A Little Progress in Vietnam

During May, I decided to try to build up some of the many kits overflowing from my shelves. Many are items I've had for years. As shown in my last blog entry, I had started my M113s, a birthday gift from my wife and daughter from about four years ago. This month I managed to get my M113s and a single M48 assembled and painted and then unpainted. I had them all done, except for the clearcoat. Then I got out the new can of Krylon clearcoat and proceeded to give them all a coating of white. I managed to save the least damaged of the bunch, with lots of dry brushing to balance out the olive and re-weather it. The others all need repainting. The M113 that survived is the least "dressy" of the bunch, not having any of the graffiti that the others had. Here are a couple pics:

While researching markings for the M113s, I found a great collection of M113 pics here on Flickr:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/zippo132/2441764052/in/photostream/

Although I had planned to get back into Vietnam gaming for several years, I had never really intended to get into the riverine part of the war. Then I randomly pulled this book off of the shelf and started to read:

"Riverine: A Brown Water Sailor in the Delta, 1967" by Don Sheppard is an outstanding account of his experience on the Bassac River as Commander of River Division 51. Sheppard shares his personal struggles, the burden of command, and offers detailed descriptions of the battles.

Despite working on the M113s, my focus is mostly on building what I need for riverine battles on the Bassac. The next step is to complete a couple of UH-1B helicopters from HAL-3 Seawolves. These are fire support gunships that supported RIVDIV51 operations. They are a frequent part of operations described in "Riverine", and I found a great site for the Seawolves here:

http://www.seawolf.org/index.asp

That's all for now, hopefully pics soon of my other M113s, M48, a couple of Seawolves, and maybe some ramblings about post apocalyptic terrain.