Filling Sandbags for a Living

It was late July 1970 and I was serving as Supply Sergeant on a temporary basis while recovering from wounds.  We were finishing up the building of a new fire base in the jungle near Cambodia.  One of the last things that had to be done was filling sandbags.

If we had been closer to Bien Hoa where Vietnamese labor was readily available, the Vietnamese would have been doing that job.  But no... we were in in the jungle with no roads, no villages and no South Vietnamese civilians close by.  So we had to fill sandbags ourselves.

No one wanted to fill sandbags.  It was a back breaking, boring job.  Luckily it was temporary.  Once a sandbag was filled, it didn't have to be filled again.  There was only so many sandbags required.  These guys were lucky that they worked for Supply instead of having the job of infantry soldier or grunt in the field.  The guy on the left had the nickname of "Boots".  He was a trained infantry soldier who was able to avoid working as a grunt because the Army didn't make a pair of jungle boots large enough to fit him.  Talk about being lucky.

Sandbags, by the way, were used as protection from bullets and shrapnel.  The sand would catch the metal and not allow it to pass thru.  So if a bullet was heading my way and a sandbag was between me and the bullet, I was safe.  Filling sandbags was not a fun job but it was a necessary one.