It had to be in the fall of 1976, as best as I can figure. The training brigades had all closed down and the instructors had all been reassigned to units in the newly re-activated 7th Infantry Division. Fort Ord was changing its appearance. The WWII barracks that had once covered all the hillsides between Seaside and Marina were being replaced by the dormitory looking buildings of the modern all volunteer Army. I wound up in the 7th S&T Battalion, in the truck company, most of the driving c...

The dozer had been working the clearing all morning. The low-boy had dropped it and the operator off early and left, the backhoe had followed along and together they had spent the whole morning expanding and leveling and smoothing out the clearing. They were wary but although they were definately in injun country, there hadn't been any VC activity in the area in some time. At about noon, they both came under heavy small arms fire. The backhoe operator was hit right away but the dozer was on the...

Every spring at Kasernes all over Germany they have some sort of post clean up day. Usually the morning is spent cleaning up from winter, raking, sweeping, trimming, etc., all the common areas and work places outdoors. The afternoon is spent on the living areas, the barracks for the singles and the housing areas for the folks who live in quarters. On clean up days, only absolutely essential work gets done, everyone is required to "pitch in" and get things squared away. This is not a really big ...

It was early in 1970, the Hyperborean Wanderer was about 6 months old, and MamaCharlie developed a muscle spasm in her back. HBW wasn't very heavy but MamaCharlie wasn't very big, either, so picking him up aggravated the back problem a lot. We lived in Benjamin Franklin Village, right outside of Mannheim. There was a medical clinic in the middle of the housing area, a short walk from our place on Columbusstrasse. MamaCharlie packed up the Wanderer in his stroller and went off to the medics f...

George worked with my Uncle Dude for probably 30 years or more. The legend is that his mom, a dirt floor-poor mexican lady who grew up in the poorest parts of Chihuahua, married a greek merchant sailor who set her up in a modest house in San Diego (it must have seemed a mansion to her) and went back to sea. He would pop in from time to time to drop off trinkets and money and impregnate her and sail off again. George speculated that there were probably several such arrangements with his father i...

Life Happens has an idea for a family cookbook entitled "The Spaghetti Mistake". It is a great idea and while they were here we came up with several recipes to put in it. But the recipes have special signifigance...it has to do with the title...so here's how it happened: We were living at Patch Barracks in Stuttgart-Vaihingen. The Hyperborean Wanderer was about 12 or 13 years old, he probably remembers the exactness of it better than me, and one night in the kitchen decided he could handle m...

Last week we had HBW, LH and the littlies with us.  The visit was so fun (marred only by MamaCharlie's severe cold and a little bit of snow on the day we were to take  "old Blue" out for a tire spin).  While he was here he received some really good career news which I will allow him or her to tell you about, and we had lots of good time to just talk. Watching my little people being parents is a remarkable thing...and I have a whole passle (SP?) of brilliant grandchildren.&nb...

Grandma was a picture of Pennsylvania Dutch-ness. She had two sisters who looked so much like her that I couldn't tell them apart unless they were right next to each other. They were round and jolly and full of mischief, gray hair rolled up in a bun and clacked their false teeth at each other as they sat around the dining room table playing Canasta or Dominoes. Their humor and bawdiness was infectious. All my memories of her and her brothers and sisters are treasures to me. Even at our last mee...

I already told you how my '65 GTO came to be in the Tucson Pontiac dealer to have the rear end rebuilt...see "MamaCharlie learns to drive a stick". I won't repeat all that. But once all the dust settled, it got rebuilt and was ready to be picked up. I also mentioned the difficulty I had getting up to Tucson before everything closed...but we finally got it worked out, just barely, and I got the word it was done and I should pick it up right away. Couple days later I was able to work out schedule...

I bought my '65 GTO from a Chevy dealer in El Cajon, CA. I was on a three day pass from Fort Huachuca at the time and after thundering around the home grounds for the rest of the weekend, I drove my new trophy out to Arizona...it was a sweet ride. Shortly after I got back into the swing of things at Huachuca, one of my buddies pointed out that the left rear wheel wobbled. We discovered that the axle was torqued and I took it to the Pontiac dealer in Tucson to get repairs. That was the beginning...

One of Betty Lou's favorite stories was about how one of her junior high classmates handled an embarassing situation. We all remember those terrible memorizations we had to do in school, right? I can still start "Abou Ben Adim" but can't finish it. In this particular incident, Betty Lou's class was required to memorize a Kipling poem called, "Recessional". It's recurring phrase at the end of each stanza is "Lord God of Hosts be with us yet, Lest we forget, Lest we forget." As each member of ...

I was watching FOX News the other morning. The teaser just before the top of the hour was a school shooting in Lousiana...details to come. In the next hour there was not another word about Lousiana. As the hour began, we were told of a bus stop shooting in Los Angeles...Turkey has invaded Northern Iraq...a plane crashed in Los Angeles, a light plane fell right in a neighborhood...Another shooting in Tennessee...Israel has launched 60 rockets in two days at Hamas targets... one in six sixth grad...

A lot of Army trucks are equipped with a Tach-O-Graph, a recording device that keeps a seven day record of just about everything the truck does ...when the engines starts, how many rpms it turns, truck speed, when it is moving and when it is sitting still, how many times the gears are shifted, how far it goes, etc. Everything is recorded on a wax-like disc. Expert disc readers can pretty much trace a truck's travels by matching data from the disc to known routes the truck is on and maps of the ...

I got to Fort Huachuca in January of 1967. I was not impressed. I was a seabag baby, grew up Navy all the way, which meant that I was always near the ocean...some ocean. I had never been to a desert in my entire life. When my teenage friends suggested a trip to the desert for fun, my response was always..."what fun?"...the ocean was closer and I LOVED the ocean. Any how, my travels from San Diego to Fort Huachuca are subject for a coming post, this ain't about that. It IS about how I met MamaCha...

Betty Lou was a very young girl when the family packed up everything they owned and lit out of Prior, Oklahoma bound for California. They weren't alone...it was the early thirties and most "Okies" were leaving the dust bowl for better climes. The Doren family looked a lot like the folks in the movie "Grapes of Wrath"...all their wordly possessions tied on to the Model A truck, kids stacked on the back. Their destination was the work camps of central California but because of good luck and a f...