Brian...
As far as having a camera ready at all times was reinforced by an episode during my first project in Vietnam... I was going to film a Naval Construction Battalion (Sea Bees) on a job inland from Danang and hitched a ride with a Marine Corps convoy.
I had always been taught (erroneously it turned out) that we should have our cameras packed away when we traveled on the roads in Vietnam since these roads were dusty and "God Forbid that we should get our cameras dirty!".
Anyway we got hit in an ambush and this is how it played out...
An absolutely beautiful day with blue skies and billowy white clouds. The firing was coming from a line of hills about a hundred or two hundred yards in the distance across beautiful rice paddies. An earth embankment separating the rice paddies from the road with the Marines and Sea Bees taking cover behind it and returning fire with a pair of helicopter gunships spraying the hills with rockets and machine guns...
Nice picture right - but what might have made the image Pulitzer quality was that here was a young Vietnamese lad in conical hat and black pajamas carrying a stick with baskets of canned Coke at each end. The kid was totally oblivious of the action going on and was trying to sell the coke to the American troops firing at the hill line
That image will remain indelible in my mind over 50 years later!
From then on, I always traveled with a camera ready...
BTW: In line with your comment bout your wife being evacuated. I have a Vietnamese friend whose mom has a very interesting story... She worked as an interpreter with the USAID Agency and his dad was a Vietnamese Major who flew helicopters. During the fall of Saigon, his dad "borrowed" a helicopter and flew it to his house in Saigon where he rescued his entire family. The chopper did not have enough fuel to fly out to any American ships off the coast so he flew it to Vung Tau on the coast where the family boarded a ship. After several months at sea, including pirate raids, the ship sailed all the way to Virginia where the family settled.
Now that would make a great book!