I will look through my stuff and try to find the DVD. It is a 30 minute long professionally done DVD of 23rd Military Police Co. operations in Vietnam 1967-72, produced by a veteran of the 23rd MP company. It is a compilation of 8mm movies, and many scans of 35mm photos, set to period music and with a voice over narration. There are several movies of M151 gun jeeps on convoy, loading and unloading from an LST or LCT, besides the water crossing at the defile. Cadillac-Gage V-100 Commando armored scout vehicles are also featured. I will ask him if I can post some of it on u-tube or maybe I can just pull out the water crossing section and post it here somehow. We just gave a copy to the curator of the Museum at the US Army Military Police School at Ft Leonard Wood MO to place in their collection. Let me try to find my copy in my own archives.
I saw the real thing in 1968. Near the south end of ChuLai base a small river, large creek, that was swollen by monsoon rains emptys out into the DungQuat Bay of the South China Sea. While patroling along the beach in one of our M-151ai's we came upon the creek as we drove south and found some GIs on the opposite bank who were deciding whether to attempt a ford of the creek/river. We told them no but they decided to try it any way and drove straight into water that was about 8 feet deep and submerged the whole jeep. They popped out of the jeep, swam to the beach eventually after being washed out. The wind up of the whole thing was extracting the M-151ai with a deuce and a half and a winch by a very pissed off motor pool SGT. It was something to see at the time and a lesson learned for all concerned.
Later that year we had to ford a small river in a field expedient defile around a blown out bridge after a convoy ambush on QL1 south of TamKy City. Our CO, CPT Sunderland, was at the scene with us and took some good 8mm movies of M151a1's in action. I have a copy of that on a DVD. The drivers pulled out the hand throttles, sat up on the back of the seats and drove those gun jeeps right across with a big splash and a lot of muddy water being thrown around. Once again I have to say that our mission weary, but always mission ready, M151s did whatever we asked of them, never let us down and brought all but 10 of us 23rd MPs home every day. They just could not cope with those command detonated, buried 105mm rounds now known as IEDs.
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