A trio of Poplar Bluff men are celebrating the 80th anniversary of the Navy Construction Battalion, better known as the Seabees, this year.
Fred Crook, Wayne Fortenberry and Art Baucom talk about serving their country during the Vietnam War and living up to the motto “We Build, We Fight.”
A desire to learn a building trade, as well as to fulfill their military duties in the late 1960s and early 1970s, paved the way for them to join the Seabees.
The Seabees formally were established March 5, 1942, to meet the U.S. Navy’s growing need to build bases, camps and other structures as part of the war effort.
Baucom attended school in Broseley before serving four years from 1969 to 1973 in the Seabees. He liked to work with wood and to build.
“We built buildings for the Marines when they were in Vietnam,” Baucom said. “We built bunkers and bridges. One time I helped resurface the area for Bob Hope’s Freedom Concert.”
After his military service, Baucom spent 15 years driving a Poplar Bluff school bus.
“I ended up going to St. Louis and working in the kitchen at Jefferson Barracks,” Baucom said.
While they grew up in neigboring communities, Baucom and Crook meet while in the Seabees.
Crook said, “I met a guy who said he ‘was from a little town in Missouri’ and I wouldn’t know where it was. He said it was between Qulin and Poplar Bluff.’”
Crook knew where it was and he and Baucom soon realized “his dad, my dad worked timber together.”
Crook first learned of the Seabees watching them as the honor guard at the Rose Bowl parade.
Graduating from high school in 1966, Crook and his friend Gary Milton knew they were going to be drafted. They wanted to be army helicopter pilots and decided to enlist.
“I wasn’t old enough to sign my papers, so Milton become a helicopter pilot,” Crook said.
When Crook turned 18 in October, his brother-in-law, a Navy recruiter, “asked if I wanted to join the Navy. I didn’t care about being on a ship. He said ‘have you heard about the Seabees?’”
Crook understood hard work, he had worked on a farm and had studied building trades.
“I went in the Seabees, signed up in November and didn’t go into basic training until January of 67,” Crook said.
Stationed in Oregon, as an equipment operator, Crook was told “you’ll make rank quicker if you’re a builder” so he become a third class builder.
After training in California from July to August 1968, “I got sent to Vietnam,” Crook said. “We built what’s called hooches where the man stayed and worked on air strips.”
Crook explained if the Seabees pulled you out of Vietnam before you served a year, they could send you back and they “could get a good 18 months out of you.”
Seabees would go to Vietnam for nine months, go back to the states spend six months training and be sent back for two to nine months.
While in Vietnam “I got promoted a second class builder,” Crook said.
When he left the Seabees, Crook returned to Poplar Bluff, joined the National Guard and worked construction before becoming building inspector for the city of Poplar Bluff.
Now retired, Crook explained, he’s “just enjoying life.”
Crook and Fortenberry had known each other since grade school and were part of the early building trades class at Poplar Bluff with instructors Herb Brown, Al Hobbs and Jake Bumgarner.
They renewed their friendship serving in the Seabees.
In high school, Fortenberry recalls, “they kept harping at us about we needed to learn how to do something to make a living. They worked hard at trying to make us have productive ideas. I had my mind made up about ninth grade I was going to try to learn to be a carpenter. Actually, I was in the first building trades class Poplar Bluff ever had. I graduated in ‘66.”
Fortenberry said, “a lot of guys were getting their draft notices before they even finished high school. They went straight from high school to boot camp somewhere. I graduated from high school when I was 17. I had a little time to play.”
“I was too wild to think about college,” Fortenberry said. “I had in my mind, I wanted to do something that I want to do. I went up to the Navy recruiter, and I spoke to him.”
The navy offered a test, and Fortenberry scored “really good for building trades or for the construction industry.”
The recruiter “got to talking to me about the Seabees, and I said, ‘Well, that worked for me.’ He signed me up. I really don’t want to be on a ship.”
Fortenberry went to boot camp at Great Lakes and then went to California.
“I was assigned to mobile construction battalion five,” Fortenberry said. “We went to Vietnam twice. First tour was in ‘67 and ‘68 and I was on the advanced team” to work on a DMZ.
Fortenberry said, he will never forget. It was early December 1967 when they landed on the Dong Hoi airstrip and they were taking fire on the runway when the plane came in.
“The pilot comes over the intercom and he said ‘you guys throw your stuff, he didn’t really say stuff, but he said they would lower the back end of the plane down and he said ‘I’m going to go to the other end of that runway and turn around. I’m going back and you guys get your stuff over here’ and that’s what we did.”
“I went through a lot of pretty interesting training on all kinds of weapons,” but it was “when I was at Portland, Maine, they wanted some electricians and they wanted volunteers. Nobody would volunteer so they picked me and three other guys out to volunteer. I went overseas as an electrician.”
Fortenberry recalls it was “pretty rough that first go around because we lost some guys from Poplar Bluff.”
When Fortenberry returned home after almost four years in the service, he said, “I went to work for JD Rains, it was Rains Electric.”
He then worked for Smith and Livingston Construction Company in commercial construction until late 1982.
Fortenberry knew the carpenter and locksmith who was retiring from the VA Medical Center. Fortenberry applied “and almost a year later they called me and said I had made the selection if I wanted the job. I thought, ‘yeah, I can make it.’ It was Oct. 25, 1982, when I went to work there and I retired actually first working day of 2010.”
“I started to say I think I would like retirement, but it doesn’t pay well,” Fortenberry said. “I worked mostly in construction all my life since I was 15 years old. The day I retired it made me almost sick to my stomach because it dawned on me I don’t have a job. I worked all those years basically in one field and then you know ‘I don’t have a job. What am I going to do Monday morning?’ It’s an eye opener, but I adapted to it pretty good.”
Adapting is something Baucom, Crook and Fortenberry did when they returned from Vietnam.
Fortenberry said, “I don’t carry that Vietnam thing around on my shoulder. That first tour, we lost a lot of friends and guys.”
He stays away from crowded stores during the holidays.
“I just can’t do that,” he said. “I don’t go there from October till after people get done taking their stuff back for Christmas. I’ve always figured you work hard, you don’t have to dwell on all negative. I’m not a negative thinking kind of person.”