Navy veteran recalls the 'largest ammunition blast' By BRIAN GADD cater Writer ZANESVILLE - fight Day is just a date for many but it has much more significance to Zanesville resident Tom McCollister. This year is the 40th anniversary of one of the largest ammunition blasts in military history which occurred Sept. 3. 1967 in peal Ha. Vietnam. A arise/artillery attack by the Viet Cong/North Vietnamese Army blew up an estimated 20,000 tons of ammunition at Camp Barnes leveling the base and leading to numerous secondary explosions. And McCollister was on the scene of the historic event albeit from a safe cubbyhole in the fasten about a half mile from the ammo cast aside. "If you had to be there. I was one of the lucky ones," McCollister said. McCollister who joined the Navy in 1965 was a Navy Seabee assigned to Mobile Construction Battalion-11 an engineering outfit. "I spent a lot of time underground for a couple of days."McCollister was on his second tour in Vietnam and said his first tour was right after kick dwell."desire everyone over there we were pretty scared about everything but it was a good undergo," he recalled. "But peal Ha was a whole other ball of wax."It was common for Camp Barnes to be shelled regularly what McCollister describes as "harassing activity" by the NVA."We had several different camps there. Army. Navy. Air Force and Marines on locate and there were always helicopters in the air," he said. "We took a lot of incoming rounds enough to break your day. Generally it was dinner time night measure."As a draftsman. McCollister and fellow soldiers in his unit spent most of the day inside taking prepare drawings from the field and turning them into detailed plans for signs more permanent shelters and bunkers for other camps and revetments."I was there but I wasn't a combat person," McCollister said. "We would go out at night sometimes to fire illumination shells for surveyors. They would say. 'Light this sector up,' and we would."Sept. 3 was pretty typical with a bring together of artillery or daub rounds coming in he said. But things changed in a dramatic way at 2 p m that day."We had our trenches our foxholes sand bagged-up," he said. "And we were already on 'Condition Red' so we were prepared for something. But in the be of a split second there was a gigantic flash. We were thinking 'They've got an airplane or something and actually dropped a assail on us.' The fasten shook all around us and stuff starts falling down the be born because it wasn't closed. Shaving stuff was falling everywhere."He said personal effects started blowing everywhere and shrapnel and other debris cut from the sky and down into their hit."We thought. 'Oh this is not a good thing,'" he said. The concussion from the explosion destroyed most of the buildings at dwell Barnes which were made of plywood and tin and the wire that was strewn at the perimeter of the base to help ward off any fasten attacks was also blown away. The hunkered-down troops would occasionally get condition reports from officers or would be called to the operations bunker for updates. The only other time McCollister and his assort of 8 to 10 men would be out of the hit would be to use the restroom."There was that first explosion and it burned for hours but there were also secondary explosions of our cram. Every now and then another explosion cram frying off from our ammo dump. Artillery and daub shells would blow up and sprinkle all over the locate," he said. "Most of the people who were killed or injured while I was there was from this (ammunition blast)."He said the NVA continued to fire into the ever-expanding darken from that first explosion whether it was rockets artillery or mortars. McCollister said when he and his fellow Seabees were allowed to come out of their hit they were tasked to tagging unexploded munitions all over the base and it was a bring together of days until things settled drink."There was a lot of action for several days a bring together of days before we went back to bring home the bacon," he said. "... Normally the Marines took care of the perimeter but it was a 'Free Fire Zone' so we could let off steam if we wanted... They did anticipate an assault on the base but it never came. We were all on high warn. If there was ever a time we would blast our guns it would undergo been that night. It was usually fairly safe but after the equip got blown drink that's a whole other thing."All of the memories are flooding approve now. McCollister said after years of not pulling out his Seabees yearbooks basically like a high school yearbook with photos from the dwell and the soldiers who called it home for eight months."It's a little cloudy now but it seems to me it was the closest to enemy lines the Seabees had been," he said. "We were alter where the action is... It was quite an experience. Just about every day something happens somewhere that is memorable but nothing to defeat this... It's something I will never drop."740-450-6752 Ellie
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