Collected Item: “Sailors in Vietnam”
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Sailors in Vietnam
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Photo
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My Covid travel story is a bit unique. I was in the Navy at the time assigned to the USS Bunker Hill, a guided missile cruiser attached to the Theodore Roosevelt strike group. We deployed from San Diego, CA to the South China Sea area of operations early January 2020. When we left for deployment, covid had started gaining traction but was nowhere near the global pandemic levels it would soon reach. In the first week of March 2020, the Bunker Hill pulled into Da Nang, Vietnam on a port visit/diplomatic relations mission. We were scheduled to be there for four days, and the first three days were filled with adventure, laughs, and “drinking like a sailor.” On the fourth day, an all-call message was sent out to every crew member to immediately return to the boat. Once assembled our captain informed us of major covid outbreaks in Da Nang and outlying villages along with the outbreak back home stateside. For the remainder of that fourth day, we were restricted to the pier and not allowed to leave our mooring station. Fortunately for us, food and beer were provided on the pier to provide some sort of leisure. Although we knew dark times laid ahead of us, everyone in the crew including senior leadership, unwound and drank with reckless abandon. We were only 2 months into a 9-month deployment and we knew that this would be the last bit of freedom until we returned home, and we made sure to savor every sip. The next morning we lined the rails of our ship in our dress white uniforms saying goodbye to dry land for the next 5 months. The time at sea was the least of everyone's worries, rather we frantically tried to make sense of the global situation with Covid and what kind of world we would be returning to upon completion of our deployment.
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#ArizonaStateUniversity, #HST643, #SpringASession2025,#Historyoftourism,#military
Who originally created this object? (If you created this object, such as photo, then put "self" here.)
Self
Give this story a date.
2020-03-04