Mushroom cloud Explosion at Donestk

[Jackpine Radical]

27. I saw 4 explosions like this in Vietnam in the spring of '68.

I was about 2 miles away & thought they were nukes going off in the 1t Cavalry Division ammo dump. The dump had been hit by 122mm rocket fire, and all sorts of artillery rounds, aerial rocket artillery arounds, flares, illumination rounds, etc. were exploding. I was sitting out on a sandbag bunker watching the show.

Then BOOM! Something just like on that film. I rolled backward off the bunker, convinced I had been nuked.

Turns out it was a 50,000 gallon tank of helicopter fuel (which is basically kerosene) cooked off and vaporized in the heat & exploded.

Over the course of the night, 3 more fuel tanks went off just like that. This was just before the 1st Cav air assaulted into Khe Sanh to dig out the Marines, so the ammo dump was holding about 3 times its normal supply of munitions when it went off.