A morning road sweep. Frank thought this was around the Hill 10 area. They have bought ice cream from some vendor. Some folks might question the wisdom of eating Vietnamese ice cream. One would suspect that the Pure Food Act wasn't a big player in the Vietnamese diary product industry. But since we usually drank whatever water we could find (once filled my canteen with bomb crater water that was so thick with mosquito larvea that it was almost a sludge, had to use the t-shirt I had been wearing for a couple of weeks to filter it when I drank) it probably didn't seem much like a risk to them.
Road sweeps never seemed too bad to me. I don't remember anything happening on any that I was on, if you don't count a couple of guys catching the clap while waiting for a truck to come by and take us back to the base. But it certainly wasn't always that way, I was just very, very lucky.
The people along the roads and in the villages usually didn't stir along the roads very much until we did the sweeps. One morning at Cobb Bridge, I had had the last watch and the sun had just risen enough to be able to see good, I was just looking down the road that ran to Dia La pass. Several Vietnamese were out on the road, maybe a half mile away where there were a number of houses. I could see them very plainly as they started off to market or whatever. One was on a bicycle and as I watched he hit a mine. You could see him flying through the air for just a second. No idea what happened to him, died I suppose.
I think that Cpl. Knight and I rotated at the same time. We were sent to El Toro, California to be processed out of the Corps. His family lived pretty close and they came and got us most every night. Anyway, somebodies folks came and got us.
Lamar Yancy is the Marine on the far right in the front row. Lamar would lose both legs to a booby trap in the area of the Allenbrook operation July 29, 1968.
September 12, 2003, just heard from Steve Scott. He's the young man in the very middle. He tells me that the man in the front middle is Stacy McLamb. Steve says this picture was probably taken sometime after operation Arizona, probably late summer 1967.