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.
