On a TV show last night I heard one of the characters say to another, who was very bright and had just given him some insight and advice that saved him a very large sum of money, "You know, when you finish your degree, you could come and work for me." I know it was only a TV script, but it does point out a line of thinking that irritates the hell out of me. If she was so bright that she saved him a bunch of money, why did she have to wait until she had a piece of paper to go to work for him? W...

Well, it's been three years since I posted my first article, a lame little "Hello". I was not only new to JU but also new to the world of the blogosphere. In these last three years I have been introduced to some very interesting thinking, some outrageous comments, terrible opinions, enlightened responses, some agreeing with me, some not, some purely anti-BFD and some very pro-BFD. There have been some memorable threads about polotics, religion, guns, crimes, immigration, and current events. I'...

It was in March of 1975 when I reported to the Motor Transport Operators' Course (MOTOC) at Fort Ord. I was a cook one day and the next I was an instructor at the truck drivers' school. And very happy about it. The Chief of the course, a Master Sergeant named Smith, was struggling along with a much smaller group of driving instructors than was required. Each team was augmented by acting sergeants, mostly newly graduated driving students who showed maturity and promise. These were held for nine...

It was a sunny morning;  I was in a three-axle dump truck, southbound on I-17, crawling along in morning rush-hour traffic. The Arizona National Guard was convoying up the north-bound lanes; 2 1/2-ton cargo trucks, jeeps, fuel tankers, the usual assortment of rolling stock. The composition was so familiar to me. I had spent seven years in the Army Transportation Corps, participating in various phases of that sort of operation.  Then something happened. As I watched the convoy mov...

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...

She wasn't quite two years old. Her daddy was one of the truck drivers and sometimes he would bring her into the office. She was beautiful but a little shy. She would hide her face in the crook of daddy's neck and just peek out with a shy smile. It took several visits before she would speak to me...until the snowy day when she came in at lunch time. I was scarfing some KFC and she came around the counter and caught me. I offered her some chicken and from that day forward we were fast friends. ...

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...