Because my travel agent was the Department of Defense and the plane I was assigned to had some serious issues with prolonged flight, I arrived in Vietnam, Republic of, in the morning of the 25th of December, 1965...about three days late. Yep, Christmas Day. Everyone who had anything to do with receiving the hundred or so soldiers who gratefully stepped off the rear ramp (doesn't that just say a whole lot about how we felt about our aircraft? That we were grateful to be on the groun...

I don't want to let the month of May pass without some mention of the fact that it is Military Appreciation Month. Having spent more than half of my adult life in the military, it seems kinda self-serving for me to trumpet my appreciation of the military. But there are some folks in the service who don't usually get special mention. This article isn't about them. This article is dedicated to one group of military men who probably get one heck of a lot of mention...and I think ...

In Japan they love boiled peanuts, not roasted. A friend had let me taste one and I thought they were pretty good. So one afternoon we made an adventure out of riding a Japanese bus to the the little town nearby and buying some. On the way back, we stopped off and bought a big bag of Cherry Mountain candy bars. I haven't seen a Cherry Mountain in years but they used to be my favorites...a creme filling with chunks of cherry inside a thick layer of chocolate and nuts....I loved 'em. ...

Something happened!  A month or so ago I was creeping up the ranks, around the low one hundreds on the User rankings...I checked today, just out of curiosity, you understand...I can not even figure out the number I am ranked now...soooooo many digits!  WTF?  It's not that I am so rank hungry as some have been...but come on...after almost four years I drop a goozillion places because?????? Huh????  Oh well...I am sure there is a perfectly unintelligible explanation....

  In the early 1960s the Army started phasing out their gasoline-burning trucks and combat vehicles and started phasing in new equipment equipped with a new kind of engine. It was basically a diesel that was touted as a "multi-fuel" engine...they bragged that the multifuel would run on hot butter if you could keep it flowing. The original "flex-fuel". So the two-and-a-half ton, M-35 series trucks started arriving with the new LDS 427-1 engines. Liquid Diesel Supercharged 427 cubic inch s...

I found this picture in a box in the garage. I haven't seen it in a lot of years. I was in the garage doing major rearranging because one of my boys and his family is moving in next month. By mutual agreement, this is a good move for all of us; never mind the details, just suffice it to say that working my butt off to get ready for them is a labor of love. Anyway, this box has been under some other crap for ten or twelve years. I opened it and found some of my favorite comic strips...

  It was nearing the end of 1971. It was also nearing the end of my second enlistment and I had determined that it would be my last. Things at Fort Hood had become intolerable: politics, crime, racial violence, and all the hippie crap creeping in had me in a constant state of fury. Walking through the barracks at night when I was on CQ (Charge of Quarters - the guy who sits up all night watching over the company and its soldiers - yeah, kind of a babysitter) was scarier than a dark night...

Just a quick quiz...do you know what these two images represent?

About a year ago I wrote an article about grilled cheese sandwiches, the kind that I had in Germany at the EUCOM HQ CINC's Mess. That article also covered the story of the fella who made the sandwiches for me. Ronnie was a buddy, but he was also a crook...well...not a very bright or malicious crook, more of a useful idiot for the Spanish Mob. Anyway, this morning I was thinking about the boy again. I was noodling around for a breakfast and while I didn't have the materials for a grilled chees...

You have no doubt heard the saying about jokes...they're no fun if you have to explain them. Well...I am going to have to explain a lot in order for the uninitiated to appreciate the subtle, dark humor of the American soldier. To start with, a quick tutorial on tank ammunition. The 120mm gun on the M1A1 fires two basic type of rounds (there are other specialty rounds for that gun but most tanks just carry the two types) a) the HEAT (High Explosive Anti-tank) round. It looks like a coffee...

I tried to spend a little individual time with each of my two little boys...Matt was four and Mike was two. We lived in Phoenix; it was during my "civilian tour"...a three-year break-in-service from the Army. I had an errand to run so I grabbed the younger one and put him in his car seat (in them days it was not mandatory and the seat was not much more than a little plastic chair that the seat belt could pass through). Now driving Mike around was always a challenge: he had a love of watching ...

0 / 0 ratings      Edit This Post   The yellow goat was an Arizona car. It was four-years old when we bought it, the shade of yellow was not a Pontiac color, it was a Corvette color. When it was cleaned and polished it looked like a shiny plastic banana. It was pristine when we bought it, it didn't have a speck of rust on it, the only drawback was that it was a three-speed. But it would gooooo like the wind. It was a 1969, black vinyl top, with bla...

The following story is dedicated to MamaKat's little sister, the memory spurred by a comment MK made on JoeZ's thread. In 1985 the truck driving school at Fort Leonard Wood found itself "critically short" of instructors.  Things like this still happen, even in the computer age, and the solution is usually drastic.  Someone up the chain tells the manpower people at Department of the Army to "fix it" and suddenly orders are cut and folks come flooding in from all over.  I think the...

We came home from Norfolk in 1955, leaving the "Mighty P" (ARS-8, the Preserver) to join the crew aboard the Diving Barge, a repair barge that serviced repairs to ships tied up in San Diego that needed hull or drive repairs underwater.  From that point until we went to Japan in 1958 we lived in a number of different houses in the San Diego and Long Beach area.  We started out in the old house on Kalmia (Calmea?  Kalmea?) Street right in San Diego.  From there we moved to Emer...

We came home from Norfolk in 1955, leaving the "Mighty P" (ARS-8, the Preserver) to join the crew aboard the Diving Barge, a repair barge that serviced repairs to ships tied up in San Diego that needed hull or drive repairs underwater.  From that point until we went to Japan in 1958 we lived in a number of different houses in the San Diego and Long Beach area.  We started out in the old house on Kalmia (Calmea?  Kalmea?) Street right in San Diego.  From there we moved to Emer...