in the background talked me into helping him give a talk on audio-visual techniques at the detachment in Saigon.

He was a very nice guy. I wish I could remember his name. He was from Pennsylvania. 1969.

This is the color development equipment I used to develop Kodak Ektachrome 35mm color slides (E2/E3 process) and C-41 Kodacolor color negatives (mostly 35mm).

I was sent to Saigon after learning the process at Long Binh in my first month in country. No one had been running the color lab at Detachment C and so I was expected to take charge of it and get it up and running.

My first batches of Ektachrome turned out quite purple, so I went to the PX at MACV headquarters nearby and studied a couple of Kodak color lab books there which pointed out that the first-developer step had to be within a degree or two of 75 degrees, I think it was, or the colors would turn out wrong.

The tank's built-in temperature control system couldn't handle the Vietnamese heat, so I developed a method of freezing water in a used (and rinsed out ) hypo plastic bottle and putting it in the first developer. I monitored the temperature and when the bath was down about two degrees below the optimum, I would take the hypo bottle out, go dark and load the 35mm film in the reels and start the run, figuring the temperature would drift back up to the optimum point just when that first step began. This improved the colors tremendously.

There were two other problems. The overall temperature of the rest of the system was always too warm and the emulsion would get quite soft, so I had to just be very careful with the film and not touch or scratch the emulsion until the film had dried.

The other was dirt. The system was set up to use the local water supply and the water filters would clog up with that red dirt in no time. It was almost impossible to keep up with it. I never really did solve that problem completely. But overall my slides and negs looked pretty good considering the conditions I had to work under.

A lot of the slides were of charts and graphs about casualties and such. I felt sorry for the officers coming in country who probably had to sit through long-winded briefings looking at all those monotonous sildes. Made me glad I was only an enlisted man. 

Some of the color negatives were from the morgue showing bodies with all the bullet wounds and such. There was one guy whose face had been blown away by a point-blank shot to his head. This was from an MP report on a local Saigon hotel incident involving a GI-Vietnamese love triangle, I think. I'm glad I only had to see the negative on this. The other guys had to make black-and-white 8 1/2 x 11 blowups from the color negs for the report. They usually did this work on the night shift. It must have been creepy sitting there alone at night trying to get the best focus while looking at the blown-away face. 

We also did some work on the infamous Phoenix program, although I don't remember processing those pictures myself.

Also, there were always guys asking me to slip some 35mm rolls into a run from their R&Rs, so I got to occasionally see some rather interesting stuff from them.

I know other people remember Miss Kim because she is mentioned elsewhere on your website. She was very young and worked for detachment C as a typist. I remember her always cleaning the keys on her typewriter (remember those?).  She gave me her address as seen below. I wrote to her but never received any reply. I always wondered whatever happened to her when the Communists took over.

Two anecdotes about Miss Kim—One time Johnny Grant, the so-called "Mayor of Hollywood," a well-known in L.A. personality at the time, came to Detachment C with a bevy of pretty American girls (blonds mainly). They were involved with some type of USO show thing and they had some photo business with Detachment C. Miss Kim had never seen American girls before and she was too shy to come up and introduce herself. Instead she hid behind a corner while gawking at them. But she was highly interested in American culture and popular music as I recall. Those girls must have seemed very exotic to her as she took in what they wore and how they were made up.

While in downtown Saigon, one of our guys took a picture of an old Vietnamese woman squatting and taking a dump in the street. She was smiling and looking into the camera with a toothless grin. Our photographer blew the black-and-white picture up quite large and placed it at the entrance where important visitors would come and pose for their passport photos (another service of Detachment C). Miss Kim thought this was very funny. 

My U.S. Army experience with developing Ektachrome helped me get a summer-relief job at NBC-TV in Burbank after returning to civilian life. I worked in the film lab developing 16mm Ektachrome newsfilm for NBC News and KNBC channel 4 in L.A.

The closest I came to combat was an all-night detail I went on with the Long Binh MPs, cruising the post's perimeter with them in a jeep (it had a 50cal. machine gun mounted on it). The duty was uneventful, and I'm glad the Tet offensive didn't begin that night. (Actually, Tet had happened long before I got to Vietnam in February of 1969).

I did artwork for the detachment, making various humorous signs and also painting white stars and official lettering ("…allow for expansion") on the unit's vehicles. One day I had just painted a big red MACV insignia on the front of the counter in our visitor area and neglected to put a "Wet Paint" sign up. An officer from New Zealand came in and leaned up against the counter, getting red paint on his rather fancy uniform. Outside of an embarrassed apology and trying to quickly find some paint thinner for him, I didn't suffer any discipline for the incident. He was quite understanding about it, thank goodness.

For the most part, being with the 221st was more-or-less like having a job in civilian life. I was very lucky to be doing photo work. Actually my MOS turned out to be as a sound man in a combat film crew. I didn't know that until I got to Long Binh, but they weren't doing any of that, luckily, so I quickly learned how to develop color slides and negative film instead.

One of the best parts was being able to acquire some really great audio gear, which I could never have afforded if I had not been drafted and sent to Vietnam. I had the stuff sent directly home rather than having it in country, to avoid the rigors of having it in a rather dirty, humid environment.

Detachment C lived on the Tan Son Nhut Air Force base and we had an outdoor movie theater kind of like a drive-in theater, but with bleacher seats that were covered against the rain. I remember seeing a lot of current movies there. The normal price was 35 cents, with special movies costing 50 cents. Before the lights went down when the movie was to start, you could see some lizards crawling up the screen. It was said that if there were a lot of them, the movie was going to be a really good one.

Being interested in all things television, I visited the two TV stations in Saigon, the Army's AFVN, channel 11, and, in the same building, the Vietnamese government station, THVN, channel 9. Typical of about half of U.S. TV stations then, they had all RCA equipment, except for the videotape machines, which were from Ampex as I recall. Of course, unlike U.S. television at the time, the two stations were completely black-and-white. Vietnam didn't convert to color until long after the war was over. One of the technicians who showed me around the stations showed me how one of the film projectors had survived a bomb blast that had blown a hole right through the station wall.

Some nights I would go over to the PX cafeteria at MACV headquarters and have a grilled ham and cheese sandwich and read the Stars and Stripes. I still think they were some of the best grilled ham and cheese I ever ate. At the far end of the base, there was a "tape center" where I went a couple of weekends and you could make your own copies of various music albums on their open-reel tape machines. I also remember, as the Christmas season approached, they made a star out of flourescent bulbs and put them on a big radar radome so that the energy from the revolving dish would light up the star. I guess that's been done before though so no big deal. I also remember seeing Curtiss C-46 aircraft on the field labeled "Air America." I never knew at the time that these were secret CIA aircraft. I only learned that much later. 

I guess  some of this sounds pretty trivial compared to the stories of those brave men and women who fought in the worst of the war, and I respect and honor them. I also knew two of them personally from our high school, one a Marine, the other in the Army, (Don Corona and Gary Danser, respectively) whose names are on the Vietnam Memorial wall in Washington, D.C. But as someone said when I first entered basic training at Ft. Ord, "…the Army is a whole civilization painted green."  

As part of the 221st Signal Company, I can be proud of having served.

     —   Wes