Over lunch this afternoon the subject of Da Nang’s world famous China Beach came up.  Two daughters and a niece were adamant that it was called and always had been called My Khe beach.  Took me a lot of convincing that during the American war, the US Army had taken over the entire beach line running from Son Tra down to My Khe as an R&R Center and named the entire thing “China Beach”.  No Vietnamese allowed.

In Retrospect it seems rather arrogant that we took one of the most beautiful beaches in the world and made it our own.  My good friend Dat had a souvenir shop just outside the gates of China Beach.  He sold scrapbooks, lighters with unit emblems, and a lot of rolling papers.

There was also a stroll of very friendly Vietnamese girls near the entrance to China Beach R&R Centre.  

In the late 1980s there was a TV show called “China Beach” that made being in Vietnam

look a whole lot cooler than it really was.