While serving as a Building Missionary in Upland, CA in 1965 I received a Draft Notice - President Johnson had just announced that we were going into Vietnam in a big way, I had just turned 20 years old and we had no draft deferments. I was able to get to a Navy recruiting office before the Army got me. And so I ended up arriving in Vietnam on the USS Polk County LST-1084 on the same day that I would have been released from my missionary service. The ship photo at the bottom is the ship. So yesterday, after church, we met with another LST Sailor who took us to the places where the ship was built and launched. The photo at the top is the yard where they first started welding components that would be used in building the ship. The second photo is of the very large building where they would build the ships round-the-clock right through the winter and the third photo is the site where the ship was launched sideways into the Ohio River on 19 January 1945. Ours was one of hundreds of these amphibious tank landing ships built by "corn field" shipyards during WWII. It was way cool to see where our ship was built!