By Paul Churchill
August 8th 1966
Hello Again,
Since we got a break and won’t be leaving till tomorrow I’ll see if I can’t get a half way decent letter off to you.
This has been a good day for two reasons. First, we didn’t jump off today and second I got a letter from you, something that makes any day good.
I don’t even remember what I wrote last night so I guess PlI just start from scratch with this letter and hope it comes out better than yesterday’s attempt.
We came in yesterday from a six day operation that came out real good from our end of the stick. We found and destroyed about 50 booby traps and mines without taking a single casualty from enemy action. We did get shot at quite a bit and on the last night out the VC even tried throwing a grenade into our lines without hurting anyone. We did evacuate two people for other reasons though. One for heat stroke, the 4th case serious enough for evacuation in two weeks, and 1 for a back injury which he got from a fall from a paddy dike. We were sure lucky as two of the booby traps we blew were found after a man tripped them and they failed to go off. Both of them would have caused several casualties as they were fairly large mines. I hope we are as fortunate when we leave again. (This operation took place in the Dai Loc area. We were, at times, only 2 or 3 miles from 2-3’s area.)
Second Battalion, Third Marines (2-3) was the unit Dave Canter was with at this time. I never did find out if we were part of operation Colorado or a separate action although the distance between us would indicate separate but coordinated activity.
I don’t really have to much more to say so I’ll just tell you that there ave some pictures in this letter..
….. I mailed them to Kodak about six weeks ago and finally got them back.
These would be the only pictures I took in Viet Nam for two reasons. Film was hard to come by and my Brownie Instamatic camera came up missing. Unless indicated pictures in this book were taken with this camera.
