It seems that most Delta Diver stories fall into one of three categories:
Discovery
Mission
Or
Legacy
This story falls into my favorite category — DISCOVERY
Tan An Revisited
After Sixty Years — We're Still Finding Pieces to This Story
I was talking with fellow Delta Diver Bill McFarlane the other day, when a pier suddenly came back into my life.
Not the whole pier. Not at first.
After nearly sixty years, that's not how these memories seem to work. I remembered pieces of it. Bill remembered some I didn't. Then one recollection led to another, and slowly we began putting together missing pieces of a job we'd worked on in the Mekong Delta back in 1968.
Tan An is a story I had returned to over and over again through the years. It was one of the biggest jobs we’d worked on with the 523rd. It was rife with things to talk about — filled with danger and hard work.
I remembered day after day of some of the hardest work we’d ever done. Our main responsibility was the underwater bracing . . . and trying not to get hit in the head with all the tools and materials the engineers were dropping from above.
That was a double-edged sword. The luck of a dropped tool missing your head meant one thing — you had to go and get it. Down into zero-visibility, by feel. Your mind racing with what you just might find. Not to mention coming back to the surface and running into some sea snakes.
While my memories weren’t backed up with paper, Bill’s showed up with the receipts in the form of a dive log.
Hell, I’d never kept a dive log, or remembered anyone else keeping one. When we were in Qui Nhon, we were pretty much diving 24/7. Sometimes as many as four or five dives a day.
Bill’s dive log not only proved my memory of the hard work we performed on this job, but it also lead to other memories that filled in a lot of blank spots in my memory of the timeline of 1968.
Many of the stories you will read in the future, will be because of discoveries made through this Delta Diver Project. And for sure we’ll be revisiting this story, and filling you in on a lot more details. It’s one of my favorite memories of Vietnam.
Make sure you come back for more.