They say a camel is a horse designed by a committee. You should see some of the things that can be designed when the committee is made up of Army lieutenants! This memory was jogged during a little back-and-forth with Pontogubb this morning. He mentioned having a trailer hitch cover that looks like a claymore. In the process of imagining what that would look like, another frightful memory crowded in and I thought I should share it with you. When we got to the desert in '...
Every Saturday afternoon the Sixties on Six channel on Sirius XM features one specific year and plays the top forty songs from that year along with news clips, ads, movie ratings and other stuff about the year. Today the feature year was 1969. They played a couple of tunes I just didn't remember at all, but they sounded like '69...kinda bubble-gummy, a shade hippie-ish, and like that. Then they played the one song that always takes me down the time tunnel a pl...
Several years ago we were in Phoenix to celebrate MC's parents special February: Their fiftieth anniversary and his birthday. We had a little free time and were driving east on Bell Road, marvelling at all the growth and how busy everything was. Even in February we had all the windows up and the AC blowing full blast (although we once survived there with two cars that had no AC, we are no longer "acclimated"). Even with all the windows up, the AC on full, and o...
Stuttgart, Germany was heavily damaged during WWII. Most of the downtown area was screwed up pretty badly. When the war ended, the troubles didn't. People lived in bombed-out basements, drew water from puddles in bomb craters, and don't even ask where the bathroom facilities were; they weren't. People begged, scavenged, sold and traded, and did whatever they had to do in order to survive. The main source of food was the American GIs who occupied...
A First Sergeant isn't the oldest or the first one up in the morning; the "First Sergeant" is the senior enlisted man in any Army company. The First Sergeant (abbreviated 1SG) has many varied duties and responsibilities. I won't list them all; it would take a lot of space, but I always felt that one of the most important responsibilities a 1SG has is the management of the unit's training program. Everything a soldier does is planned...
I had it in mind to write about my Uncle today. Omar. He was a local hero; he grew up in the East County area of San Diego and had a reputation as a tough guy and a ladies' man. He raced stock cars on a dirt track and drag raced on the back county roads. He was over six feet tall, dark curly hair, deep set eyes, and hands the size of a five-pound ham. But while I was thinking about Omar and the things I remember about him that are signific...
I tried to break my wrist the other day. I was changing the brake pads on Charlie's Grand Prix and was using a 24-oz. mini-sledge to tap the lug wrench in order to break the lug nuts free. That in itself is not an unsafe practice, but the position I was in and the angle I had to use had me holding the lugwrench in place with my left hand and swinging the hammer across my arm to hit the wrench to the left of my left hand. That was the unsafe procedure. ...
In the late fifties I woke up to the world of "cool". Guys around me were starting to look cool, dress cool, talk cool, and act cool. I tried hard to be cool like them. I had the engineer boots, the black leather jacket with zippers and studs, form-fitting white tee-shirt, levis down on my hips...and the hair. I went for the Elvis/Fabian/every-other-teen-idol look. Tried Brylcream, Vitalis, Wildroot Cream oil, Vasoline, and Valvoleen but I neve...
I met Admiral Friedrich Ruge when I was assigned to pick him up at his home in Tubingen and take him to a formal dinner being held at the Deputy CinC's house in Stuttgart. It was late 1977; I remember it was a very chilly night. I was selected, I think, because I could speak a little German and had proven that I was able to get around without too much supervision. I had never heard of the Admiral Ruge. I was told that he was a retired German Admi...
I have to thank Sherabella for prodding my memory, when she wrote about attending a seminar where the speaker illustrated that we all have a little more effort to expend, even when we think we don't. It immediately got me to thinking about Army Basic Training, Fort Ord, California, Summer of 1964, learning lessons every day about pushing just a little bit harder. Our seminars were not conducted in air-conditioned auditoriums...we learned our lessons under th...
These days we throw the word "Hero" around too liberally. I agree that our men and women in uniform are serving our nation with honor and courage and we should support them and recognize what we owe them. It is a very big deal. Our police and firemen and EMTs and other rescue- and "first responders" serve with courage and often go "above and beyond". But does the term "Hero" apply to every single one of them that shows up for work every day? In my day, bei...
The Armed Forces Network - Europe provides radio programming for servicemen and their families in Europe. It has evolved over the years. The programming has changed a lot. During the sixties, AFN only played popular music a couple of hours a day...country music a couple of hours a day...dinner music at dinner time...radio dramas in the evening...classical music in the afternoon (did you know that Carl Haas was very enamoured of Berlios?)...various and sundry other pro...
My dad, the Chief, was a hard-hat diver for most of his Navy career. He was rated as a shipfitter (which became a metalsmith which became a hull technician). He was not a formally educated man but he was very intelligent about things to do with metallurgy, gases, atmospheres, depth and pressures and all kinds of things. I know because every couple of years he had to take a test for promotion and I used to quiz him from his manuals; they had sample tests at the back o...
Sitting in the airport waiting for our new Marine to arrive, MC and I started noodling about how many airports we have flown in and out of. It has been a few. When I was a very young fellow, most of my travel was on trains. I rode the Super Chief halfway across the country, and several others, too. I wrote a couple articles about that awhile back. My first memory of flying was out of Norfolk; our plane's engine caught fire on ...
I eat my peas with honey I've done it all my life They do taste kind of funny But it keeps them on my knife ! We all have food idiosyncrasies, I think. I knew a man who loved to eat chocolate cake with roast beef gravy on it. Sounds yucky to me. Like the Smothers Brothers singing about "pancakes boiled in cabbage juice...of course it's not so popular now..." One of my particular peculiarities is ...