Fridays
are when the entire base or most of it gets outta town. I remember seeing one officer pushing a PX cart filled with vodka bottles. Ft.
Hauchuca’s more adventurous types head for Tucson’s motels. If a guy had a car, he had it made –
literally. SSgt. Fleming, another
Marine, had a 1975 Nova SS and never wanted for female companionship. Not believing in that lifestyle, I spent most
of my free time in Special Services, an Army recreational facility that had
sports equipment and even music listening rooms. It’s a pleasant alternative to the smoke
hazed Enlisted Club where you go to shoot pool and get drunk. I discovered the sound track to the movie American Graffiti and became hooked on
Doo Wop ever since. Remember Maybe Baby by Buddy Holly and the
Crickets, Little Darling, Since I Don’t Have You by the Skyliners,
and Step by Step by the Crests? Decompression from basic training at MCRD was
also accompanied by retiring my Marine Corps birth control glasses and having
my ID photo taken on my 27th birthday.
Ft.
Hauchuca is a big place, but getting to classes wasn’t that difficult. Should I call it a tradition, custom or
understanding that hitch hiking to class was the norm? You just jumped in the back of a truck and
that was that. Class could be anywhere:
in the field, building or in a vehicle park (familiarity). Divisional Mini-Kills held outdoors simulated
a CP tent situation and were designed to test what the students had learned by
“tasking” various intelligence gathering resources. I made the mistake twice of sending spotter
planes below the clouds. Map reading was
critical and the night compass marches proved to me that you shouldn’t march at
night. Seriously, the map reading part
was intense: Zulu, minutes and seconds conversions, azimuth (directions). Order of Battle was more complicated than an
NFL game plan. I also learned the
importance of Errata and red collar tabs, but that was then. With computers intelligence is a different
world.
I
graduated in April, 1976 in the lower third of my class in the 85 percentile on
a curve. I could never figure it
out. That meant two-thirds of my class
graduated above 85%. My Achilles’ heel
at the time was a poor showing in relationships (spying). Although Intelligence Analyst on the division
level was a tactical course with an introduction to Photo Interpretation,
Counter Intelligence, and Order of Battle, it also included Sherlock
Holmes-type situations involving intrigue.
In part, who slept with whom? The ladies were the best at solving these
problems.
You’ll
never know what integration is until you’ve had black roommates. Ft. Hauchuca
had a housing problem with surplus officer dorms and not enough rooms for the Enlisted. I moved into one of them while classes were
forming. There were four people to a
room. Eventually my room was filled with
another white guy and two blacks, one of which was a “casual.” It was an
explosive situation and a clash of cultures because it was unsupervised – no
barracks with Officers of the Deck to enforce rules. I could never get any sleep because the two
blacks always came in late and played their horrible music all night. You couldn’t run and you couldn’t fight. That meant automatic jail time. It could also mean a knife in the night. There was another troublemaker across the
hall that went on for days disturbing the peace until vigilantes beat him
up. After I shipped out to Kansas City
the next day after graduation, I heard from the taxi’s
radio, a broadcast that someone had been shot to death in the same officer
dorms at Hauchuca. I assumed it was the
troublemaker getting his revenge. I was
glad to get home.
