Welcome To Firebase Phu Loi

Guardian of the Republic

Welcome To Firebase Phu Loi /

Cam Rahn Bay/

Vietnam

Jim Benner's Tribute Homepage to the
205th Assault Support Helicopters

612th Transportation Detachment
U.S. Army

Hello, Welcome to LZ Phu Loi. This is my first glimpse of Vietnam's Peaceful Skies. And yes, there truly were beautiful skies. From where we built our hooch, you could see almost into forever, out past Cam Rahn Bay. I have seldom seen such beautiful sunsets in my life as I can remember vividly in this faraway country, so torn by the devastation of war and conflict . Even long before the first GI stepped off a boat or plane in country, this land was at war.

Back in 1945, when the Japanese signed the peace treaty out in Tokyo Harbor, on the USS Missouri, Ho Chi Minh vowed to adopt a document not unlike our own Constitution.. He wanted Peace with a unified Vietnam, where democracy would rule the country, not communism.

Had the United States backed Ho Chi Minh with his plans for a unified Vietnam in 1945, and not the disloyal French, those who died, would still be alive today, living a life of peace at home, and not laying down their lives in that faraway land of Vietnam.

We are missing nearly 59,000 lives and over 2100 Missing in action, of our population! I invite you to consider... and take those 59,000 men and women, and then multiply the children these missing Americans would have had, had they lived and married, we then are missing perhaps 180,000 souls and their progeny. I doubt few have considered these ramifications of the Vietnam war and it's cost to humanity forever into the future. Just how many scientists, astronauts, Doctors, Senators, and even Presidents are lost to the future? Perhaps one of those potential scientists was the one to discover a cure for cancer or AIDS? But we'll never know now, will we?

It is up to us, the living to continue carrying forward, for those who cannot. That is what we owe them, who died in that land of Vietnam. WE must live our lives to the fullest, so they can live in us.

Let us also teach our children that there just has got to be a better way to solve our National differences, than spilling the blood of our youth in foreign lands. Maybe if they made Senators and Congressmen, and old men put on uniforms and go fight wars, then perhaps wars would finally come to an end?

Vietnam is an incredibly beautiful country! Sometimes, when the guns were silent, life returned almost instantly back to the way it was for 2000 years before. A land of gentle, peace-loving people.

In a way, although the war had a sad ending for our Country and those who went to war, peace has finally come to Vietnam, and both the Vietnamese and the American people are finally becoming friends again. Strange how things turn around, like the old saying goes, "What goes around comes around" and so has the world. It has spun around it's axis, within it's solar orbit now 32 years since I left country, for my home in America, and Peace has finally come to this gentle people in that faraway little country, in Southeast Asia called...

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