Talk:Cam Ranh Air Base/@comment-174.28.131.74-20160508161116/@comment-174.125.114.17-20170303023538

I visited Cam Ranh many dozens of times from 8 January 1966 to June 1972. What RMK-BRJ built by February 1966 was just temporary. In short, Cam Ranh facilities, the two 10,000 foot concrete runways, naval facilities, ammo dumps, bridge and on and on were built under contract with the U.S.Naval Facilities Engineering Command under contract NBY44105, using hundreds of accomplished American civilian construction stiffs, thousands of Vietnamese civilians, some third country nationals and supported in port, bridge and other heavy steel fabrications by Philipine citizens at Poro Point on Luzon. Yeah, I was there too. I'm quite familiar with Red Horse at Cam Ranh as on my probably hundred or so landings there, leaving the airport, one could see a row of new Red Horse  backhoe loaders that over years, never were seen to move or get a scratch of paint. There is much BS written about constuction in VN. RMK was there in February 1962, before the Marines landed and stayed busy as RMK-BRJ till completion of construction in mid May 1972. They dredged 98,218,585 cubic yards of material at 40 sites equivalent to 10 years dredging to build the Suez Canal, otherwise moved 91,110,000 cubic yards of dirt, poured 3.7 million cubic yards of concrete, crushed 48 million tons of rock and produced 10.8 million tons of asphalt. Read about it in the official U.S. Navy book, SOUTHEAST ASIA: Building the Bases by Richard Tregaskis. It also documents building done by others, the Seabees, Army Engineers and Red Horse as I recall. At the peak, RMK-BRJ had over 8750 units of construction equipment in it's fleet, peak employment 50,771, mostly Vietnamese civilians. Over 50 of our employees were war casualties. Our work was overlooked by Naval construction officers, a Navy Admiral who also supervised the Sea Bees, experienced U.S, Navy civilians and audited by GAO and DCAA. The fake news writers of the VN war referred to us as Camp Followers. In some cases, like building Dong Tam Base, our guys for over a year took the fire of the Viet Cong before our military showed up to occupy the base. I know. I was there. Former MGR, Construction  Equipment, RMK-BRJ, John Stadler