Older Folks and Vaping Front Porch - Part 5
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I must be pretty much stocked up. I went to fasttech to order another 20 pack of coils for my Crown tanks - they just notified me that the previous order of them had shipped. (I'd been waiting for them to get in stock again and figured I'd get more while
they had them.)
And, I haven't found anything else I want/need to add to the order!
That's a first.
But I am going back out this evening to double check that. Can't have just 1 item come all the way from China.
they had them.)
And, I haven't found anything else I want/need to add to the order!
That's a first.
But I am going back out this evening to double check that. Can't have just 1 item come all the way from China.
Instead of having them scattered on ECF I am lumping these Camp Nimitz pictures together here to go with the NAS Alameda base pictures I posted above...
A picture I took when I was on Camp Nimitz Island...
Picture of Your Setup Part 3!
Camp Nimitz Island with a small portion of NTC (the main base) in foreground...
Camp Nimitz again with the MAA shack left center, chow Hall and grinder, and the rickety old WWII barracks we lived in for up to 3+ weeks on both sides of them. Each "H" barracks housed 360 recruits (four companies), same as those that were a little newer and in better condition on NTC where we spent the rest of boot camp (don't remember exactly but IIRC Boot was 10-11 weeks total). We only got one day of liberty in San Dog on the day after we graduated, then were shipped out the next day (to a next duty station, an A School or on leave before going to one of the other two). I spent spent most of my liberty day learning how to surf with a beach bunny college girl who grew up surfing in that area.
A picture I took when I was on Camp Nimitz Island...
Picture of Your Setup Part 3!
Camp Nimitz Island with a small portion of NTC (the main base) in foreground...
Camp Nimitz again with the MAA shack left center, chow Hall and grinder, and the rickety old WWII barracks we lived in for up to 3+ weeks on both sides of them. Each "H" barracks housed 360 recruits (four companies), same as those that were a little newer and in better condition on NTC where we spent the rest of boot camp (don't remember exactly but IIRC Boot was 10-11 weeks total). We only got one day of liberty in San Dog on the day after we graduated, then were shipped out the next day (to a next duty station, an A School or on leave before going to one of the other two). I spent spent most of my liberty day learning how to surf with a beach bunny college girl who grew up surfing in that area.
Thank you for the nice comments. Some of the pictures are mine, others were saved from other sources over the years. The pictures and the memories of my 1967-1971 service is all that is left as none of those places still exist today as they were back then. The bases I was at were all closed with the end of the cold war and relegated to be available for commercial concerns. Instead most were just forgotten and became wasteland ghosts. I also have some sad pictures of what they are now. The squadrons and ships are gone too (except for the USS Midway that is now a museum on display in San Diego).
The USS Recruit TDE-1 is still "moored" in it's slip where it was back then though. It is a landlocked 2/3's scale model of a real destroyer escort ship (that was in fact commissioned as a bonafide Navy ship back in 1949) where 10's of thousands of squirrels got their first training of the life and times on a USN ship. From sitting in bleachers along port side during lectures about everything at sea, to going aboard in mock crews and acting out seaboard situations... learning/practicing marlinspike and normal ops on a ship, using sound powered phones, doing fire, general quarters, and abandon ship drills etc. It might seem silly in a way, but we didn't take it that way as it could mean the difference between life and death on a ship later. BTW, squirrels is what recruits were called in boot where we had lots of strange and colorful new "terminology" constantly thrown at us (much of which shouldn't be repeated in mixed company).
TDE-1 back then...
The retrofitted/modernized version later...
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Very impressive!
When North Drake (Japan) closed its doors back in the late 70s (don't remember the exact date) we had pictures of the before and after, and it was so sad......to think that my husband worked there and we lived there for over a year.
I understand the nostalgia of sites long gone, and if I can, will find those pictures......have plenty of us living inside a small community! It was imperative that we learn the language, so I needed to take a crash course while living in Okinawa.
Arigato...
(Sorry, but I only know a few rudimentary Japanese words/phrases unfortunately despite having had a few close Japanese friends in my life. The last one passed in 2016 when he was 90 years old, Takashi 'Tak' Yakota. Despite his being born in America when WWII broke out his family was put in a relocation camp. After high school he served in the US Army in Korea, then lived the rest of his life in Seaside, CA where I first met him in the very early 70's and for a time we worked together in Monterey, CA and shared some hunting experiences there together.)
FWIW I found a site with a lot of pictures of the ruins of AF Base Drake online that are probably far more informative than the ones I have of my old duty stations. It's like one day they just walked away from Drake and left it to rot. Those of mine show that most of what was there is gone with only a little of what had been there left. It should be easy enough for you to find that site via a browser if you want to view it or post a link to it.
Oh, I came across one photo of the Hospital there, and it tugged at my heart cause Lisa my daughter and I, then 5 years old, would go there almost every day! They were delighted to see her with her outgoing personality and they took right to her........there was a huge race track with remotes that they would play with and the smiles on their faces was worth all the time we spent there. There were amputees and Lisa would ask about them, and one of the GIs explained it to her in the most realistic and compassionate way. Her response usually was......"Okay"! She brought so many smiles to those kids....yea, they were all kids! 
She hadn't reached the point of maturity to understand it all.
Here is the only pic I could find that's as close to the hospital that I remember and that I could find.
She hadn't reached the point of maturity to understand it all.Here is the only pic I could find that's as close to the hospital that I remember and that I could find.
Wow. That's an impressive collection of photos. They cleaned their clothes in buckets? I know the difficulty of organizing an office party or family reunion so the logistics of managing tens of thousands of people is amazing. And then you add a war and training on top of it all. Sheesh!
I remember the gas chamber well. Of course they only used tear gas. We went in w/o the masks and then donned them when we couldn't take it anymore, lol. Fun for the drill Sargent, lots of masks to clean afterwards.
In '66 - '67, I was CBR NCO, and got to conduct my very own gas chamber. I recall the procedure was to enter with mask on, remove it, and give your name, rank, and service number. Those who got confused, I had escorted out mach schnell. CBR NCO was one of those additional duties, and I had to live and work with those guys. No really good reason to torment them.
This sounds worse than when I was working in the prisons and inmates got "gassed" with pepper spray when they were out of control. I know the guards liked to completely empty their canisters during a gassing. One told me that the paperwork was the same for whole canisters or a single spray.
Buckets, powdered soap, deck scrub brushes, cold water on concrete scrub tables out in the barracks courtyard. It took several rinses in cold water to get the soap back out and wring them out by hand. Then the clothes had to be tied to specific clotheslines for each type of clothing with small lengths of para cord turned and spaced exactly 1 or 2 fingers apart depending of what they were.... and those clotheslines were inspected to be sure they were done right daily. Failure to pass inspection of anything and everything in boot meant a marching party for the whole company. In a way we were like prisoners of war in boot, but as the company RCPO I could soften that for my company. The experience was all good in the end.
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That's about the same way it was in he Navy.. you entered the gas chamber that was like a mouse maze in a block building with your gas mask on... then when the gas was released the lights were turned off, the gas masks came off and we had to crawl to get low in the gas and find our way through the maze to get outside. They also faked a nerve gas spill to see if you could give yourself "the shot" (a hypo needle attached to a baggie full of saline that you held between your fingers and slapped you leg with). Some of the squids failed that one. The fire fighting school I took later as an aviator was way more dangerous though... a low walled circular tank filled with AV gas set on fire and a mock up of a jet airplane on fire that we had to wade in with shipboard fire equipment/foggers and try to put it out. The gas was boiling hot and slippery, so it took 4 men to control a fire hose.
Yep, from day one the military was nothing like the more or less innocent lives we had came from.
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Another old pic turned up of when I was in the squadron that was take with that same old Kodak Bullet camera...
It's of Attack Squadron 56's Championship Golf Team. The four of us took 2nd place in the California State Navy Gold Tournament in November 1970. Pic is in front of our #407 A-7B Coursair II (one of 15 of them we had) in our hanger at NAS Lemoore, CA. "Gunner", the WO standing on the left was just being his typical glory monger self by getting in the picture... he was not on the golf team. Jim, Bob, Dennis and I was the team.
It's of Attack Squadron 56's Championship Golf Team. The four of us took 2nd place in the California State Navy Gold Tournament in November 1970. Pic is in front of our #407 A-7B Coursair II (one of 15 of them we had) in our hanger at NAS Lemoore, CA. "Gunner", the WO standing on the left was just being his typical glory monger self by getting in the picture... he was not on the golf team. Jim, Bob, Dennis and I was the team.
We missed that one. We had the later atropine injectors. Any training injectors would have been pretty expensive, and all you had to do was pull a plastic pin out of the rear to arm it and press the front against the thigh. Much less psychological stress.
An "issue" with that Nerve Gas drill was that you had to be careful when slapping the needle into your leg... it had to go all the way in straight or there was a chance of breaking in it off in your leg. Once in you simply squeezed the bag to force the saline into your leg. I think were the stress came for some of those who couldn't do it was from them making it seem so realistic they actually thought there was a gas emergency (which for most of us more on the ball was not logical because they often tried to trick us)... and/or them not being big on getting shots in the first place. In boot we got endless shots for every disease known to mankind and domesticated animals (or so it seemed), but they used jet gun injectors to deliver most of them. The theory was that the compressed air forced the vaccines in thru your skins pores. The fly in the tea cup with them is we usually got two at a time, one in each Deltoid, and if the two corpsman/nurses didn't fire them at the exact same time a flinch could mean the second one could ripe you arm open. Even if just one at a time you had to brace yourself a little because the air pressure could knock you off balance if you were not paying attention.
At times I think we were guinea pigs helping train new medical personnel.
Edit to add a picture of the Jet Gun Injectors in use at boot camp...
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I remember that. When I was in, it was cotton cord, rather than para, and it was issued as a continuous length with aiglets (little metal sleeves) in pairs every 8 inches or so. You had to cut it into lengths between the pairs. Tie the center of the tie to a corner of the clothing with a clove hitch; wrap the ends in opposite directions around the clothes line exactly three times; and bring the ends over for a square knot (heaven help you (and the company)) if it was a granny knot. I'm sure the specifics are in my Bluejacket's Manual (which I still have, but unfortunately it's in storage right now with all my other books).
I still have most of my laundry ties 55 years later; very handy for those little temporary lash ups.
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