It is snowing again. We had a pretty significant snow fall a couple weeks ago and it had almost melted away. I just looked out the front door; the sidewalk and streets are covered, maybe an inch by now, and it is supposed to keep going until noon tomorrow. If I were a kid, I would be ecstatic. I am no longer a kid; I have to drive around some tomorrow and I would just as soon have the roads clear. Life Happens and Alice Wonderland are driving up from Texas on Saturday, I hope all this snow is ...

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...

Way back in the day, the government used to fully subsidize the military commissaries and Exchanges. There were two exchange systems, the Army and Air Force Exchange System and the Navy Exchange. The commissaries provided US and US-like groceries and sundries in overseas areas where those items would be unavailable or prohibitively expensive. So we could live in Germany or Japan or Spain or lots of other places and have Turkey for Thanksgiving and hot dogs for fourth of July. The Base or Post...

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...

I was in the garage a little while ago and got distracted. At this age, that can ruin a whole day. It is one thing to go into another room and stand there like an idiot trying to remember why you are there...but to go out to the garage with a real purpose, move the cars out of the way, then see something that steals your attention and crowds out all other thoughts...that's inconvenient to say the least. What got my attention is an old Army poncho hanging out there, a just-in-case precaution su...

I am breaking one of my own rules about blogging this morning. I am writing while I am MAD. I have always felt that the soft voice turns away wrath. Dealing with people of all ilks and stations was a large part of my professional life, both in and after the Army. I learned young, by observation and by intense teaching from the Chief, that people who are screamers turn off their audience. If you scream every time you are upset, subordinates will disregard anything you say in a normal tone of vo...

I came into the support platoon at the end of their fifth month without a platoon sergeant. A young buck sergeant had been named to the position temporarily but in reality the platoon was being run by a committee of junior NCOs with limited experience and no real pull outside the platoon. The political upshoot was that the platoon had become the target for any extra work, blame, or dirty job that came down the pike. So morale was bad, discipline was weak, and performance was sub-standard in al...

In 1989 I was in Grafenwohr with the 68th Armor. It was a normal gunnery rotation, lasted about three and a half weeks. We lived in one of the camps with concrete barracks buildings; Normandy I think it was. The rotation started on the third of January and unbelievably, the weather was balmy. For the first ten days or so the temps were in the high fifties and low sixties and not a drop of rain. For those who are not familiar with the largest training area in Germany, the one thing it is univer...