For the locals, it's, I mean, it's whatever
they're growing around there so a lot of chickens,
a lot of beef, a lot of seafood.
The Mekong River runs right through
the bulk of the country and
then you can get out to the shore and
it's all beautiful white coral beaches out through there.
There used to be a big Club Med that
was there one time.
I mean so it was kind of, it was interesting to go.
A lot of fresh fruit, like the jackfruits and, you know,
like the normal stuff, coconuts and mangos.
We had the only water purification unit in the country,
it was the ROWPU, they call it now.
We had actually a prototype so it was called an ADROWPU
before which meant air droppable,
reverse osmosis water purification unit
but the problem was air droppable,
no, not a good thing....
They found out after they slid it out,
they used them in the Gulf War,
they slid it out of the back of the
aircraft and it went “whack, thump,”
and cracked a lot of the lines so they figured out,
okay we're not going to drop them by aircraft anymore.
So what these were, were ship board systems
that they used to use for desalinating the
water for the men, onboard ship, or ladies,
yep, so they were able to modify,
put it in a sea container, put it in a self-contained,
with a generator and all that kind of stuff.
So ours was one of two prototypes so
there were a lot of miles on by that point already.
They didn't want to let me take leave from the camp
because that water purification unit was critical.
If it went down we'd be without water.
And parts to get, had to come from Canada because
it was a prototype so we really babied that machine and
the only way that I could ever leave the camp
is if we had at least three to four days of back
up water in place before they would let me go
anywhere just in case something happened.
And it gave us a lot of heartache once we first
got there because it was in pretty rough
shape by that point.
A lot of the propellers on the pumps
were beat up and the problem
with a shipboard machine is that it
vibrates a lo tand luckily I had that navy training
in the past so the first rotation was having
a lot of problems like knocking down all the
time and had to go through al the maintenance
routine and try to get it back up again.
And then I had taken industrial motor
controls at St. Clair College and had worked on
programmable logic control technology which
we did not have training in the
military on at that point.
So luckily I was just in the right
place at the right time and we were able
to keep the pumps working the way they
were supposed to and I was able to fault
find a really difficulty fault on it so
good for us we had water.
I mean we were pumping it out of the river,
it was coming out of the pools around us
wherever we could get it as a
water source but it was coming out 99.99% pure.