Many including myself experienced alternatives to this at times including filling water trailers from streams directly without treatment. Fred Stella reports "the posting about the drinking water was important I dont remember where we were, 'but we' we had to drink the water from a river for a few days because they could not fly in fresh water."
I remember filling canteens in rivers and streams and not having the purification pills. Also we were socked in an on one LZ southwest of Polei Kleng and spread out ponchos and plastic sheets to catch the dew. This went on for about three days as I remember it and we had a couple of attempts by choppers to get us resupplied. One 'blivet' was dropped to high and it was a mad scramble to get out of the way. The 'blivet' bounced all the down the hill and had to be destroyed.
Some or most of the water used by the 1/92d FA was reportedly obtained from the Engineers from their Pleiku compound.
There has been a report of ingested parasites from the water supply that has brought about medical problems in Veterans in later years. For more information on this got to Links/Liver Cancer Parasites. It also occurred to me that in places where Agent Orange was used, we were probably ingesting it through our other than normal sources of water. There are a couple of articles on the Stories page also.
I have accidently deleted a couple of the responsesI had received on the water issue, and the information above has in someplaces been from memory. Sorry for the deletions I get a lot of email and it sometimes happens. If you can expand or have any further information please forward it to Webmaster . . . Thank you.
Jeff Danielson
During the Ben Het/Dak To action, water became an issue for the units in Ben Het. We could not get enough potable water to them because of enemy fire, so we used powder canisters, filled them with water and airlifted them in. This was used for washing, etc. not drinking. For drinking, we airlifted in soda and beer and had a number of pallets low level dropped on the runway using a parachute to drag the pallet out the back of a C130 as it flew over the runway.
When possible, we used water trailers slung under CH47’s but due to the terrain on top of some of the mountain top firebases, they had a tendency to roll if the brake was not set. We lost a few off the sides of mountains.
I was the Service Battery Commander and S4 from Nov 68 through Nov 69.
Richard Pederson - rwpeders@swbell.net |
