My longtime friend Mel Terkla recently shared this photo and story from his time serving as a US Navy radio operator in Vietnam.

The photo is from 1969 at the Nautique Hotel in Nha Trang, Vietnam! I’m wearing a set of locally made Tigerstripe fatigues that were sterile without name tag, rank, or unit patches. I was a Navy Radioman doing a tour at the Naval Support Facility on the Cam Ranh Bay peninsula. There was our base, an Army base, and an Air Force base on the peninsula. When we were off duty, we could go anywhere on the peninsula, but couldn’t leave it without travel orders! I worked at the Navcommsta on the base, and had everything I needed to cut my own travel orders, right down to the big red ORIGINAL stamp?! The nearest city was Nha Trang to the north about 40 miles away, and the go to spot for the guys, with a beautiful beach and plenty of bars! You had to put in for travel orders to go there, but they rarely got approved for us lowly enlisted guys! Luckily I didn’t have that problem, and could go anytime I was off duty…I was kind of a rebel back then?! It’s kind of hard to understand now, but it was a whole different scenario 50 years ago in Vietnam, especially in the relatively safer zones and in the cities! There were 3 branches of the military on our peninsula, and even more than that up in Nha Trang with different ARVN units also?! So with that said, you could move pretty freely, because the different branches didn’t really know what the others were supposed to be doing! Up in Nha Trang, the Army MP’s we’re in charge of security for all the US military, and the South Vietnamese Police (White Mice) were in charge of all the Vietnamese population…civilian and military! The Army had an alert system in Nha Trang, which was…White where you could move freely in the city…Gray where you could still move around the city but supposed to be on alert…Yellow which was a possible impending attack and you could not be hanging around in the city at all…Red which was an attack in progress! The Tigerstripe fatigues helped when I was walking around downtown on Yellow alert, because a lot of the ARVN military guys wore Tigerstripes, and I was a little guy and dark complected! Whenever I spotted any MP’s in their Jeeps, I would just turn my back and I looked like any other ARVN guy?! Also, when cruising around downtown during White or Gray, if any MP’s stopped to question me, I would just whip out my travel orders! The WTF looks they would give me with no markings on my Tigerstripe uniform and official Navy travel orders was hilarious lol?! I could write a book with all the stories I have from traveling to and from Nha Trang, and the downtown life?!

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