I have heard that one of the strongest memory stimulators is your sense of smell. A fresh-out-of-the-oven apple pie will bring you back to the days when grandma was baking them and you were a little kid. A certain perfume will arouse the memory of a long-ago love. A smell can take you back to a familiar place, too. I was the son of a sailorman; I grew up next to an ocean, a few different ones, in fact. The smell of salt spray will bring up a v...
It was a late spring, early summer Saturday. We got up and did some chores and then loaded the boys into the car and headed out for an adventure. We didn't have a destination in mind, just out to have some fun. First stop was at KFC for a bucket of chicken and then the Circle K for sodas and snacks. We started off going Northwest on Grand Avenue. We stopped in Wickenberg for a little bit and just looked around. There is a big tree in...
El Cajon, California is my home town; well, as much any place can be a home town to a Navy brat. I spent most of my high school years there. Went to several grade schools there. I have memories of walking to the El Cajon theater with a quarter and that would get me into the Saturday Matinee with enough left over for popcorn and a coke. When I was six or seven I would walk from my Aunt Essie's house to the Donut Center on El Cajon Boulevard and buy a do...
They purchased a new Corvette and set out across the great USA in search of adventure and...I don't know...it was too early for all that hippy transcendental crap so just fun and chicks, I guess. Anyway, we watched them every week as they took odd jobs and met people who needed their help. I am sitting here hearing the theme song in my head; it was on the pop charts for a while...piano tinkling with a mellow backbeat, not the Bobby Troupe/ Rolling Stones song, just a mellow...
I have been tootling around the Southwest Desert area for a lot of my life and other than an occasional checkpoint along I-5 in California, I don't recall much Border Patrol activity. But this last trip we made we saw a lot of checkpoints, observation points, and patrols. On I-8 between El Centro and Yuma there was a checkpoint that had several patrol cars, a mobile guard shack, and concrete barriers. A couple of the Patrol SUVs were marked as K-9 units and ...
Willi was the barber for the command group at HQ USEUCOM (Headquarters, United States European Command) near Stuttgart, Germany. The shop in the basement of the J-2 building was his normal place of business but when summoned by the boss, Willi would make a housecall to the little barbershop in the basement of the command building. I can't count the number of haircuts I received from Willi, nor can I recall all the conversations that we had. But o...
The great Southwest is a beautiful place. This month we traveled from Colorado Springs to Phoenix to San Diego to Fort Huachuca to Phoenix and back home. At each location there was personal history and family. It was fun to explore some of the history and always a good time to be with family. The difficult part is the space between destinations...the long empty space. All along the way we made a few notes and observations and thought it would be fun to sha...
I think it was Thomas Wolfe who said that you can't go home again. I think the sentiment he was expressing was that you grow up and change and so does everything at home. So when you revisit your past, it isn't there anymore. At least that's how I have experienced it. MamaCharlie accuses me of being overly nostalgic and maybe I am. I prefer to regard it as a respect for my history but I can see her point. I am kinda stuck in the sixties....
The Army's policy for soldiers returning from Vietnam was that if you had six months or more left on your enlistment, you would be assigned somewhere in the States. If you had less than six months left you would be discharged early and sent home. Even shaving off the short-timers like that, Stateside posts soon became seriously over-populated. My brother was sent to Fort Ord in September of 1966 and was assigned to a signal unit that had so many soldiers in it tha...
Caudell was a mechanic in our maintenance shop. He spent as much time after hours working on other peoples, and his own, cars as he did working on the company's trucks. He also spent a lot of time over at the Army junk yard looking for parts and such. On several occasions he would catch someone turning in a car for junk and buy it cheap before it got into the Army's junk system. One afternoon he intercepted a young GI who was turning in an Audi because he cou...
When I got out of the Army the second time, in 1971, it was still pretty much a "boys only club"...the Women's Army Corps (WACs) was a separate world: separate billets, separate job assignments, and fiercely enforced anti-fraternization regs. Sneaking into the WAC barracks was a general fantasy, sometimes discussed and even planned, but only rarely attempted...usually by fellas on the way home from the club who were well past the legal blood-alcohol limit. At the ...
I made the mistake of watching the video that Whip posted the other day, "We Gotta Get Outa This Place"...by the Animals...a song that almost every GI in Vietnam knew by heart...well...at least the chorus. I remember sitting in the Hua Lu Hotel's rooftop bar; thirty-some hours left in-country and some other drunken short-timer kept playing it on the juke box...so we all sang..."We gotta get outa this place, if it's the last thing we ever do..." and drank more beer a...
Elroy was a bully. He was big, probably 6'4-5'', 225 or more, and malicious. He got crosswise with me at almost our first meeting; he was throwing his weight around in the drivers' waiting area of the motor pool. He, a SP4, called me "Stoney", a nickname reserved for my friends...very few friends. I gave him a minor dressing-down, in front of his cronies, reminding him that even in the relaxed atmosphere of EUCOM, SP4s do not address Staff ...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ghXatUGIi9g This morning I came across one of those movies that I cannot resist watching whenever I stumble across it. "Mr. Majestyk" was released in 1974, starred Charles Bronson, was filmed in Colorado (in areas I am familiar with), and was full of 70's TV people. The plot was unremarkable: reluctant love interest, bigger-than-life bad guys, beautiful moll, simple farmer just trying to get along gets crosswise wit...
Mom walked me to school that first day; just a few city blocks. We lived in the middle of the block on Kalmea Street. Walk up to State Street and turn right; then it was only a few blocks to the school. Straight forward, easy, even for an eight-year-old who was reluctant to start in a new school again. She showed me which door to come out of at the end of the day, "Go to the right" she said, "it's only a few blocks to K...