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, ...

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......

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...

I used to drink a lot. Sometimes I would drink until I puked. Sometimes I drank so much that I would wake up sometime, somewhere, with no memory of how I got there or what had happened the night before. I wasn't alone in this. In my platoon at Bad Kissingen, almost everyone in the platoon drank to excess and lots of them were like me, puking, lost, underaged, irresponsible drunks. The sergeants I worked for were responsible, functioning, mature drunks who got a kick out of the antics of the no...

With a nod to Ok for jogging the memory. He posted a re-write of an article he had posted on another site awhile back. When I read it the first time it reminded me of an incident from my own travels that I had intended to write about then promptly allowed to slip into the black hole between my ears. Similar is some ways, but different. My rainy flat tire story took place in Dallas. I was a platoon sergeant in a truck company stationed in California. We were on one of the screwiest convoy mi...

This is one of the themes that I have neglected of late. In the space of about forty-five years since I left home, I have met many people; some memorable for whatever reason and some that just come to mind on rare occasions, drawn out by some event or related memory, or sometimes just by a smell. And I'm sure there are some folks I just don't recall at all. I met Charlie when I came to the 38th Trans in 1967. The 38th was on Coleman Barracks in the town of Sandhofen, just outside of Mannhei...