The Life of a Us Air Force Firefighter 1960–1980

By Ron Fink

When I entered the air force so many years ago, I would never have guessed that life would take so many twists and turns. I would meet colorful people, have ten different duty assignments in three countries and four states, see many nice places, and have some rewarding experiences. With so many different jobs, I would learn that leadership is a combination of being able to follow orders and lead the team with the same enthusiasm.

The US Air Force firefighting force is much different today than when I was in uniform. Gone are the converted military trucks that passed a fire trucks; now the equipment is state-of-the-art and the best that the fire equipment industry can provide.

Firefighters at all levels are trained to meet standards established by the National Fire Protection Association, a consensus organizations of fire department leaders from small communities, large metropolitan areas, and the Department of Defense.

I was proud to have been associated with the firefighters I worked with in those twenty years but wish that I had been able to participate in the organization that exists today.

This book is about that adventure and those experiences.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Jun 23, 2018
• ISBN: 9781546248088

Book preview

The Life of a

US AIR FORCE

Firefighter 1960–1980

pic%201%20Airman%20Fink%20with%20a%201952%20530-A%20Pumper.jpg

Source: Personal collection

Ron Fink

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© 2018 Ron Fink. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse 06/20/2018

ISBN: 978-1-5462-4809-5 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-5462-4807-1 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-5462-4808-8 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2018907337

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models,

and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Contents

Prologue

Chapter 1 Basic Training

Chapter 2 Germany – Part One

Chapter 3 Eglin Air Force Base

Chapter 4 U-Tapao Air Base

Chapter 5 Mountain Home AFB, Idaho

Chapter 6 Bitburg Air Base

Chapter 7 Athens Air Base

Chapter 8 Vandenberg Air Force Base

Chapter 9 Sparrevohn Air Force Station, Alaska

Chapter 10 Back to Vandenberg Air Force Base

Epilogue

Prologue

The History channel once aired a feature known as Basic Training. The idea for this documentary comes from the story of six young Americans who were followed through several weeks of US Army basic military training during a television documentary a couple of years ago.

In this series the new recruits are housed in air conditioned, brick buildings; they have nice beds and plenty of storage space for their gear. The sergeants treated them with dignity and they allowed their charges to question the purpose of the orders they are given.

I do not recall the same living conditions or getting the same treatment that these young men and women are getting when I was in basic! What follows is the story of how I remember Basic military training and subsequent chapters chronicle a 20-year career as an Air Force Firefighter.

1

Basic Training

WHAT DO I DO NOW?

I was almost 18 years old. I didn’t have a job; I didn’t know how to get one and being raised in a relatively rural area of San Fernando, California I was very naive concerning the ways of the world.

It was 1960, I had graduated from high school and wanted to leave home and make my own way in life. In those days the area where I lived was a sparsely populated area with several fruit packing houses and thousands of acres of citrus and olive groves. I was frustrated, there weren’t any places to work and maybe I had watched one too many of those Foreign Legion movies that portrayed the life of a soldier in a romantic light!

I had always wanted to be a fire fighter but there weren’t many options. The US Forest Service was hiring 18-year old summer crewmembers. I applied and didn’t hear anything from them for several weeks. I was a little discouraged, but I didn’t realize that I needed to squeak the wheel by calling or visiting the central office.

I don’t know how I would have gotten to the job since I had no car, no drivers’ license and lived many miles away from the nearest US Forest Service office.

I was too young for the Los Angeles City or County Fire Department and so all that was left was to join the military. The draft was in full force and many of my classmates were being called to serve in the Army and Marines.

I was young, but I had a high school diploma and the military wanted a few good men. I was smart enough to know that I didn’t feel like camping out with the Army for a couple of years, wade in the mud with the Marines or bounce around on a boat with the Navy so I headed to the local Air Force recruiting office to see what they had to offer.

Ironically, the day before I left for basic training the forest service had picked my number and I got an invitation to join them at the Arroyo Seco fire station near the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, CA; too late, Uncle Sam already had me.

THE US AIR FORCE WINS!

Usa, Uncle Sam, I Want You, Army, Military

Source: Pixabay

There were two military recruiters in our town, one from the Navy and the other from the Air Force. The day I went into the office, the Navy man was out of the area on business. Therefore, by default, I chose to speak with the Air Force Sergeant on duty and a twenty-year career was born.

He was a good sales representative and I was a willing buyer of all he had to offer. Good pay ($67 a month), an interesting job, world travel, room and board and life time medical benefits! I didn’t realize that he might be stretching the truth until many years later.

First, there were the tests both physical and mental, which I passed easily. These consisted of a series of mental exercises of simple math, simpler English and some interpretive tests; then a physical evaluation determined whether I had all my fingers, toes, arms, legs, etc. Since I would soon be government property I guess they wanted an inventory, so they would know which parts of me got lost in the process of serving my country.

The testing and physical examination were conducted in an old wooden building that was probably used by the military during WW II. The floors were squeaky, the paint was faded, and it smelled of stale tobacco smoke. The examiners were tired old veterans of who knows what conflict; in those days, nearly every adult male was a veteran of either WWII or the Korean War.

There were forms and paperwork for everything under the sun and none of it made sense to me. Where were you born, where did you go to school, are you an American, do you wet the bed? This was the first of what would seem like tons of paper before I was to end my stay with the Air Force. I looked once, and I thought the stack was at least 6-inches thick and growing; I probably signed my name a hundred times before the day was over.

After all this I was given a reporting date and would soon be on my way to the recruiting depot in Los Angeles and points beyond.

I told my parents that I was leaving home the night before I was due at the recruiting depot. I had just turned 18 and didn’t need their permission to join. My first act of defiance was to do what parents and judges threatened teens with – joining the military services. This was 1960 and they were quite surprised!

I collected my most valuable possessions and climbed aboard the bus. As I would later find out, I really didn’t need anything since it was all eventually taken away at Lackland Air Force Base, Texas, otherwise known as basic.

The recruiting station in downtown Los Angeles was another adventure. It was located on a very busy business block and busses roared by spewing dark and smelly exhaust smoke and trolleys of all vintages plied the tracks. There were big plate glass windows that allowed columns of light to pierce a thick haze of cigarette and cigar smoke that filled the air.

In those days it seemed like everyone smoked something; all the movie stars punctuated the important lines with the lighting of a pipe or cigarette and the villains always seemed to chomp on a cigar. Of course, the billowing cloud of smoke always looked cool in those black and white films. In those days there was no hint of the health hazard associated with the use of tobacco products.

When I got to the depot late in the afternoon it was very crowded with young men and women and there were some nice military people in crisp uniforms to greet us. At this point, I was still Mr. Fink and had not taken the oath. We were all given a few meal tickets and a voucher for a room in a cheap, but clean hotel and instructed by one of the sergeants to be at the main depot early the next day.

The night in the hotel was exciting for a naïve young man from the orchards of the San Fernando Valley!

This hotel had been there for decades; the military always chose the cheapest places to stay and this was among the cheapest in LA. The lobby had black and white checkered tiles and the halls were covered with threadbare carpet that had seen thousands of feet in its day. There were glass transoms over the doors and the walls were so thin that you could hear the noises associated with an active digestive system from the guy in the next room.

Fresh air wasn’t part of the deal; between the tobacco smoke, smelly restrooms, dirty carpets and the exhaust fumes from the street this place really stank.

There were almost 100 recruits in the hotel, all of them under 25 and almost all of them had never been away from home before. Some were worldly and wanted to show their pals the ropes in the big city. Los Angeles is a big noisy place full of all the excitement a person could stand. As I said, I was young, but not foolish and I didn’t look for trouble, I just went to eat and then stayed in my room and tried to get some rest.

I was also scared, although I would not admit it. There was a lot of yelling in the hallways and some of the Military Police came up to calm everyone down. Most of the noise was party type noises. I guess the other guests, if there were any other guests, and those unsmiling military police didn’t appreciate happy people.

The next morning it was obvious that some of the young men had gotten very drunk and now they weren’t feeling too well at all! We were handed meal tickets and told to go down the street to a nearby eatery.

This was another adventure; cleanliness was not one of the selling points for this place, the cooks had grease-soaked aprons, a cigarette was hanging precariously from their lips and my eggs were floating in a puddle of brown grease. The table had remnants of meals that had been recently consumed and my sleeve was sticking to some unknown substance.

But I powered my way through it though and then went back to the recruiting depot.

Even though I had already had a physical exam during my initial testing, our first task was another physical examination; I guess they wanted to double check on the earlier inventory to see if I had lost anything yet. We were stripped to our shorts, inspected, poked, prodded and basically made to feel inferior to other humans in the building. The medics drew blood, checked for bugs, made noises in my ears, took another inventory of my parts and a doctor who smelled of stale tobacco and a long night of boozing pronounced me in good health.

As we completed our physicals, several of the guys were sitting around and they overheard a couple of the women recruits who were talking about failing the physical; it seems they had some sort of social disease! As the women left to return to wherever they came from I heard an ah crap in the background. So maybe all that yelling was the party with the girls who didn’t make the train to boot camp. Take two aspirin and call me in the morning, or is it an antibiotic?

Lunch was another trip to a local greasy spoon; I chose a different place this time and the food was a little more edible. At least this stuff wasn’t floating. These were my first real opportunities to eat in a public place; my parents weren’t rich so the closest we ever got to eating out was either pizza brought home or my infrequent adventures at Bob’s Big Boy, a hamburger drive-in on Sepulveda Boulevard.

In those days’ people could smoke while eating; this is something I could never quite understand. Why would you want to mask the flavor of a satisfying meal by smoking? Anyway, this place was no different and since ventilation consisted of opening the windows to let in the exhaust fumes from the street you can imagine how appetizing that was. But one of the benefits of being young is that it takes a lot to kill your appetite.

Later in the day, we were sworn in by a very stern Major who proclaimed himself commander of something and all hell broke loose! Those nice military people from the day before were suddenly now yelling orders at us and trying to make us get into some sort of orderly rows! We were all given serial numbers and ordered to memorize them before we arrived at Lackland Air Force Base and a lot more paper to carry. It seems’ the military has a need to account for your every movement and they provided us with our orders to move from California to Texas.

One young man with some college time was put in charge of the group and off we went to the Union Pacific Railroad station near Korea Town. Once we were formally inducted, we were immediately moved to the train depot; no fooling around now and the efficiencies of a smoothly oiled military machine were set into action.

I was excited about the trip, but mindful of the air of authority that seemed to have taken hold of our group.

The railroad depot in LA is a grand place; it was built long before airplanes became the choice for travel. The ceilings were cathedral-like and fifty feet or more off the floor; the floors, walls and columns were marble and there was polished brass everywhere. The place was clean as a whistle; people respected public spaces back then.

At the train station we were not allowed to mingle with civilians and were required to remain in one orderly group while we waited for the train. In what was to become typical military fashion the wait was longer than planned and several of us got restless. Some of the bolder men wanted to look for adult beverages, but all I wanted to do was find the men’s room!

Of course, the man in charge had strict orders, so I got to use the restroom, but the others would wait many months before they could indulge in their favorite beverage.

The train trip was the last taste of relative freedom that I would have for several weeks. The train was of the new diesel type; it clattered with the incessant click-clack as it crossed each joint of the tracks. You could faintly smell the odor of diesel exhaust, but the train was spotless.

Meals were accomplished by a meal ticket provided to the dining car steward. You had no choice about what you ate, just give the steward a ticket and then eat what was on the plate. The meals were far superior to those I ate while at the recruiting depot; the railroads of 1960 were always noted for having a good wholesome dining car and it didn’t matter what it was that they fed you, it was all good.

Of course, the stewards knew there would be no tips, they treated us politely, but didn’t give us any extra service. Most of them were veterans themselves and maybe they knew that we were off to basic training. Oh, the club car was strictly off limits.

The trip lasted two days and the tracks from LA to San Antonio pass through some very small towns. One thing you quickly noticed was the openness of the great American west and the difference in the type of cars people drive. In LA, they had sleek cars with tail fins, car club signs, lots of chrome and they are slick, low slung and clean. In Arizona, New Mexico and Texas, there were pickup trucks with banged up fenders, scratched paint, mud flaps, animal skins hanging from the antennas and the paint is covered with thick mud or red dust!

There was a difference in the appearance of the towns too; gone was the hub-bub of the City of Angels. This was a different America from the one I was accustomed to; dusty small towns, streets with high curbs to channel the summer gulley washing rains and a much more casual appeal to a passing teenager from LA.

REFORMING YOUTH

Finally, we arrived in San Antonio early one morning and were taken to the Air Force boot camp, which was quite a shock.

Because I had watched so many old war movies I guess I was expecting John Wayne, instead we got Barney Fife! We were bused from San Antonio to Lackland and a diminutive sergeant in a well-starched olive drab uniform met us at the bus. The first thing he did was yell, in a squeaky voice, get off the bus and form two rows. He then pulled out an old wooden clipboard and began calling our names. He tried to get us to march as a group, but we were a disorganized rabble at this point and the best we could do was walk in a relatively straight line without falling.

We had not been on a military post before, so the groomed lawns, shiny cars, freshly painted buildings and straight-as-an-arrow streets were a tremendous change from what we had just left in LA; not a piece of scrap paper in sight, no overflowing trashcans and no one lying around sleeping on the streets. There was lots of room between the buildings and no parking problems.

We finally got to the place we would call home for the next few weeks. One of a neat row of wooden buildings that were put up quickly during WWII to house the millions of men who would soon march off to war; as far as we knew we weren’t going off to any wars, but this clap board building would serve to house us.

These places had their own character; the whole thing was built of wood, the floors had reddish brown linoleum covering and you could clearly see the nails that held the material down. Many patches had been added over the years. The latrines, military talk for restroom facilities, were utilitarian; that’s the kindest term I can muster up. With several sinks all in a row, bare concrete floors and galvanized metal walls in the open shower area it was clearly designed for function not eye appeal.

I would soon find out why those streets were free of trash; it was because the troops were ordered to fan out with instructions like if it moves, pick it up; if it doesn’t paint it. And if a piece of anything slipped from your hand there was always someone in charge to yell at you to pick it up. Eventually you got the habit of looking for something out of place to straighten up and even to this day I try and keep the outside of my house tidy and trash free.

It was November and all the sergeants really wanted to do was be home for the holidays. It was 1960 and the pay was miserable for career men who were trying to raise a family. The only thing they had going for them after the Korean experience was a steady job, a house on base and a nice family to spend time with. We were interrupting their holidays, but they didn’t hold it against us.

Two sergeants were going to try to change 65 young men from an unsightly, disorganized group of teenagers into a razor-sharp fighting machine! Well, at least that was the theory.

The first thing was to purge anything civilian from our beings. All those valuable possessions I was so careful to bring along were the first to go. Pack them up and send them home. We had to stay in our civilian clothing for a couple of days before we were issued uniforms. The civilian clothes seemed to really bother the two sergeants, but we really didn’t care.

We were given half-a-months’ pay ($33.50) in advance to cover expenses over the next few days with the first order of business being a military haircut; the barbers were kind and asked the men with nice hair dos’ how they would like it cut. After the men replied with the style that suited them, the shears cleaned those skulls off slick-as-a-whistle in about 15 seconds.

To add insult to injury we had to pay a quarter for the haircut. Next, a 5-minute trip through the small Post Exchange (PX) store to purchase our essential items; shaving gear, marking pens to mark our clothing and letter writing materials were recommended. Let me restate that, letter writing materials were required as our sergeants demanded that we write home each week we were there to let our moms know that we were still in one piece.

We wouldn’t see the inside of that little store for several days; just like in prison we had to earn our privileges and it seems that going to this little PX was deemed a high privilege by our new leaders. Since the meals in the chow hall didn’t include any sodas or other treats the first thing I wanted was a soda pop; some of the others wanted a beer but that wasn’t going to happen.

Once we began to show some promise to our training sergeants they allowed us some 15-minute trips to the PX; we could buy anything we wanted but had to consume it before we got back to the barracks.

The sergeants gave us a big break due to the holidays. Somehow, we had been sent to them by mistake, the first of many administrative errors that I would experience.

It was a long-standing rule that the Drill Sergeants would be off duty between Thanksgiving and the first of the New Year. However, the cold war was in full swing; the Russians were acting up in Europe and the Vietnam conflict was escalating every day; Cuba was only 90 miles away and Uncle Sam needed some fresh troops. Somebody forgot to tell the sergeants what the plan was I guess.

Our group was composed of about 30 guys from LA, 30 from the Detroit area and five from Iowa. Three completely divergent cultures trying to live together. One of the guys from Detroit told us that his older brother told him the way to escape the Sergeants eye was to blend in; we all have uniforms so we all look alike, the fellow from Detroit said. Blending the olive-green uniforms with our new haircuts and his plan should have worked.

But, it didn’t for him; the Air Force was in the process of changing uniforms (from olive drab to a silver-gray) and guess who got the only olive drab field jacket in the whole group? He was a big man, about 6’ 3" and weighed about 230 pounds. The rest of us were 6’ or under and no one weighed over 170 pounds. The poor guy from Detroit never had a chance; he stuck out like a sore thumb.

Uniform issue was another jolt to our civilian minds. All 65 men crowded into a mothball haze-filled small room, trying to be fit into generic uniform sizes by three overworked clerks. Well, fitting into was a stretch; what size are you yelled the clerk! I was 18 years old, I had never bought any clothes for myself; how could I know what size I was? I guess they were used to a bunch of idiots parading through their warehouse because we all got bags of clothes.

What a joke, one size fits all, almost. As I said the Air Force was changing uniforms, so I got two of everything, an old style and the new one.

The clerk mentioned how lucky I was to get a double issue for the price of a single issue; yes, we had to pay for our uniforms too. All it meant to me at the time was that my bag was twice as heavy as the next guys when we carried them back to our barracks. Of course, technically, we were paid an allotment of about $300 to buy uniforms, but we did not see a penny of it, we just signed a form indicating that we had received our clothes.

The sergeants had us change immediately into our new uniforms; our civilian clothes would be mailed home the next day. These uniforms hadn’t been washed yet and they were very stiff. I never knew you could chafe in so many places in just a few minutes of marching.

We marched everywhere; it only took a couple of days for us to figure out how to stay in line, all walk at the same speed, make turns as a group and not bob up-and-down. There would be no casual walking during the next few weeks; if you went somewhere alone you walked at a position of attention; if there were two or more you marched, squaring your corners and stopping smartly.

On one of our many marches back and forth across Lackland the sergeants stopped us and pointed to a fence and a busy highway. They said that if anyone wanted to leave that they should climb the fence and hitch a ride to town. Then catch a bus and go home. No one did, but the idea was discussed for the next few evenings in the barracks.

Basic training is an experience that everyone should be exposed to; we lived in two-story wooden barracks that were built before World War Two. You could look outside through the cracks between the wallboards, there was no insulation, all the pipes and wires were visible and what little heat there was provided by a small oil boiler in a half basement. There were 15 double tier bunks down stairs and 17 upstairs. The drill instructors had a private room and one of them was required to sleep with us each night in case there was an emergency.

The military was very much afraid that these buildings could catch fire and kill several of us. Many had burned quickly to the ground throughout history. We had several fire drills the first couple of days to teach us how to escape quickly. All these drills were between midnight and 4 am. We were expected to turn out of our warm bunks and form up outside in the cold, dark morning for roll call in a few seconds.

The cold nights that were chosen were usually punctuated with freezing rain and if anyone was straggling (that is a couple of seconds late) we got to do it over again in an hour or so.

Fireguards changed every hour on the hour throughout the night with terse instructions to blow the whistle three times and yell FIRE-FIRE-FIRE. Of course, I always thought it was just another way to force us to accept the military way of thinking, but we were just the barracks fire detection and alarm system.

The military was also afraid that we would get dirty, or more importantly, that something in our barracks would get dirty. Of course, there were no maids and we were expected keep the place spotless. All this cleaning and shining was accomplished after the normal duty day and before lights out; then again before we left for the chow hall the next morning.

The people selected for this duty were those who collected the most demerits during the day. The bad marks were issued for anything that came into the sergeants’ mind. When it was all over we decided that everyone had a chance at the crappy jobs at least once during our 40-day stay so I guess they really had a plan after all.

Following the morning wake up call, usually an abrupt turning on of the lights and the yell of the drill sergeant to hit the deck, roll call in 15-minutes, we had to shave, get dressed and make our beds with blankets so tight you could bounce a quarter off them. Then we had to be in formation for a march to the chow hall.

Making the bed was something new for most of us; at home we just tossed the covers towards the bed and hoped that would satisfy our moms. Here though there was another standard. Soon we discovered how to sleep without tearing up the bunk so that in the morning we could attain that quarter bounce look in a few seconds.

During the first week, we learned how to march, the code of conduct, military history, how to shoot an M-1 rifle and how to eat. It was winter in Texas, and as I said before, John Wayne was not at our boot camp. We accomplished a lot of our weapon’s training where it was warm and dry right in the barracks. I guess the drill instructors didn’t want to get wet or cold.

The confidence course was rumored to be a man killer. The more experienced (about two weeks in the service) recruits told us that many men didn’t make it all the way through. Of course, we had no idea what lay ahead, but we were eager to find out.

By this time those of us from California had figured out that this was just a big head game that they were playing with us. All the marching and yelling was designed to make us conform to a rigid protocol in just a few weeks. Therefore, when we finally got to the confidence course we were ready for anything.

At this point in my life I was in very good physical condition. I had hiked up and down the mountains around my home almost every day, so the confidence course wasn’t going to be that tough. Besides, the physical conditioning consisting of thousands of push-ups, jumping jacks and mile runs that preceded this event were all designed to prepare us for the task.

The course was laid out over the low sand hills in a remote area of the base; we were marched over there and when we were done marched back to our barracks. We were told to run the course, that is not to walk, because the whole thing was a timed event. There were many obstacles such as low fences to go over, mud holes to slog through, drain pipes to crawl into and of course a low barbed wire obstacle to crawl under.

To punctuate the challenge about half way through and just after the gas house, we were required to qualify on the firing range.

The gas house was a square building filled with tear gas; we were expected to put on a gas mask, enter the house, remove our mask, recite our serial number and put the mask back on before going back outside.

This activity was supposed to instill confidence that the gas mask worked if you put it on correctly, but at the time all I can remember is the burning sensation in my eyes and nose, the tears and mucus running down my face as I reached for my canteen to wash out the stinging gas.

With tear gas still fresh in our nostrils we sighted in our trusty M-1 Carbine’s and tried to poke enough holes in the center of the target to demonstrate that we knew how to shoot straight.

As I said, it was winter in Texas; rain, snow and freezing temperatures were the norm. Ice was on all the thousands of mud puddles and hypothermia was not out of the question. So, the confidence course became a true case of survival. We were required to complete two trips through the course, no excuses.

This was supposed to prepare us for field deployments, but to be honest in my 20-year career the closest I ever came to field conditions was a training exercise in Idaho and an assignment in Thailand and we were provided with tents with concrete floors and cots to sleep on.

But since it was the holidays, since it was cold, and since we weren’t supposed to be there anyway the instructors only required one trip through the course and the gas house; so, after a hot meal in the field kitchen we all trundled off back to our barracks. Damn the luck!

As I look back, this didn’t really prepare us for the realities of war or field duty; it was more of an inconvenience and today’s Air Force boot camp, or basic training is much more focused on teaching our young men and women how to survive in hostile environments and how to think for themselves in tough situations.

The integration of the Air Force into Army and Marine units makes it imperative that each person on the team is prepared to perform under fire; the confidence course I witnessed was more of the Boy Scout troop variety.

THE CHOW HALL

The chow hall wasn’t a cafeteria or like any restaurant anyone had ever seen; like the restroom and barracks facilities it was designed with function in mind. The military needed to feed several hundred men and women in a brief period, so we moved quickly to a stack of metal trays divided into sections like TV dinner trays are today.

No chatter was allowed either in line; you then picked up a knife, a spoon and fork and then moved to the serving line and tilted your tray down so food could be put on it.

Technically you had a choice, but you were required to have meat, vegetable and a starch on the tray; a dessert was optional. The stuff was glopped on the tray by a tired looking cook and then you went to a table, waiting for all four places to be occupied; sat down and eat everything on our metal mess tray and then throw your empty metal tray and silverware in the wash can and be back in formation outside in less than 10 minutes.

All very efficient, you see the military viewed food as fuel; at this point taste didn’t matter it was only the calorie content of the stuff they fed us that counted, and all meals were prepared from a master menu developed somewhere in the bowels of the pentagon. Today’s mess hall menu is much different with a focus on healthy, meaning few calories and of course it’s still tasteless.

Because we were there over both the Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays our sergeants could stand down, that is take a break in military lingo, to be with their families. That left us recruits with literally nothing to do until they came back.

The chow hall never stops; they serve four meals a day, 365 days a year no matter what; breakfast, lunch, supper and midnight rations. It takes people to run a chow hall, the military is very strict about cleanliness primarily because an army literally marches on its stomach and if the troops get food poisoning then the battle is over before it starts.

The first time our sergeants ever asked us to do something, usually they just ordered us to do things; the cooks needed help and since we were idle they asked us, they didn’t order us, to serve on the Kitchen Police (KP) squad. Since I knew I would be bored I volunteered along with several others from our group; why not, we weren’t going home, we couldn’t go to town or even wander around the base and at least it was something to do.

When we got to the chow hall at 5am a grizzled old sergeant met us with a scowl; it looked like he was very hung over and didn’t like being there at all. As he looked at our sleepy little group he decided to make the best of it and told us what jobs he wanted us to do.

KP is the most unappreciated job in the military; the unseen crew scrapes burned food off the pots, mops floors, peels potatoes, washes the metal trays and silver ware and generally keeps the place clean. I was handed a mop and told to keep it moving until someone told me to stop; a virtual mopping machine fueled by high calorie chow hall food.

Now one thing that the military takes a lot of pride in is how they prepare their Thanksgiving and Christmas meals; they go all out. Turkey, ham, shrimp cocktail, candied sweet potatoes, pies, cakes and all the other trimmings. This was 1960 and eating healthy had a whole different meaning than it does today.

And, for these two special days the training instructors suspended the 10 minutes to eat and no talking rules so we could enjoy a meal.

We worked until supper was over, about 14 hours. We were tired, but the cook took pity on us; there were a lot of left over pies that were going to be thrown away, so he said, Why don’t you boys just take them with you?

We accepted his offer; I mean who could turn down fresh baked pumpkin and cherry pies? But, we had a problem; where could we store them? We chose to put them above the ceiling of the barracks and took some whenever we felt like it. But after a couple of days the sergeant caught on to our little scheme and we had to throw the rest of the pies away.

In hind sight, this probably wasn’t the best idea since there were probably rodents roaming around who would like a piece of the pie too.

JOB HUNT AND PAY DAY

After a couple of weeks of training we all went over to the green monster, a huge olive drab administrative building where the military decided what they were going to do with you during your stay in the Air Force. Each person was asked to choose three jobs from a list of hundreds of jobs within the 10 minutes that was allotted to make choices.

Most of the jobs I had never heard of. What is a ground electronics engineering installation assemblyman and what does he do? All I wanted to be was a firefighter, so I chose the fire department and the clerk helped me find two other jobs that had no openings. Little did I know that firefighters were near the bottom of desirable jobs, somewhere between the Air Police and cooks and that I was virtually guaranteed to get the job.

The only real choice that the clerk had to make was whether I would be sent directly to my first duty station for on-the-job training or if I would be sent to a technical school. I felt fortunate to be sent to the fire academy first.

About thirty of the men, all over six-foot tall, including the guy from Detroit, were to become Air Policemen and the other thirty were to become cooks. One fellow, the one with some college, went to officers’ candidate school and the rest, either intentionally or unintentionally did not make it all the way through boot camp.

Education and experience did not matter to those clerks in the green monster. Some of the men in my group were master mechanics, hoping to become aircraft maintenance men. Some were experienced carpenters and plumbers, but none of it mattered. On that day in 1960 the Air Force needed cooks and cops! So, out of 65 men only two people got the job that drew them into the Air Force.

Our first full month’s payday came shortly after that. Of course, in those days, we had to report for pay and one mistake would send you back to the end of the line. Stand at attention in front of an officer, recite your name, rank and serial number, no laughing or talking in line and then I would get $67, minus taxes, for the month.

I was really living, respectable job, lots of exercise, very little idle time, bed and food provided and great pay. A dream comes true!

I made it through the pay line first time, only to discover that there was another line after the paymaster. This line was for contributions to the Red Cross, old soldiers’ home, war bonds and other important charities. Not mandatory, but you couldn’t get out of line until you were asked by senior sergeants for your money. By the time we were done a sizable chunk of our pay was gone.

This routine would happen every month and eventually every two-weeks for the next few years. Eventually the Air Force did away with pay call and our checks were deposited automatically into our checking accounts.

WE MADE IT

Then our instructors broke some news to us – we would only spend six of our eight weeks of basic training at Lackland, we would finish the other two weeks at our technical school. Freedom early, party time; military style.

The last big event of our training was to be a huge parade, the military equivalent of a graduation ceremony, consisting of all the groups of 65 recruits that were getting ready to complete training. As I said, we figured out that this was all just a big head game, so I devised a plan to keep myself from marching several miles on a cold January day in the parade.

I noticed that the sergeants were really picky about how their group of recruits looked when marching. There was to be no interruption to the smooth flow of the march, everything nice and orderly, no bobbing heads in the group. We didn’t know it, but they were being evaluated by their superiors on how well we looked.

So, about three days before the march I developed a slight limp. One of the sergeants finally noticed and asked what was wrong. I replied that I must have sprained an ankle during practice for the march, but that I would be ok and would just tough it out. Of course, this slight sprain caused me to bob up-and-down like a jack-in-the-box while marching, but I was trying as hard as I could.

The evening before the march, he ordered me to stand as a traffic guard for the rest of the troops the following day. I was broken hearted, or at least I appeared to be that way. My plan had worked and while the others were marching their hearts out for two hours in dress blue uniforms on a wet grassy field, I was lying around the barracks thinking that this military life wasn’t so bad after all.

OOPS, WE GOOFED

When the first phase of basic training was completed, I found out that the military makes mistakes. I was about to board the Greyhound at 5 o’clock in the morning to Greenville, Mississippi for fire school when a very tired looking Sergeant called my name and directed me to return to the casual barracks. I was very disappointed, but there was probably a good explanation. Surely, it would only take a day or two for me to be on my way.

I learned a lot about the military while I was in the casual barracks. The reason they called it casual was because you didn’t really have a job, they didn’t know what to do with you and so you just remained casual until they figured out why you were there.

One day some maintenance people came in to repair a small hole in the ceiling of the barracks. There were five of them, three military craftsmen and two civilians. The first day they measured, smoked and planned the job; all this planning required a lot of storytelling, joking and laughing among the crew. The lowest ranking military man did all the work while the civilians and other military people watched him. This took about four hours to plan a repair of a two-foot square hole.

The next day the same group returned and after a couple of hours of small talk discovered they had forgotten their tools. The following day they returned and cut the sheet rock too small for the hole, and yet another day they cut it too big. It took two weeks and several trips for these five people to fix the hole.

They never did paint it in the three weeks I was there; I guess that was not on the work order or they weren’t trained to paint. This is how I got the indelible impression that remains unchanged today that government efficiency is truly an oxymoron.

Since I didn’t have a lot of money to entertain myself I was getting tired of this casual life and began volunteering for every job that came up. The orderly room, an office that housed the commander, the first sergeant and his clerk, would call over a loud speaker and ask, Who’s over there, and one of us would respond with our name and rank.

One day they wanted someone for a special detail. I responded, and the person on the other end just laughed and said that I wasn’t good enough. I immediately went to the orderly room to find out what was so funny about me, and why I could not do this job. This is when I found out that the reason I was taken off the bus was that I had reportedly gone AWOL (absent-without-leave)!

I was shocked; I had only been off the base twice, both on legal passes and except for the time the instructor pointed out the fence I didn’t even think about running away. The military had been very good to me so far; where else could I get three hots’ and a cot and some spending money for almost no effort.

I told the Sergeant that there must be some mistake. He said, No, you’re Robert L. Fink and you went AWOL. I then showed him my identification card showing that I was Ronald L. Fink. At this point a Lieutenant, who was the squadron commander, appeared and asked what was wrong.

The lieutenant was a little more understanding than the sergeant was; he asked me a lot of questions and said that he would try and fix it. He asked what I would like to do, when I said all I wanted to do was join my firefighting class in Mississippi he said he would try.

Anyway, they straightened it all out and said Oops, we goofed and quickly prepared orders for me to join my class at fire school.

FIRE SCHOOL AT LAST

Finally, it was off to firefighting school in Greenville, Mississippi. The bus ride from Texas to Mississippi was an eye-opening experience for someone from California. This was the early sixties in the south. Alabama Governor Orval Faubus would soon stand in the schoolhouse door blocking entry to black students and racial tensions would soon come to a boil.

I wanted the wide back seat in the bus, so I could stretch out and get some sleep along the way; but when we crossed the Texas state line into Louisiana the driver ordered me to the front of the bus. It seems that the back was reserved, sort of. In the backward way of the deep south blacks were supposed to ride in back.

I also learned which water fountain I was supposed to drink out of and where I was supposed to sit to eat at the bus stops. This caused me some confusion; coming from the Los Angeles area I had never experienced this sort of separation. Why were they doing this I asked myself. Back home my school classes were all punctuated with black, Hispanic and Asian kids and when we went to a drive in or Bob’s Big Boy our multi-ethnic classmates were often there too, and it didn’t seem to cause any problems.

In the 1950’s my family lived in the Watts area of LA near an intersection that would later be the center of a major racially provoked riot. When I lived there, blacks lived next to Caucasians and at least from the perspective of a young person like myself seemed to live and shop together in harmony. But I was a little kid, what did I know of all the subtle ways that people could be segregated?

But this was 1960 and just five years later the nation would erupt as oppressed blacks of the south began to assert their rights and those in the north and west joined them. Many people today try to resurrect those turbulent times in some misguided effort to make a political point, but I don’t think that the conditions of today could ever equal those dark days when I first traveled the south.

Later, after blacks gained so much from the civil rights movement I noticed that they began to segregate themselves from others and created organizations that were dedicated to ethnic pride. Maybe the new generation has forgotten the lessons of their forefathers.

The fire school was in the process of moving from Denver, Colorado to Greenville, Mississippi. Now Greenville was a really, small town. How small was it? At the time the train literally backed into town for about 20 miles. All the buildings in town were mostly red brick and downtown was a good two blocks long.

The downtown area had few sidewalks and no curbs or gutters; gravity allowed water from frequent rains to simply run down whatever channel it could create. The buildings were broken, bricks cracked, and signs faded. This place appeared to have been forgotten after the nearby air base closed following WWII.

Most people lived in white clapboard houses with front porches shaded by large trees. Black people, of course, had a separate area of town and the houses were of bleached out lumber with porches that were falling; the trees here were bent and diseased and there were no flowers. I thought I was in some backward third world foreign country.

The town was on the Mississippi River levee so there were really two parts to everything; farm land on one side of the levee and houses on the other side. You could not actually see the river, but everyone assured us that it was there. In fact, the only time I saw the mighty Mississippi River was on the bus crossing a bridge near Nashville, Tennessee.

Greenville Air Force Base was originally built starting in 1940; it sits on 2,000 acres and had 140 buildings. It was both active and closed several times before our arrival with the last planes leaving the year before we got there. The base was closed for the final time in 1965.

I had been in the Air Force two whole months and still had not seen one airplane. The base in Mississippi had been closed for many years and while we waited for our turn at training, we were ordered to activate several World War two style barracks and offices. There were not any aircraft here either; am I really in the Air Force?

It would be a few weeks before our training could begin; once again it was hurry up and wait since the personnel system had pumped in more students than the instructors could handle in their haste to fill quotas.

So, we were tasked with fixing up these old musty and dusty buildings; our job was to get them ready for their new occupants just like the people that arrived before us did. The first thing we did was to clean them out, then the civil engineers came in and got the heaters working, electrical wiring repaired, and the plumbing began flowing water.

Then we moved furniture, assembled beds, put in new lockers and hung fire extinguishers in the buildings and cleaned the place up for the new troops that would soon be arriving.

We also pulled weeds at the golf course, thousands of weeds. I learned that one of the most essential military areas on any Air Force base was the golf course; of course, none of us could use it.

The shining jewel of this base was the chow hall. It was far superior to the one I had just left at Lackland Air Force Base. It was run by a contractor and they really knew how to work magic with the master menu; this food had some taste to it and eating their peanut butter coated waffles was pure heaven. I must have gained a couple of pounds even though we were working hard every day.

THE PIG PEN

Meanwhile we were starting our second phase, or the last two-weeks of basic training. Apparently, the drill sergeants in Mississippi didn’t get the word from the people in Texas, or else they didn’t quite know what to do in this second phase.

They all assumed that we already knew what to do. After all, we got here on our own from Texas and didn’t get lost and we could put our uniforms on straight, so we must be trained. So, the second phase consisted of marching to and from class and not much else.

There was one lunatic sergeant who tilted his Smoky Bear type campaign hat low over his eyes and carried a swagger stick. He thought that it was his personal responsibility to mentally break every one of us. He would yell and scream at us every day creating new obscenities and putting new emphasis on old ones.

He didn’t appear to be very smart, but then he was our new leader. One day he finally went completely crazy and trashed our dormitory. He overturned every bunk, tossed our clothes out of our lockers into the middle of the room, threw the trashcans out the windows, dumped the water-filled butt cans on the floor and put a sign out front declaring that our barracks was a pig pen.

Even the other sergeants assigned to our unit thought this was too much. When we got into the barracks, we all huddled together and decided that the best way to get back at this guy was to quietly clean up the mess and pretend that nothing had happened. It took several hours but we spit shined the place and returned it to its former shining glory.

This worked so well that we never saw this guy again. Another sergeant was assigned to complete our basic training and he was so freaked out by the actions of his predecessor that he let us take care of ourselves.

On a side note it was about this time that several new people were arriving for other schools located on the base. In Mississippi there were large drainage ditches on each side of the road to catch the heavy rainfall that happens in this part of the country. These things were deep, well over 6 feet, so you could hide in them if you wanted to.

A few of us decided that we would harass the new arrivals. We concocted a scheme to use water filled fire extinguishers as supersized squirt guns. After dark we laid in wait in one of the ditches on the main drag and opened fire on passing troops. This was a hoot until we mistakenly blasted one of the sergeants who happened by; he didn’t catch us but we all decided that the fun was over.

ENTERTAINMENT

There wasn’t much to do in Greenville unless you just wanted to hang around on Main Street. I wasn’t much for hanging around and I didn’t have any civilian clothes anyway, so I stayed on the base.

There were movies, a new one every couple of days and the service club. The service club had a nice snack bar where they made soda fountain treats every night. That’s where I became addicted to chocolate milk shakes and cheeseburgers.

These weren’t ordinary cheeseburgers; the cooks