Ancient Web: Jack Spratt Put His Swiftboat Memories on a Homepage

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.

Not every important piece of Web preservation comes from a website built in 1997. Sometimes the thing worth saving is half a century older than the page.

Visit Jack Spratt's Vietnam Story

Jack Spratt identifies himself as a U.S. Navy veteran who spent 1970 aboard Swiftboats—Patrol Craft, Fast—in Vietnam. The opening photograph shows PCF 48 in September of that year. Spratt identifies himself and several shipmates by rank and name, from LTjg Mike Peters to men stationed in the gun tub and aft of the boat.

The homepage was updated September 27, 2024. This is therefore a modern personal preservation project, not an original 1970s website or a demonstrably surviving 1990s homepage. Its relevance to the Ancient Web series is the deliberately accessible, independent archive of original photographs and firsthand recollections.

An account built around what someone remembers

Spratt begins before Vietnam, with a frank story about failing to stay in college and joining the Navy in January 1969, partly because he imagined a shipboard assignment would keep him away from ground combat. By late 1969, he says, he was in Vietnam anyway.

The site branches into a photo album, information about his awards, and individual reminiscences. The link list alone suggests the range: the first night in Vietnam, liberties in Cam Ranh Bay and Saigon, a Cambodian-border patrol, a cat named Fred, an ice-cream social, a race, and rest and recreation in Sydney.

Rather than claim to give a full military history, Spratt calls the material his perspective. He says the worst experiences are not the ones he readily remembers. He also warns that his memory may have become cloudy over more than fifty years. That caveat is not a flaw: it helps readers distinguish personal recollection from contemporary ship logs or independently documented wartime events.

The site is a collection of accessible short entries, photographs, and named comrades, not a polished documentary streaming service. An ordinary visitor can pick one anecdote, then another, without losing the author's voice.

What is being preserved is an individual's lived experience as he chooses to tell it. The photographs and named crewmates give future historians leads; the memories remain memories, to be compared with other records.

Read the introduction and follow the photo and story links.

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.