The ships of the US Navy, for the most part, are named after heroes and historic events in war. And so it was with the USS Valley Forge (LPH-8), a World War II- and  Korean War- era aircraft carrier that was converted into an amphibious warfare ship in the 60s.

Its mission after the conversion was to carry helicopters that would carry Marines to points relatively close to shore and permit them to fly in to surprise an enemy from the sea. In my time with Third Battalion First Marines (Battalion Landing Team 3/1) and the “Happy Valley,” the enemy was the North Vietnamese Army during the period December 1967 to February (give or take) 1968, the time of the North Vietnamese Tet Offensive.

I’d mentioned in an earlier post that after my months as a rifle platoon commander I had been sent to “Embarkation School” at Okinawa to learn how to load Marines and their equipment onto ships. I’m not sure to this day if this assignment was a kind of R&R from combat in what seemed a halcyon Japanese island or serious preparation for an upcoming assignment, which is what it turned out to be. The assignment would be the loading of Third Battalion, First Marines and their supporting arms onto the five ships constituting Special Landing Force 3/1.

I had taken drafting class in high school, and my father was a draftsman for a time in his early days in the United States. A good thing, on both counts. embarkation school was about loading Marines and their gear, considerable when considering that 1,100 Marines, artillery, tanks, and tracked landing vehicles needed to be distributed onto five amphibious warfare ships, the largest of which was the USS Valley Forge (shown here in 1968, with Marines and their helicopters embarked—official USN photo).

In Okinawa, I had no knowledge of the details of what I was preparing for. I essentially learned what each of the five types of ships in the task force could carry and how, using paper cutouts of equipment, the tanks, artillery, amphibious assault vehicles, ammunition, other equipment, and Marines of Special Landing Force 3/1 could best be loaded. No CAD software available in 1967.

On graduation, I returned to the battalion in the sands south of Marble Mountain and south of the city of Danang to learn that Embarkation School was not R&R. We would be loading out in two months, sailing to the Philippines for additional training, and then returning, with a squadron of Marine CH-46 helicopters for combat operations in Northern I Corps and I was responsible for creating the loading plan.  This led to a flurry of travels to the units that would join us. Then much clipping of paper into shapes of tanks, artillery, landing vehicles, storage points and so on.