Seabee 71 in Chu Lai

<p> Hoping to stay out of Vietnam David Lyman joined the U.S. Naval Reserve to avoid the draft. By summer 1967 he was with a SeaBee unit on a beach in Chu Lai. A reporter in civilian life Lyman was assigned to Military Construction Battalion 71 as a photojournalist. He documented the lives of the hard-working and hard-drinking SeaBees as they engineered roads runways heliports and base camps for the troops.</p><p> The author was shot at almost blown up by a road mine and spent nights in a mortar pit as rockets bombarded a nearby Marine runway. He rode on convoys through Viet Cong territory to photograph villages outside The Wire. The stories and photographs Lyman published as editor of the battalion's newspaper <I>The Transit</I> form the basis of this memoir.</p>