It seems that most Delta Diver stories fall into one of three categories:

This story falls into my favorite category — DISCOVERY

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.

The Tan An Job was one of the big ones for the 523rd Engineers. It was such a big memory for those of us in the Mekong Delta in late ‘68. Old stories like this one gets swapped whenever the Delta Divers get to talking.

Bill was sharing that all this Delta Diver stuff has him going through boxes, and he came across his dive logs for that project.

That's 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 sixty years ago.

Tan An is a story I had returned to over and over again through the years. Like I mentioned, this story is legend among the Delta Divers of that time. It was rife with things to talk about — filled with danger and hard work.

We spent a month living on a Mike Boat, LCM 8, under a canvas cover strung across the well deck. Along with the heavy construction, we had the responsibility of diving a circuit of bridge inspections, looking for any damaged or explosives. Standing guard at night watching for the mines the VC floated down the river, trying to blow up the bridge that was just down river from us.

They had hit it twice in the month we’d been there.

What I remembered most about the job, was the 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 the chance of 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 five to ten dives a day. On this pier job, it was an endless stretch of bounce diving.

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.

It is a true blessing to be in my 8th decade and still leaning new things about my past.