A Woman In Vietnam

Beverly Stewart

Vietnam 1971-1972

All together, I think we went to the bunkers about four times on bomb threats. They would blow a siren and we all file in. We didn’t have flashlights but we had to put on our gas masks and stand there, sometimes for hours, in a twelve by twenty foot room in the dark. I didn’t like going into the bunkers; I was claustrophobic anyways and if something happened you couldn’t get out. Because it wasn’t used that much there was rats down there. Rats everywhere and giant tree roaches that get in your room and all your stuff. When we weren’t in the bunkers, we could hear the fighting every day and every night from our barracks. There’s a lot of trees around the buildings where the Vietnamese could get in and hide real easy. Several times they got in. I had a friend who told me that there was about four or five that got in one day.