In 1968, two brothers from Decatur, Illinois served simultaneously in Vietnam. Mike Ducy sailed aboard USS Jouett (DLG-29), a guided missile frigate on search and rescue duty in the Gulf of Tonkin. His younger brother Bill was a Marine, on the ground in Da Nang and Hoi An.
They wrote letters home. They recorded cassette tapes. Mike kept a daily logbook and shot Super 8 film of helicopter rescues, port calls, and life at sea. Back in Decatur, their parents followed the war through their sons' words and the evening news.
This site presents their story day by day, from the primary sources they left behind.
The material on this site comes from the personal archives of FTG3 Michael F. Ducy, USN, preserved by his family for over fifty years. The collection includes:
Digitized and curated by CR Michael Ducy II.
Logbook pages, letters, and documents transcribed using Claude AI vision from scanned originals. Audio recordings denoised and transcribed using modern speech recognition. All transcriptions reviewed against source material.
For questions about this project or the Ducy family archives, please reach out to Michael Ducy II.