They were so exhausted and seasick and all they could do was crawl up those beaches. And thousands of them lay dead in no time at all. It's unthinkable.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
The people got daily worse from the cold and the bad water, and they must all have perished if they had not discovered the port about the time they did.
Many corpses will be floating in the sea.
By the end of the summer of 1973 I thought it was virtually impossible for South Vietnam to survive. How in the heck could they?
At any given time, there are a lot of million-dollar luxury charter boats cruising around the Mentawai Islands finding the most incredible waves. And yet the people on shore are suffering. The whole scene is wrong. As a surf community, we have to do something.
They were heading out to the middle of the bay - the Gulf - that's another thing that became kind of standard practice, we didn't hurry the destroyers around the beach any more, when it got dark, we'd take 'em out thirty or forty miles out in the middle of the Tonkin Gulf.
I've never been one for sitting on beaches.
It was like in Samoa when they'd put up a movie screen on the beach and show movies and the locals would run behind the sheet to see where the people went. It was pretty grim.
They died hard, those savage men - like wounded wolves at bay. They were filthy, and they were lousy, and they stunk. And I loved them.
The pictures we saw before we got down here didn't even touch the reality of what it is like being here. We can be right on the beach with all the devastation and still not be able to imagine what it was like when the wall of water actually came up.
They all went down in droves because just scenes of palm trees and beaches can get pretty boring.