We were set up in the woods southeast of Wurzburg. Beautiful spot, rolling hills, farm fields, autobahn cutting through the middle of the area. A perfect place to take the young soldiers out to the top of the tall hill across the autobahn and do a map reading class. The 1:50000 maps the Army uses for manuever are fairly detailed and you could sit on the hill and look out over the countryside and orient the map easily, then point out the terrain features and landmarks. It was a great place...

It has been an interesting year. I have learned a lot of things. How to make them little happy or unhappy faces, ones that wink, even. I learned right away not to type in all caps...the lazy man's method. I feel I have been accepted by many, for that thanks. I learned that some folks try to make a joke out of anything and others have very little sense of humor about anything. I have learned that when I put out what I feel is a heart felt and honest piece, no one seems to notice...but I...

It was the coldest I had ever been in my life...even colder than the railroad platform in Minnesota at three o'clock in the morning, winter of 1954. I was in the cab of my fuel tanker, without a working heater ( driving around during the day, you could get a little heat from the engine compartment coming in through the hole in the firewall that was supposed to be for the heater duct but it didn't stay at all warm once the engine was shut off). We were in the woods on the side of Mount Bal...

I mentioned before that my friend, Dave, passed away recently. And that his wife, Imera, was getting a raw deal from her bank and an insurance company. This is not an update on that situation, that is an ongoing struggle. I don't know what this is. I can't explain it. I am not a believer in supernatural things...I don't do ghost stories...I have only seen one UFO and it got explained pretty thoroughly the same day I saw it. Here's what happened, you figure it out. A couple of us wer...

During a three year break in service, we lived in Phoenix. One of the schemes in my little thinker was to become a breeder of magnificent German Shepherds...with Golf von Haus Schutting as the prize breeding bull. Golf liked the idea, too. The plan got no farther than the first litter, we had a dozen or so dogs at one time...but times were not conducive to raising guard dogs. So the whole enterprise dried up, we sold two of the pups and gave away several, the most beautiful of the bunch, ...

Back in the day, when dinosaurs roamed the earth, there was a border between East and West Germany. This was a real, by-gosh, barbed wire, minefield infested, machine gun covered, don't-you-dare-get-near-it border. There was a 5 kilometer strip on the west side of the border that was prohibited to US personnel. The Fulda Gap and a portion north and south of it was responsibility of the 14th Armored Cav...we sat in border camps on the edge of the 5K zone and patrolled the border and sat in ...

Jackson was a country boy. He did not want to be in the Army, did not want to be an Army trucker, did not want to be in Germany, and did not mind telling anyone who would listen all about it. He bunked under Johnny, a totally opposite type of person, adapted into the Army and its environs and so fully assimilated into German lifestyles that when he was on pass in town people were always mistaking him for a German. But this is about Jackson. Jackson spent an awful lot of time in bed. ...

The last I heard they were still looking for dad so no one is real sure if he shot his daughters because they had embraced those filthy western ways or if there was some other reason to kill two lovely, bright, popular, happy, young girls (adjectives provided by various friends and news services). Even if they were fat, ugly, malcontent, hated, pig-faced girls...I still can't think of how killing them restores honor to anyone or any thing. I can't think of a reason to kill your daughters......

Several years ago a community back east earned some headlines by holding a vote so citizens could give their bridge a new name. The voters elected to name their bridge "BOB". This generated some dicussion locally about names and nicknames. Shortly after that, a mountain community in our fair state chose to name their bridge, too. They named it the "James Brown Soul Center of the Universe Bridge". This inspirerd two local morning DJs on the classic rock station to lament the fact that our ...

Imera came over yesterday to do some cleaning for MamaCharlie. She is a fanatic cleaner and wanted to do it as a kind of Christmas present for her good friend. So we were up late the night before, doing some cleaning so Imera wouldn't think we weren't cleaning at all. Before I went to bed that night, I sat up talking with MamaCharlie about a variety of things. One of the things was the idea of cleaning before the cleaner showed up. It reminded me of the period in my life when we had a maid. ...

    Somewhere in the middle of the 70s the Army got all "run" crazy. Bernie Rogers, the new Chief of Staff of the Army, decided that we all needed to be able to run two miles in less than seventeen minutes regardless of what the PT test standards were (at the time, a guy in my age group was required to run one mile in less than ten minutes or so). This, coupled with new weight standards (which overnight made me 20 pounds overweight), created some concern. We all were gi...

My brain seems to be locked onto the old days in Arizona and young GIs with way too much car for their own good. I mentioned the obnoxious Chevelle driver on my last post; I'll share another quick one about him. Most weeknights we didn't go to Tucson; sometimes we did, but mostly we either hung around the barracks or "cruised" the town of Sierra Vista, right outside the gate of Fort Huachuca. On one of those very late nights, as we were making our last lap out to Sambo's, we spotted the Che...

While I am on the subject of Speedway in Tucson and cars and draggin' and such, let me share a quick story that I am soooo proud of: There was a GI from Fort Huachuca that cruised around Tucson in his '67 SS-396 Chevelle. He would rev his engine at you and flip you off and engage in other anti-social behavior. He had a tattoo on his right butt-cheek, if that helps you visualize some of that behavior. I didn't like the guy and for some reason, he and his buddies didn't like me. Sigh. So i...

It was a Sunday night, late. I had Gordy with me. We had been cruising around Tucson most of the evening (MamaCharlie had moved back to Phoenix and our visits were less frequent). Bored and tired, Gordy and I decided to swing by Johnnie's on Speedway to check out the cars and then head home...or actually to Huachuca, our temporary home. Johnnie's was a bust; there just weren't that many cars out that would make it worth staying in town any longer. We were at a traffic light about a block we...

As a coming-home-in-one-piece present to myself, I bought a 1965 GTO when I got back from Vietnam. How I started off shopping for a '66 Chevelle and wound up with a '65 Goat is another story I have already told (http://bigfatdaddy.joeuser.com/article/153991/Little_GTO ) and ( htp://bigfatdaddy.joeuser.com/article/153517/A_Gift_To_MeFrom_Me). But the actual purchase of the Goat is a story that spotlights a few things about The Chief that were amusing to me. After the test drive and the negot...