Navy Guantanamo Bay Part II

Most people learn to drive some time or other. Except my mother, she never drove and to the best of my knowledge, she never even tried. 

But even if you're pretty good at driving, you can still have accidents. Just two months earlier, I had been home on leave to attend Bob Deeter's wedding to the lovely Judy Powel and on the way home had driven through one of Miami's infamous 'puddles'.

Water doesn't drain well when it has nowhere to go (like in Miami) and in those days, if you got your brakes wet, sometimes they would just... disappear. 

And that's exactly what happened causing me to run into a Cadillac on Biscayne Boulevard. Had to be a Cadillac! I was in uniform and thought maybe I would catch a break, but no! No breaks! No breaks for you! Here I am showing off my ticket for posterity.

But remember what was probably the hardest part of learning to drive? That's right, parallel parking! And that's essentially what the Executive Officer of the Greene was attempting as we pulled alongside the pier that Wednesday, August 30, 1967.

The problem was that we didn't 'pull alongside' as much as 'run into'. Normally, we would have to fling our lines to the pier but because we came in a little hot and on rather too sharp an angle, we could reach the pier just by dropping the lines over the side. So they moored the lines on the pier and we tied our end off on the ships bollards in a figure eight pattern just like you see them in this photo and held on for our lives.

In this actual photo from the Greene, you can see the bollards are merely just stools that only have lines on them when the ship is docked.

So as we scraped along the pier, those of us who did painting were all cringing at the thought of how much work was clocking up for us as the grinding continued. Meanwhile, the stern was much too far to reach with lines so we held the bow and ran the engines to pull the stern in closer.

We were going to have a bow line that day, but it was going to be metal, we had already laid it out, so the line my two shipmates and I were holding that day was called the bow spring, the next line up from the bow. 

The line ran from the dock, in a multiple figure eight pattern around the bollards on the ship and the three of us held the end. Essentially, we were trying to hold a Destroyer under power with a 2-inch nylon line. 

In retrospect, we should have foreseen that something untoward was in the offing.

And so it was.
 

Navy Boot Camp Part III

Being in the Navy provided an introduction to discipline. What kind of person would I be if Bob and I weren't so exhausted that day driving down NW 27th Avenue in Miami that going into the Navy seemed like a good idea? Beats me, because that's the way it happened. Would I do it again? Hmm.

There was no one available to kiss your foot in boot camp. This startled some of the company then so I can't imagine what a lot of our modern youth would think of such demands to suddenly grow up. Even the need for cleanliness was a shock for some. We were taught all manner of hygiene and not just for our own health. After all, we were going to be jammed together in tight places for long periods of time and who wants to be near someone who stinks? 

We washed all our own clothes by hand and hung them out on lines in the courtyard or in the drying room and for some bizarre reason we were not allowed to use clothespins. We had to tie the wet clothes on the line with little strips of string called 'clothes-stops'. If the knots were tied wrong, the clothes were pulled down and thrown on the ground. I imagine we were being made familiar with tying knots since knots are very important in the Navy, what with the sails and all.

We marched everywhere to provide us an introduction to coordination and teach us how to respond to orders and we carried those rifles and performed lengthy rifle drills to build up our upper bodies. Of course, no one explained any of this, we just did as we were told. We even marched to meals, where the food was always good wherever I went. The signs were clear and blunt: Take all you want. Eat all you take. Not a bad slogan. 

The Navy provided a guidebook to everything 'Navy' named The Bluejacket's Manual. They started using them in 1902 and they're still in use. I recently acquired a copy of the edition that was current when I joined and sure enough, I recognized every image.  It contains all the basic information required to get along in the Navy: rankings, ratings, when to salute, how not to drown, you know, the basics. A lot of the classes we attended were to explain what was in this book.

Beside the marching and drill work and the classroom study, there were practical, hands-on education sessions. Growing up in Miami, I can't remember not knowing how to swim. So I was surprised when I found quite a few of my company couldn't swim. They joined the Navy and couldn't swim. Huh? A couple admitted they'd never even seen the ocean. Talk about getting out of your comfort zone! But it was good to learn how to surface for air when there's an oil fire burning for hundreds of yards around you. That part of swimming I was unfamiliar with.
 

We spent quite a while on fire-fighting because fires are bad on a ship not just because you have nowhere to run, but pretty much everything onboard can explode or burn. So we became firefighters. Along with that, we had to become comfortable wearing gas-masks as well. Not dying is a priority I easily bought into.

There was also hand-gun and rifle training, ship identification and terminology. It was cool to learn the origin of the terms still used on modern ships. And we had to learn the rules around standing watch. To train us, we had to stand watch over the garbage dumpsters in case someone came on base to steal our garbage. 

Along about the sixth week, each company had to provide 'services' to the command for a week. Depending upon where you were assigned for 'Service Week', it could be custodial work, food service, warehouse work or whatever else was required. Because I was First Platoon Leader, I was assigned as a mentor to a new company in their first week on base to help them with the transition. If we had one of these assigned to my company, I don't remember ever seeing him. Oddly, I found this task to be a lot of fun because they really seemed to appreciate the guidance I could provide. And since this new company spent a lot of time marching and drilling and in the classroom, I had that time to myself. So I wandered around the base exploring and going into all the old buildings. Benefits of rank.

A couple of weeks later, we were marching along and my Service Week company marched by and they all yelled "Hey, it's Service Week!" which was their title for me. They actually broke rank and ran over to me! Boy, there was a lot of yelling and screaming from the instructors. Good times.
 

Navy Boot Camp Part II

My daughter told me recently that, knowing the way I am, she couldn't really see me in boot camp. That I wasn't 'boot camp' material, you know? The circumstances exist that serious physical harm or at the very least, psychological warfare would have raged uncontrollably. Military prison or a very long hospital stay were some of the best possible outcomes. She was right, of course, but it depends dramatically on how one sees 'boot camp'.

You see, I did not go through the boot camp as characterized in the movie Full Metal Jacket. The boot camp the US Navy provided was a series of schools to produce a healthier, more compliant resource that would serve the interests of the Navy and who will not die the first week they were placed in a duty situation. 

As you begin this process, the crutches of the past, your 'self', your individualism, the control of your time for eating and sleeping, bathroom needs, the choices you made about clothes, hairstyles, jewelry, even eyeglasses, are all removed. You are left with nothing to worry about except conforming and complying.

At the start of it all was uniformity. I'm sure you've all seen the movies of the head shaving, the issuing of clothing and bedding, medical and dental testing, all of that. There was no concern about what to wear and no one had to worry about combing their hair in the morning and shampooing was irrelevant. Naturally, some of us had to go above and beyond by shaving our heads right down to the skin. For those who had fairly long hair, there's some awfully white skin under there. Some people were made temporarily blind by the reflected light. 

There were several rounds of inoculations, but there were no needles, the fluids were pneumatically blasted into our arms (or rear ends) with air guns, it was all very efficient. Some guys had to see the dentist quite a bit. I was FINE because I had just had all my own work done on my own dime. It's called 'timing' people, look it up. 

So, after the 'induction' process was over, we were assigned to our units. Bob Deeter and I had joined together, but we were told there was no guarantee where we would end up. After all this, we were both made part of Company 555. We were the first company to use a brand new building in the new section of the Recruit Training Command. We were on the ground floor right where that red arrow is pointing.

As you can see, this was a large facility. Each of those buildings held twelve companies and there were a lot of buildings.  They had to have an efficient process to get us in and get us out.

I don't have an actual photo of what the interior of the barracks looked like, but this is a pretty good approximation. Rows of two level bunk beds with lockers in the center dividing the room. The bathroom, shower room, laundry room and drying room were all at one end, the rest of it was just one big open room.

One of the first creation steps of the new company was the assignment of leadership roles within the recruit population. There were regular naval personnel assigned to us, but this was a hierarchy within the recruits themselves. There wasn't any discussion of who would do which role and no one revealed what the selection process was. It was simply announced that Bob was Company Commander and I was First Platoon Leader. And that concluded our training. Company 555 consisted of perhaps 80 or 90 men and I was suddenly responsible for half of them. I can't recall if Bob and I ever discussed the odds of the two people who knew each other ending up in the top two positions in the company, but there it was.

Someone along the line secreted in a Polaroid camera, and I'm very glad he did since this is the only photo I have of the uniforms we wore as recruits. So here is Bob Deeter on the right and me on the left in front of the World War II-era rifles we carried everywhere. Notice that on our right shoulders we are displaying our recruit rank, Bob with four stripes and me with three.

The Navy did produce a Company 555 'Yearbook' for us with actual photos, but that was lost a long time ago. Perhaps they sent someone in the dark of night to steal it because it had such sensitive information. 

Or not. 
 

Civil Air Patrol

 
There are major disruptors in life. Disruptors being events like a death in the family, loss of a job or moving your home. 

Our house in Carol City

The first such disruption in my life (that I remember) was in 1960 when we moved from North Miami, Florida to Carol City, Florida. Those towns were only a few miles apart so geographically, it wasn't far but psychologically for me, it was huge. My family moved into a house that we actually owned and didn't rent, so this was really and truly ours. Of course, I also left all my friends behind and no one had yet invented Facebook or email or even the Internet at that point, so I may as well had moved to the moon. The move also meant a new school and all the angst that accompanies such a change.

It didn't help that the move happened well into the school year, so I was introduced into groups that already knew one another. Fortunately, we did know one family in the area, the Wissers who had been family friends for years so gratefully, there was at least one connection to stability.

One of the oil tanks Deb's Dad built

While all this was happening, my wife's father was finishing up his work in Guayaquil, Ecuador where he was building oil storage tanks. When he moved his family back to the United States, see if you can guess where they ended up. Yes, even though they had moved from Ohio to Ecuador, when they came back, there they were in Carol City!

And then, in one of those bizarre coincidences one reads about in the comics, my future wife and I attended the same school, Carol City Junior High, at the same time - for about three and a half months. I have the mental image of the two of us crossing paths in some hallway or of her pushing me out of the way to get a drink of water from the fountain.

Carol City Junior High

But there was no meeting, no premonition, no nothin'. We did not meet then, not for another eight years, actually, even though we lived on the same street 169th Terrace, we were ten blocks apart and you know... ten blocks is a long way. So I was left to my own devices and they were pretty limited.

Somehow (!) - I don't mean to be vague, I just don't remember - somehow, I was introduced to the Civil Air Patrol. Many people don't even know it exists, but the Civil Air Patrol is quite important in the aviation world. It is the official United States Air Force Auxiliary and does things like search and rescue missions, disaster relief and the training of cadets where such training prepares them for an introduction to the US Air Force.

Unfortunately, all this happened during a period of almost no family photography. Twenty or fewer photographs a year leaves a lot of gaps. I compare this circumstance to what my grandchildren enjoy. They have had at least ten photos of them taken every day of their lives. They have tens of thousands of photographs of each of them along with hours and hours of high definition video. There is no gap in their growth or the sequence of events in their lives. Things are different now.

Civil Air Patrol Seal

But I have no photos of me in uniform, or on the flights I took, or of the events I attended. Oh, well. We met in the evenings at Carol City Junior High and learned the discipline of marching in formation, the basics of aerodynamics, flight theory and military structure. It was only the adult members who participated in search and rescue, but we actually got to fly!

We had training missions in light aircraft like Cessnas and Piper Cubs. But my most memorable flight was in a Douglas DC-3, one of the most famous aircraft ever built. This was a twin-engine airplane first introduced in 1935 that was so stable and so well designed that there are still DC-3 aircraft in active service.

Douglas DC-3

Let that sink in for a moment. They stopped production in 1942 and they are still operating regularly seventy years later. Not just for show, but working, seventy years later. I'm very proud to have had the opportunity to fly on that aircraft.

We also served as guides during air shows especially at Opa-locka Airport which was right next door to Carol City. Then, during the Cuban Missile crisis, we spent days preparing food and other packages for servicemen and other possible survivors of the imminent nuclear war. I wonder what ever happened to all that stuff we put together since the war never took place.

While I was with the CAP, I became First Sergeant, where I learned a little about leadership. Being part of that group was a good experience. One high point was an awards ceremony we had at the McCallister Hotel in downtown Miami. They bused us down there and thrust us into an adult environment, I was about 15 at the time. The waiter comes around and asks us what we want to drink, so naturally I order a scotch and soda expecting to get hit upside the head. But he doesn't even blink and brings it with everyone's cokes and 7-Ups. Of course, all the cadets want a sip and of course no one liked it. It was scotch and soda.

I never joined the Air Force, I went into the Navy instead. You can read about that elsewhere in this blog-thing. But a sure reason (other than my commanding presence) for becoming First Platoon Leader in the Navy Boot Camp was what I had learned about leadership from the Civil Air Patrol. How about that!       
   

Bob Deeter (right) Me (left)

 
Update March 12, 2018 - Regarding the coincidence of my wife Deb and I both attending Carol City Junior High long before we knew one another, I checked to see where our home rooms were. It turns out I was in Room 214 and she was in Room 216. So, it's not an absolute certainty but a pretty good bet that we saw each other. I do remember this one girl tripping me...
 

Leaving Home

I have no memory of leaving home to go off into the Navy.

How could that be? How could memory-boy come up with nothing? Well, it WAS September 12, 1966, that's a long time ago. It was just a few days past my nineteenth birthday and just four days after the very first Star Trek episode aired. You remember it, I'm sure, The Man Trap. Where the shape-shifting salt monster/vampire kills a bunch of people by sucking out all their salt.

It wasn't the first Star Trek episode shot, or even one of the pilots, but it was the first aired. Because it wasn't in the sequence intended, there wasn't any explanation of who these space people were or what the Enterprise was all about. Just Kirk's usual comments about the 'five year mission' (which turned out to be a three year mission) and -bam- right into the episode. Pretty gutsy, I think. I didn't see it when it aired, I didn't really see much TV for a couple of years before or after.

So, Star Trek was not blurring my mind when I left. I remember the trip (it was my first jet airplane flight) and I remember arriving in Chicago. Was there some sort of trauma that caused me to forget? I've heard of people whose brain suffered some emotional insult and the brain said, "The hell with this! I'm outta here!"

Doesn't sound like me, though. More than likely, Bob Deeter's dad and/or mom picked me up after my mom and dad went off to work that morning and took Bob and me to the airport. Just nothing to remember. Or else it was very early in the morning and I wasn't awake for any of it. Anyone who knows me even in passing knows I cannot abide getting up early in the morning, so it makes sense that I would go into military service. Or. . . DOES it?

When I was taking Physics in High School, the only accelerated class (HAD to be in the accelerated class! COULDN'T be in the regular class!) started at 7:15. 7:15 AM! Like in the morning! What sadistic bastard did that scheduling? There I was, working at Royal Castle, flipping burgers and frying eggs until 9 PM, coming home doing my homework and then getting up in the stony dark to do it all again. I'm still tired.

Bob and I had joined the Navy together and we went to boot camp at the Great Lakes Naval Training Center where we learned to polish shoes and march. The GLNTC is on Lake Michigan in North Chicago getting close to the Wisconsin border. In a couple of years it will have it's one hundredth anniversary and some of the buildings looked it. It was in heavy use during World War II and some of the barracks from that period were still being used.

Remarkably, we were stationed in a brand new building. My company was the first one to use it. It was all clean and new. A little too new, actually. There was a row of brand new toilets in the head and everyone got the bright idea to leave most of them untouched so we wouldn't have many toilets to clean. As often happens, this had unexpected consequences. There was often a line. And since these were not stalls with doors, the line was directly in front of the guy trying to use the toilet. Not content to quietly await their turn, there was often yelling and abuse from those standing in line two feet in front of the poor schlub. "Come ON! Hurry UP! What's the PROBLEM!!" For some reason, privacy is a big deal for me now, I'm not certain why.

Not quite as bad as the public toilets in Roman days, but getting there.

What the Hell

Marilyn Monroe is famously quoted as saying, "Ever notice that 'what the hell' is always the right decision?"

I'd like to add that you often reach that decision state when you're tired. Frankly, a lot of the major directional decisions I've made in my life were made when I was tired. I'm tired right now, but I've got this thought in me and it has to come out.

When I interviewed with the company that I still work for, SMS, (now Siemens), I came right off an all-nighter at the computer lab and right into the interview. I knew instantly that this was the company I wanted to work for and canceled all my other interviews as I walked out. Now that I think of it, I guess it's a good thing they hired me. The interview was in January, they hired me and I didn't start until I graduated in August. It did take the pressure off the last couple of semesters. What's more, this is what I looked like when I interviewed and they hired me anyway!

I also made the decision to join the Navy when I was tired. I was going to school full time and working full time so when my friend Bob Deeter suddenly suggested we should just join the Navy, I followed Marilyn Monroe's sage advice (as I always try to do) and said, 'What the hell' and we joined up.

We took the summer off before heading off to camp, I wrote about that in a previous blog entry. I also had the opportunity to drive my mother up to Minnesota to see her family. We went in my mauve Rambler American, the first new car I ever owned. Hey, don't laugh, it was a good car, I gave it to my father when I went in the Navy and he drove it practically the rest of his life. One of the high points of that trip was loading Mom, Grandma, Grandpa and Uncle Edwin in the car and having some clown run a stop sign and hit the car hard enough to spin it all around. Ha ha, what fun. No one was hurt and damage to the car was barely noticeable. Boy, they don't make cars like that anymore.

On the way back to Miami, we visited my cousin Audrey and her husband-to-be Andrew Houlihan. They were living in New Orleans and I distinctly remember deciding that as long as we were in the neighborhood, we would have to swing by and see them. Yeah, it's hard to reconcile how Minnesota and New Orleans were in the same 'neighborhood'. But I'm so glad we did because I got to meet Andrew and I thought immediately that he was so cool and had this dynamite southern accent. My instincts were right because even now, after all these years, he's still cool.

But the summer ended, I went to the beach a few last times to finish working on my tan preparing for the skin cancer that would come later. When we were visiting my Aunt Del and Uncle Mel (that's Uncle Mel to the right) up north with my mother, I happened to cross my legs and the skin on my leg showed. Well, Uncle Mel's eyes bugged out like you see sometimes in old cartoons. He asked, "Are you that dark all over??" He was stunned. This was a man born and raised in Minnesota in the heart of white-leg country. I think it had a profound impact on his whole belief system.

By now, my brother Dave had already moved to the Buffalo, New York area and was preparing for his marriage to the lovely Miss Donna Krueger. So as I prepared to leave to go off to boot camp, it never occurred to me that I was leaving my parents with an empty nest. And while it's true that they were never what you might call 'demonstrative' it may have at least been nice if I had awakened long enough to recognize what was going on around me and acknowledge it somehow. 'It never occurred to me' - a phrase I often use even to this day. But I was excited because I was taking my first jet aircraft trip. Bob and I were off to Chicago and on to the Great Lakes Naval Training Center where I would be introduced to 'culture shock' before they had even invented the word.

Resume - Part 2

So, when last we met, Rich was eighteen and tired. Now, of course, he's older and perhaps even a bit more tired. If that isn't a complete synopsis, I'm sorry, you'll have to read the previous entry Resume - Part 1. See how clever the whole naming thing is working out? For those of you who were eighteen once, it may come as no surprise to you that my solution to this difficult circumstance was to run away. How's that for integrity and grit? As it happened, my friend Bob Deeter (who was in a very similar situation to my own) and I were driving down 27th. Avenue near the college when he suddenly said, "We should just go ahead and join the Navy."

It had never entered my mind to join the Navy, if I was going into any service, it would have been the Air Force. After all, I did spend a few years in the Civil Air Patrol where I had risen to the rank of First Sergeant and I loved to fly. But I could never be a pilot, <heavy sigh> because my eyes were no good and that kind of put a damper on the whole thing. But I had learned how to march and picked up some tips on leadership and learned how to calculate load factors on aircraft. And a couple of the guys in the squadron were the ones I worked with laying that industrial tile I spoke of earlier (see how all this ties all together?). And at that point I had no idea how many other people in my family had been in the Navy, Uncles and Cousins and Step-Grandfathers, oh, my. My father never spoke about his family, or else I wasn't listening, which is another really strong possibility. I found out about these Navy connections after I started delving into genealogy.

So, having nothing better to do, we joined the Navy. I know, you can almost hear the Village People in your head, can't you? "In the Navy!" But there was no such song when I joined, but there was the Vietnam War and chances were pretty high that we would go there. But this was June and we delayed entry until September so we could have the summer. Vietnam could wait. Bob's dad used his connections to get us jobs at Carlson Construction as laborers. I did spend some time working with carpenters which qualifies as 101 Intro to Carpentry, but most of the time we did demolition. And what a great time we had busting stuff up!

Most of the other laborers were middle-aged black guys who had been doing this stuff for twenty years and knew full well that what didn't get done today would be waiting for us tomorrow. But here come these two puppies bouncing around, "Hey, come on, let's wreck some more stuff!" They adopted us and tried their best not to get us killed. One particular job was EXCELLENT. We were contracted to replace the ceilings in an elementary school with new dropped ceilings. And that's where we came in because we had to remove the forty year old plaster and lath ceilings. The guys were using axes and pipes to break up the old ceiling and then sweep up the pieces. Man, that forty-year old dust was something to behold. So, Bob and I looked at the situation and knew right away we shouldn't push up, but should pull down. So we had the shop make us some sky hooks - a long pipe with a 90 degree angle at the end that we could poke up through the old ceiling. Ours had another piece supporting the angle so it wouldn't bend. Of course, you had to be careful not to hit the ceiling support beam when you pushing the pipe up with all your might because then you had to stand there for a while until your body stopped vibrating the way Bugs Bunny did when he ran into a street lamp. There was a down side, of course, because you were pulling all this stuff right down on top of yourself, but that's what hard hats are for, plus the fact that the work was getting done five times faster.

But I noticed that not only was the plaster strengthened with horse hair, the lath was attached to the beams with wire and not nails. You can almost guess what I did next. I crawled up into the space between the ceiling and the roof, cut the wires and pushed the lath DOWN, much easier and the pieces were bigger. Yeah, this was Miami in the summer, so it was 130 degrees up there, but youth and stupidity are a great combination. But even that wasn't enough. On this one long hallway, I went up and cut ALL the wires and then stomped down on one end and the whole ceiling peeled off like a banana peel and came down in one piece. What fun! As it happened, our supervisor heard the whoomp! (so did people for blocks around) and came to find me jumping down after doing a weeks work in two hours. He gave me a ten cent an hour raise. But this was 1966 and that was a lot!