Tnx, Grit !!
I read your story this week about the club waitresses at 11th Marines while you were in Da Nang, and you mentioned the Da Son ville…Funny, because 11th Marine Regt took over the CP from 12th Marines when we all departed Da Nang to move up north to the DMZ areas in the summer of '66…I had been a Corporal with 3rd Marine Regt – Comm back then, and our CP was just down the road, after you made the left at "3 Corners" on the back way out to Red Beach…When we re-deployed up to Artillery Plateau (re-named Camp Carroll later that year on the Marine Corps birthday) there was an Army infantry unit that had moved into our CP, but when I went back again in '69, 11th MT Bn was there…
There used to be a multi booth road stand there at Da Son's 3 Corners, where you could buy lukewarm Cokes and Tiger 33 beer (tiger piss), and a lot of the young girls from there wound up going to work in the various Marines clubs in the area as time went on…There was one of my "favorites' from that road stand, named Ho Thi Bong, who I ran into several years later, at the 1st Shore Party SNCO club…She was working as a cocktail waitress, and it was like old home week chatting with her that night, and catching up on old mutual acquaintances.
I rented a car and driver on one of my early trips back to Vietnam in '07, and had him drive me around to some of the various places I'd been during my tours in the 60's and early 70's…I'll enclose a couple of pix of the Da Son ville of today…Note the blue house with a brick house under construction next to it at 3 Corners…Those houses sit on the same location as the old Seven Graves boom-boom house from back in the mid-60's…The road through Dog Patch, past the old 327 PX, and up around the old Division headquarters area is not much more than an old washed our trail nowadays, and the mountains behind that area have all been turned into a huge rock quarry…You can even see it from the airport today.
Jim Mackin
MGySgt. USMC(Ret)
2029827