29 Palms: Live Fire

This is what Outpost Crampton looked like in 1978.  It was a part of reserve Marine Corps training at 29 Palms, California in the Mojave Desert.  Any resemblance to civilization is merely co-incidental.  The wooden buildings are permanent and are occupied by succeeding units that overlook the valley where the armored battalions maneuver under live fire conditions.  APCs reach 155 degrees on the inside.  Where we were on the mountain top it was only 120 degrees.  The first photo shows the ingenuity of Marines.  Wherever two or three rocks are gathered together, Marines will make their homes.  I remember we had no cots and slept in tents infested with rats.  One discovered my unopened can of peaches two feet from my head.  He picked it up with his paws and sniffed it, bit holes in the top, and sucked out the juice.  Our Vietnam veteran corpsman had warned us by relating the story of how the rats used to attack the eyeballs of Marines while they were sleeping to obtain their body salt.  Standard amenities at Crampton included a 4-seat non-partitioned toilet they called something else.  Navy corpsmen would burn off the contents only on certain days when we were down wind.

 

The next photo is when the planes and artillery opened up on a target.  One A-4 jet from El Toro streaked up to us on the west side and fired his neon colored missiles upside down as he crested above us.  Captain Anderson in white t-shirt looks on and SSgt. Vest (seated) enjoys the view.  If I remember correctly, the guy taking the picture in the middle is Pvt. Malko, soon to be the official photographer of Hq. Co. 24th Marines, Kansas City.  Note the panorama and the smaller mountain ridge below the big ones.  Our regimental S-2 shop had spent several months making a terrain model of the area out of newspaper, sugar, and flour.  To our surprise it didn’t make it to the Palms.  Mice had eaten it in transit, but still, preparing models are part of the intelligence function.  Our shop was set up in one of the wooden buildings and it was typical.  Our desks were olive drab blocks we had to unsnap and unfold.  I suppose they had been that way since the Civil War.  Of course, we had the situation map with red and black grease pencils and overlays.  Today with computers, it’s all changed.  I was the only divisional level trained intelligence analyst, a rare bird.

The only thing good about Outpost Crampton was when flew back to Camp Wilson. The first person I met after landing was from a New York unit, a beautiful Puerto Rican girl near the wash racks.  She teasingly sprinkled water in my face – the nicest greeting I ever received in the Marine Corps and a real morale booster.  Sadly, I learned in 1980 when we came back to the Palms for CAX80, she had been stabbed to death in a jealous rage.  The last photo shows a bunch of us getting ready to catch the bus for the trip home.  We had staged our gear and I hold my ever-present water bag.  Sgt. Peak holds the soda pop and SSgt. Williams is next to him milling about smartly.

29 Palms: Arrival

Getting off the bus at Camp Wilson in 29 Palms is like going to the kitchen and putting your head into the oven.  It’s that hot.  Immediately my nose shrank due to the lack of humidity.  This is the Mojave Desert where Patton practiced with his tanks before the war.  In many areas, supposedly off limits to everyone, is ordnance sticking out of the sand – some unexploded.  We had arrived from Ontario, California from Kansas City’s Hq. Co. 24th Marines for CAX78.  I remember going down Highway 62 into Yucca Valley aptly named and passing the exotic town of Joshua Tree.  I thought, “How bad could it be?” as we pulled in to the main base.  I’d been stationed at Ft. Hauchuca, Arizona for intelligence training two years before and that wasn’t so bad: There were patches of snow still in the mountains overlooking the desert in February.  There were no school dorms or barracks for us at 29 Palms.  Of course active duty types hate reservists so the Standard Operating Procedure is to immediately bus them to Camp Wilson which at that time was a tent city on the north side of the base.

I’ve recently heard on TV that the highest recorded temperature in the United States was 138 degrees in some desert.  In our tents one afternoon our corpsmen came out and measured the surface temperature (August) at 144 degrees.  It was so hot that a flock of Roadrunners that stumbled into our camp, lined up on the narrow shadow of a telephone pole.  The next photo is what it looks like during a sandstorm.  You hunker down and check the tent ropes.  Our floor was sand.  Nothing was pre-fab.  Cots were wooden because the metal ones always got too hot.  After a week someone hauled in a rubber water bladder for showers and it’s hard taking a shower in a wooden pallet.  Girls were being added to USMC combat units and they always showered first.  There was a lot of volunteering for shower tent guard duty all of a sudden.  Across from our tent was the Colonel’s big water bag hanging on a tripod.  One rebel among us soaked his cover in the sacred object before he starched it (the cover).  We bought our little ones at the Exchange.  They were canvas with a cork stopper and looked like a purse.

The last photo is dawn at 29 Palms shortly before another sand storm coming in from the East.  In the distance are the mountains above the valley where the exercise was going to take place.  Closer are the cement pads supporting water pipes for shaving and washing.   The little white shacks were used for another purpose.  I was always amazed at how long some Marines would stay in them to avoid a work detail (officers too).  The trick is to bring a big cigar.  Note the M-60 tank with its turret turned backwards moving north.  It was part of the positioning up the valleys for that particular battalion’s exercise the next day.  I really mean “all” the unit’s equipment including 155mm SP howitzers, jeeps, trucks, and even Bradleys that were new at the time.  Bradleys had little respect because they were lightly armored and were yet to be proven.  We had Israeli advisers.