Item

Sailors in Vietnam

Title (Dublin Core)

Sailors in Vietnam

Disclaimer (Dublin Core)

DISCLAIMER: This item may have been submitted in response to a school assignment prompt. See Linked Data.

Description (Dublin Core)

My Covid travel story is a bit unique. I was in the Navy at the time assigned to the USS Bunker Hill, a guided missile cruiser attached to the Theodore Roosevelt strike group. We deployed from San Diego, CA to the South China Sea area of operations early January 2020. When we left for deployment, covid had started gaining traction but was nowhere near the global pandemic levels it would soon reach. In the first week of March 2020, the Bunker Hill pulled into Da Nang, Vietnam on a port visit/diplomatic relations mission. We were scheduled to be there for four days, and the first three days were filled with adventure, laughs, and “drinking like a sailor.” On the fourth day, an all-call message was sent out to every crew member to immediately return to the boat. Once assembled our captain informed us of major covid outbreaks in Da Nang and outlying villages along with the outbreak back home stateside. For the remainder of that fourth day, we were restricted to the pier and not allowed to leave our mooring station. Fortunately for us, food and beer were provided on the pier to provide some sort of leisure. Although we knew dark times laid ahead of us, everyone in the crew including senior leadership, unwound and drank with reckless abandon. We were only 2 months into a 9-month deployment and we knew that this would be the last bit of freedom until we returned home, and we made sure to savor every sip. The next morning we lined the rails of our ship in our dress white uniforms saying goodbye to dry land for the next 5 months. The time at sea was the least of everyone's worries, rather we frantically tried to make sense of the global situation with Covid and what kind of world we would be returning to upon completion of our deployment.

Date (Dublin Core)

March 4, 2020

Creator (Dublin Core)

Self

Contributor (Dublin Core)

Noah Rodenberg

Event Identifier (Dublin Core)

HST643

Partner (Dublin Core)

Arizona State University

Type (Dublin Core)

Photo

Controlled Vocabulary (Dublin Core)

English Government Federal
English Conflict
English Labor

Curator's Tags (Omeka Classic)

deployment
military
navy
Vietnam
pandemic
Da Nang
naval diplomacy

Contributor's Tags (a true folksonomy) (Friend of a Friend)

Spring A Session 2025
HST643
History of Tourism
military

Collection (Dublin Core)

Military

Linked Data (Dublin Core)

Tourism story for the COVID-19 Archive

Date Submitted (Dublin Core)

01/28/2025

Date Modified (Dublin Core)

03/12/2025
03/31/2025
04/20/2025

Item sets

Covid 19

This item was submitted on January 28, 2025 by noah rodenberg using the form “Share Your Story” on the site “A Journal of the Plague Year”: https://www.covid-19archive.org/s/archive

Click here to view the collected data.

New Tags

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