Hey, didn't get up to too much today. Hit Pizza Hut for lunch for my "Happy to be alive" meal, walked down to Dan Sinh market to look for more maps. I might have found a map showing Katum and the Cambodian border, where the 173rd preformed the only US Army combat jump.
I spent last night up until 3am distracting myself and face down in my new map of the Dak To area. I bought overhead projector plastic sheets and wipe away markers yesterday before the Viet Cong ambush I walked into. Last night I opened up Google Earth, Ray's Map Room who has a huge collection of maps he's scanned and uploaded. He was in the 1st Bn, 69th Armor Regiment during the Vietnam war and has added 173rd bases as he operated at the same bases with them. There's also a website where you can look at 60's maps all of North and South Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia and Thailand. All of them are military maps and it's almost like google earth in HTML haha. Each click brings you a new page of a more zoomed in with more click-able maps until you get a high detail map of the terrain, detailed enough you can see military bases and major hills. All I do is print screen, paste it into Paint and add what I want. That's how I printed off Derek's 720th MP Company map. Getting sidetracked haha. I was up till 3am crawling all around my double size bed plotting points on the overhead pages from Hill 875, Fire Support Base 16 which Bravo company (our company we re-enact) built, west to Hill 830 and Hill 664, Rocket Ridge which looked over the Dak To Airfield and the enemy launched rockets from and Hill 1338 is just off the map. North to FSB 13, West to FSB 12 (real original I know), Ben Het Special Forces Camp and the Tri-border region of Laos, Cambodia and South Vietnam. Now I just have to worry about smugging any of my hard work. At home I'll probably redo it but in grease pencils so it's tougher.
I've been lucky though finding original maps and I checked on ebay for more maps. One guy is based in Saigon and I asked if he has a shop or anything. He owns the coffee shop I go everyday and eat my fruit salad. What are the odds? I could get him to bring all his maps but I don't have the funding for them. If he does have a map of Dak To airbase, Hill 1338, Hill 875 and Ben Het Special Forces camp I might buy it as mine is missing 1338 and Dak To. His maps are bigger and in more detail, so if both look good and he's almost out of both, I'll have to let the Visa handle it. Otherwise I'll order them when I'm out of debt! I don't know why I like maps. I think that it's because I'm a visual learner that it's one thing to read about it, but another seeing the terrain, where they were based at, how far away, villages in the area, where the enemy came from and all that.
That reminds me of a game I use to have, it was turn based like those warhammer table top games, but you got to fight different Vietnam War battles, you move the US troops around, computer is the enemy and sticks to their movements during the battle, or as close as possible. So I mean I could be in the Ia Drang Valley, I play the role of Lt. Col. Hal Moore (Mel Gibson) and in command of 2d Bn, 7th Cav, 1st Air Cav Div. The smallest unit you can control is either squads or platoons, so my Machine Gun squad can put down a base of fire and have three rifle squads flank. You can also control vehicles so I can have gunships swoop in, I did use my Chinook cargo helicopters to do gun runs but they got blown out of the sky, lowered troop moral and it was a hard game. Gotta be more of a chess player than a first person shooter gamer haha. Only way I could win was on two player and I made the VC walk into my ambushes, playing Jay's version of the Vietnam War hahaha. I'm trying to download it as we speak.
Again didn't do much, hung out here after the market, still full of pizza and at supper at 8pm. Got my fruit salad and my dessert, got some Vietnamese cookies and their version of joe louis which wasn't great and I'm here. Nothing really planned tomorrow other than pick up that Katum map and thats about it. So exciting I know :P Take care.
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