Ronnie was about six foot tall and nearly 220 lbs. He was surfer good looking, casual, loose, and as free a spirit as I ever met. He came to Huachuca like the rest of us. If you got back from Nam with less than six months left, they discharged you and sent you home...if you had more than six months to go, they sent you somewhere to finish up. Most of the posts in the States were overflowing with shorttimers that no one knew what to do with. I was "lucky"...I got sent to a place where the...
In the same house as the long staircase that took out Mama's tailbone. Two or three in the morning...Chief wakes us to a sensation of intense heat...the bed is on fire. The Chief and Betty Lou always slept in the raw and had a bad habit of smoking in bed...mix that with the usual Saturday night intake and it is not good. This night it caught up with them. Jumping from the bed and pulling Betty Lou out of harms way, the Chief rolled the mattress up and charged through the house onto the fr...
Sometimes the Chief used to get hiccups when he drank...just sometimes....but they weren't the cute cartoon drunk hiccups, these were relentless, painful, and unstoppable. We went through every imaginable cure that anyone could think of...breathing into a bag...teaspoon of sugar...drink from the other side of the glass (that had to be someone's idea of a joke 'cause if you try it, the drink goes down your shirt!)...jumping jacks...and on and on. We tried scaring him, too...not a good idea w...
The fellows on the VTR, (Vehicle, Track, Recovery), the M-88 were working feverishly on the center guides of their tracks. The VTR is like a tank...it travels on tracks that go the whole length of the vehicle and are about four feet wide.. The weight of the vehicle, about 60 tons, is distributed on the track through a series of wheels called road wheels. The road wheels are split and ride over the center guides to keep the track on the wheels. The center guides are like a two pronged spik...
It was a dark and stormy night...in fact, it had been a dark and stormy day into the night. It was the fifth or sixth day of a two week "field Problem". My first. It was early in January, 1965 and I was learning a jillion things every day. Being a fuel truck driver in an armored unit meant lots of driving. You drove all day behind the advancing (hopefully) tanks. When they stopped, you spent hours filling up jeeps and trucks and tracks and generators and fuel cans and everything under ...
I arrived in Stuttgart, West Germany in October of 1977. It had been seven years since I left Germany and I had some reorienting to do. Just as I got there, the Red Army Faction was cranking up a new campaign to get one of their leaders out of prison. The plan was to kidnap a pretty big industrialist and trade him for Andreas Baader. To say the plan went awry is like saying the Titanic had a little mishap on her maiden voyage. First of all...I never bought the idea of the "Red Army Fac...
Homecomings were always special. Some of the cruises lasted a year or more and the Chief always came home with neat stuff, alligator purses from Cuba...Toys from Japan or Hong Kong...lots of tailored clothes from Hong Kong, too...always something. Except for the big Greenland cruise. That time he came home empty handed...so did all the guys in the machine shop. Here's why. Some of the older hands told some of the newer guys about the great fur deals you could get in Greenland...if th...
BJ Littlefield loved Squoshi...everybody loved her...but she loved BJ. Squoshi means little in Japanese. She was small and pretty and I loved her, too. BJ was a huge North Carolina football player who wound up in the Navy and working for the Chief aboard the Mighty Etai (etai means "ouch" in Japanese...our nickname for the Etlah, AN-79, a worn out old net tender that had been home ported in Yokosuka since the end of the war). A net tender is a pretty small ship with two huge "horns" stick...
If you wander long enough and meet enough people along the way, you may begin to get jaded and believe that there are just so many types of people. You change the hair color or the eyebrow shape or weight or height but basically there are a limited number of "types" in the world. You know you've met people and said to yourself, "he's just like______" , fill in the blank. Well, I know that there are some people in the world that there is just one of. World couldn't handle any more than one...
The Chief spent his whole Navy career on ships. The only shore duty he ever had was the diving barge in San Diego and that was afloat. So when we left Hawaii in 1962 to return to San Diego, he assumed he would get another ship to finish out his 20. Wrong. He was assigned to North Island NAS to a desk...in the safety office. No more diving, or metal craft, or any of the things he loved about the Navy...just a whole lot of the stuff he hated. Paperwork. Desks. And worst of all...he was ...
Not all of the sea stories I heard as a kid were from the Chief. This one came from my buddy Bobby's dad, the one who got us the job at Bloc Arena on Pearl. He was one of those WWII vets with apparent baggage but I never saw him act out on it. He was kind of sour alot of the time, but he really loved telling this story. In the south Pacific somewhere, early in the war, Boats (that's what we're calling Bobby's dad cause that's what he was) was detailed with a small group of sailors and ...
It was January 22, 1966, at 0400 (4 AM for civilians, for you marines that is when Mickey's big hand is on the twelve and his little hand is on the four). I had arrived in-country on Christmas Day 1965 and pulled guard duty that night (the new arrivals were the only ones sober enough to do it...subject for another article sometime). I spent New Years at the 69th Signal compound on Tan san Nhut AFB...in a fox hole because the Air Force guys fired their pistols in the air to celebrate the arr...
Here in the Swirling Epicenter of Hate we have been treated to an event that has had national coverage...way too much national coverage for my taste. As I have told you before, we have earned the nickname for our fair burg because of the many churches and churchy organizations and their enemies and counter groups that seem to congregate here in the shadow of the big hill. One of the biggest churches in town was founded by Pastor Ted and has been very successful at being a church...mission...
A cyclo is a loveseat in front and a motorcycle in back. They were mostly ancient two stroke engines notorious for fouling their spark plugs. It was common to see a GI sitting patiently in the seat while the driver squatted down by the engine, filing and blowing on the plug. I told you all that so I could tell you this. There had been a rash of crowd bombings using cyclos and pedicabs to deliver small plastic charges packed with nails and ball bearings. The technique was to drive the v...
He was in between flights at an airport somewhere, late at night, the place was practically deserted. He found a little bar in the terminal and dropped his seabag by the door and headed for the bar. Too late he noticed three soldiers at a rear table, blouses (that's coats to the uninformed) off and obviously had a good head start on getting a beer. The Chief was a known scrapper, fearless in that regard, but three to one...Army vs Navy...and these were big boys. If he had seen them fi...