Memory of 6-6-68
from Steve Leuty
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Me and another guy decided to stay in the hole instead of going to midnight chow; we were at the bottom of the ship to lazy to climb the ladder up. Just when the guys got back we heard a lot of explosions,
Couldn't figure out what was happening. Then a couple of people leaned over and said to get our butts up here, were getting hit. After a few minutes I was chose to go up and see what was going on, when I got to the top of the hatch I saw automatic gun fire in the 545th barracks, I saw everyone running in all directions. It seemed that there was automatic gun fire everywhere. I also watched the 5 ton trucks being blown up. Then I leaned over and to my buddy to get the hell up so we could get off the ship, because it started the engines and was trying to back up still tied up to the dock, he was coming up and I watched people jumping off the ship into the bay, it was full of jelly fish guess it was mating season for them. They (Charlie) shot a couple of rockets at the jp4 tanker. When we got up on deck we went down the ramp to the pier and started running to the road, lucky for us there was a jeep going to the co. area. When we got there we were told to go to the supply room for our weapons, then it was guard duty the rest of the night. For two weeks we either built bunkers or worked the ship, it felt like we were up for 2 weeks straight. The only people with weapons were the brave Navy guys, and they did the best they could. God bless everyone we lost that night, rest in peace.