Three acres of Vietnam lives in S. Carolina

Above a mix of military equipment and drab-painted plywood buildings surrounding the compound, mounted speakers punched out the screeches of jungle birds and the droning chirps of crickets

IN THE light Lowcountry rain and high heat of late- summer South Carolina, bamboo was growing just outside the fenced perimeter of a three-acre addition to Patriots Point Naval & Maritime Museum near Charleston.

Above a mix of military equipment and drab-painted plywood buildings surrounding the compound, mounted speakers punched out the screeches of jungle birds and the droning chirps of crickets – along with the muffled booms of far- off artillery shells and the whoomp-whoompwhoomp of helicopter blades.

None of it was foreign to Ray Tanner, a wiry 74-year- old who had recently moved back home to Cades, a hamlet about an hour north in the Palmetto State. To him, the clamour of incoming Hueys was the best sound he had ever heard.

“I looked for it,” he said, his shirt bearing the crest of the Army’s 1st Battalion, 7th Cavalry Regiment. “It meant they were getting us out of here.”

“Here” was wartime Vietnam. And a half- century later, he was walking through a re- creation of it, a permanent exhibit called Vietnam Experience.

Tanner was a radio operator who did 11 months in Vietnam. He was a forward observer whose battalion spent 2 1/2 days in the Ia Drang Valley in late 1965. Ia Drang, in the Central Highlands, was one of the first battles in Vietnam that featured large American units. It was the subject of “We Were Soldiers Once . . . and Young,” a 1992 bestseller and a 2002 movie.

“There were 64 killed,” Tanner said of his battalion, “but nobody was left behind.”

Patriots Point is a major Charleston attraction operated through a state agency of the same name. Its centerpiece is the USS Yorktown, the famed World War II aircraft carrier decommissioned in 1970 and relocated to Mount Pleasant five years later.

Linked to Charleston by the stunning Arthur Ravenel Jr. Bridge and directly across the Cooper River from touristchoked downtown landmarks, shops and restaurants, the complex is a draw for veterans, their families and school groups. A submarine and a destroyer are also permanently moored at Patriots Point.

Vietnam Experience, which opened in 2014 on formerly undeveloped land behind the warships, is included in Patriots Point’s admission price. Many cities and states have Vietnam memorials; the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington has spawned permanent and touring Wall replicas. But the walkthrough Vietnam Experience – portraying a Mekong Delta naval support base and a Marine artillery base set in Khe Sanh – is a tourism outlier. Still, Dick West, 72, who runs the volunteer program at Patriots Point, says that 2017 attendance at Patriots Point is expected to top 300,000. Like Charleston, it attracts visitors from across North America, Europe and Asia.

Overseas conflicts great and small are hard to physically project beyond museum dioramas. Factor in the enduring home-front division over the Vietnam War, and Vietnam Experience could seem a marketing land mine.

But the exhibit steers clear of controversy: The timelines avoid politics and strategic secondguessing, and instead focus on what American grunts went through.

You don’t hear brass-band patriotic tunes emanating from the replica barracks. It’s “Born to Be Wild,” “Green Tambourine” and other hits that were audio touchstones to home from a distant and dangerous jungle.

Large relics include a shallowbottom “brown water” patrol boat, choppers (including two Cobra gunships), field artillery and a Viet Cong dugout. A Quonset hut displays M-1s and other rifles, maps and other paraphernalia. The Quonset and a building toward the back hold small theaters that loop footage about Americans in Vietnam. Roughly 2.7 million of them served there; about 58,000 were killed in action.

Veterans and their families are core visitors to Vietnam Experience. There is a strong sense on the grounds – via signage wording and spectator comments – that this is a belated welcome home for those who returned from the fog of war to find no parade.

“Thank you for your service” is a frequent call- out to seniors whose caps or clothes mark them as vets.

So, the best way to see Vietnam Experience is with someone who was on the ground in Southeast Asia.

Tanner strolled the grounds with the soft- spoken West. Their hitches in Vietnam were quite different.

A country boy who could hunt, Tanner was prime enlistment bait. West was in Army ROTC while studying engineering at the University of Florida.

Tanner was in trenches, facing incoming fire. West served in 1969 as a first lieutenant in an engineering group, the US. Army Engineer Construction Agency, often heading to military construction sites in a low-flying, twin- engine Beechcraft – an easy target.

Tanner slept in pup tents, then larger tents; West’s crews built plywood-and- sheet-metal barracks that came after the war’s escalation brought more manpower and money.

Tanner climbed the wooden observation tower in the exhibit’s Delta area and handled the .50- calibre Browning mounted there.

If you pull the trigger, you’ll hear a recording of machine-gun fire. From the tower platform, the top of the nearby USS Yorktown can’t be seen; only the peak of the distant bridge rises above the dense tree line. — AFP

Above left, West, left, and Tanner head toward the Vietnam Experience exit. Tanner has helped organise reunions at the exhibit. “Most people don’t want to relive it,” he said. “It’s more like a family reunion.” • Large relics from the Vietnam War,...

West, left, runs the volunteer programme at Patriots Point. Tanner, right, was a radio operator who did 11 months in Vietnam.