Friends

By Loi Gillera

In the fall of 1964 I was doing some schooling in one of the amphibious school of the U.S. Naval Training Command at San Diego, California. One of my classmate was Lt(jg) Lawrence A. Grant of Bangor, Maine. Our initials are both LAG so we're always next to each other in roll calls inside the class, on shipboard exercises and in field activities. We even shared the same BOQ billet. Hence, we became good friends.

There were many weekends we spent together just being ourselves (share stories about our lives, hike the mountains of Laguna, take Santa Fe trips to Los Angeles, San Francisco and Seattle). But the recreation we loved most was ogling the fair sex in and out of the base. It was not long then when both of us got our "Susans". Larry's girl is Alice and mine is Lesley. The 4 of us remained inseparable, particularly Larry and me, until the end of our training.

Thanksgiving of 1965 was the last time we're all together. Larry proceeded to Texas to train in small fast gunboats and marry Alice. I returned to the Philippines and learned not very long that Lesley accepted another man. In the last of the few letters Larry and I exchanged, he mentioned he is shipping out to Vietman.

It was late in 1967 and our ship was docked at pier 3 in Camh Ranh Bay, South Vietnam. Our task force was attached to MACV-Central and among our mission was the transfer of bodies of fallen American soldiers to Subic Bay (for processing before airlift to continental U.S). There were about 80 sealed steel caskets lined end to end, beam to beam in the cavernous tank of our LST. The U.S. flags they were wrapped when they boarded were removed. All caskets bore no name. The only identifying marks were numbers on one side. In the cargo manifest I held, number 33 was Grant, Lawrence A., Lt(jg) USN.

I was sea sick all the way back.