Seabee 71 in Chu Lai: Memoir of a Navy Journalist with a Mobile Construction Battalion, 1967

Hoping to stay out of Vietnam, David Lyman joined the U.S. Naval Reserve to avoid the draft. By summer 1967 he was with a SeaBee unit on a beach in Chu Lai. A reporter in civilian life, Lyman was assigned to Military Construction Battalion 71 as a photojournalist. He documented the lives of the hard-working and hard-drinking SeaBees as they engineered roads, runways, heliports and base camps for the troops.

The author was shot at, almost blown up by a road mine, and spent nights in a morta...