My Road to USS Little Rock – Part 1

There are approximately 76 million members of the baby boom generation and my parents contributed eight babies to the mix.  I was number two of eight and completed high school at age 17 in June 1969, the same year that the lottery was reinstated to help make the draft politically palatable in choosing men to fight the war in Viet Nam.  The first Viet Nam era lottery was held December 1, 1969.  My birth year made me subject to the second-year lottery held July 1, 1970. 

An uncle of mine liked to joke that his gift to nephews and nieces at high school graduation would be 5 bucks, a used suitcase, and best wishes.  Truth is that was about my net worth when I completed high school.  I knew that my parents had no money to help pay for college and borrowing money was not part of my psyche, so I never even considered a loan.  I had no interest in putting my life on hold for more than a year to find out if I would become an Army draftee, so I spent my last summer after high school at my uncle’s farm working and having fun and enlisted in the Navy that fall.  Joining the Navy was not without precedent in our family as my dad and several uncles served in the Navy during World War II, and my older brother enlisted in 1968.  The Navy seemed to be the best option for me to serve my country, see the world, and then use the GI Bill to help pay for college. 

As it turned out, my birth date received a high number in the 1970 lottery and I would not have been drafted.  Eventually, Congress refused to extend the draft authorization and it expired on July 1, 1973, although lottery drawings were held for several more years as a “just in case” congressional compromise.  The last draftee reported for duty in June 1973.  With the draft ending, Congress began the process of raising military pay and allowances to help attract enough new recruits to try and staff an all-volunteer force. 

I volunteered to join the Navy under the delayed entry program shortly after my 18th birthday, October 1969.  At that time the Navy was loading up the Great Lakes and San Diego boot camps with as many new recruits as possible to meet the growing task of supporting the war in Viet Nam.  As a native Minnesotan, I had lived with the cold, snow and ice all my life and had no interest in wintering-over at the Navy’s Siberian boot camp by the shore of Lake Michigan.  I asked my Navy recruiter to guarantee me a spot at San Diego and to delay my reporting date until after the first of the year.  This delay allowed me to celebrate Christmas and New Year’s at home before heading south for the warm and sunny climes of San Diego. 

When I signed my Navy contract in 1969, the standard volunteer enlistment was four years, while draftees were required to serve two years of active duty.  The bulk of the draftees were handed over to the Army and a select few to the Marines.  I believe the Navy and Air Force were able to recruit enough volunteers to meet their staffing goals and never received a single draftee during the Viet Nam era.

My first-ever plane ride took place January 15, 1970, when I flew at taxpayers expense from Minneapolis to San Diego to report in for boot camp.  I boarded a Western Airlines jet and did everything expected of a rookie traveler, including but not limited to: claiming the wrong seat, pushing the call button by mistake, and walking forward from coach to use the first-class bathroom.  I nervously observed that no white-collared Lutheran minister, Catholic priest, or Holy-Roller preacher of any denomination was aboard my flight; I suspected they all traveled by train so as not to tempt the wrath of God. 

Before leaving the gate, a stewardess stood in the middle of the aisle and gave a polished and animated speech on what to do in case of emergency.  I listened intently, but it seemed there wasn’t much to be done if there were an emergency except sit tight, hope for the best, pray, and get the heck out once the jet stopped, very likely in pieces.  The stewardess talked for several minutes, but she said nothing to advise first-time flyers like me about the grindings, clunks and thuds a jet makes during normal operation.  Consequently, every thump, bump and weird jet noise I heard during the flight caused me to experience every fear-of-flying phobia known to man and had me looking around for the passenger’s parachute locker!  Luckily, no oxygen masks deployed and I was relieved to survive the roller coaster landing at San Diego.  I anticipated that boot camp would be easy in comparison.

My first days at boot camp were run-of-the-mill routine.  The morning of day one, a sadist individual ran around the barracks banging the lid of a metal trashcan to wake everyone at 4 a.m.  By 5 a.m. I was sitting down to eat my first military breakfast of Sugar Pops, milk and white-bread toast.   I quickly learned to call a bed a rack, the floor a deck, the bathroom a head, and food service a mess.  My “processing in” became official when I was given my Navy service identification number with orders to memorize it within 20 seconds.  I lined up with all the new recruits and “counted off” to win an all-expense paid group membership in battalion Golf’s boot camp Company 035.

Our company commander was a tall fellow with the last name of Buechlein, a (GMGC) Gunner’s Mate Gun’s Chief.  Our new company commander quasi marched us over to the barbershop where I stood in another line to have my hair cut down to the nubs.  With my new shipmates, I was issued a sea bag full of clothes and learned to do a military inventory by holding my navy jumper in my right hand, my navy pants in my left hand, and my navy skivvies between my teeth.  The process of losing my individual identity continued when I was ordered to pack my civilian clothes and possessions into a box to be shipped home.  Our new company was assigned a barracks and each squad staked out a set of racks and lockers.  We made our beds, stored gear, and sat down to fulfill a standing order that “every recruit must write at least one letter home every week!”  The next morning after breakfast we cleaned our communal head for the first time.  Everyone was issued a toothbrush and ordered to clean the floor and make it shine!

I will post more of Part 1 in a few days.  The picture of recruits doing a uniform inventory is a photo that I scanned from my basic training album, “The Anchor.”   I would guess that the old cars in the photograph’s background indicate the publisher did not make much of an effort to update the stock pictures used in every recruit album.  In any case, the picture is a good representation of the inventory process. 

Lines were a way of life in boot camp and every recruit quickly learned not to “get out of line” because “big-brother” was always watching.  We stood in line to eat, get our shots, talk to a vocational counselor, pickup a rifle, wash our socks, buy candy, enter church, and to wait when there was nothing left to do but wait.   When not standing in line we lined up and marched around base in formation and learned the importance of right and left foot synergy.  It was like learning to line-dance military style.  A real command performance paced to the beat of a rhythmic cadence instead of music.

After one week of line-ups from sunup to sundown, my right knee hurt and I got in line at sickbay to have it checked out.  Once inside, everyone from assistant desk clerk in charge of pencils to head doctor in charge of golf balls was yelling, trying to scare malingering recruits back to work.  It was no picnic!  After an hour or so, a corpsman finally came by, wrapped my leg with an ace bandage, handed me two aspirins, and in the harshest of bedside manners yelled at me to return if my knee did not improve.  My pain continued, but I decided it was easier to deal with my swollen knee than all the yelling and intimidation, besides there was scuttlebutt that any recruit spending too much time in sickbay would be placed on “medical hold” and not be graduated with his company.  The prognosis of extending my stay in boot camp was worse than the disease!

I was wondering how I might survive eight more weeks of boot camp, when our company commander, GMGC Buechlein, announced that he required a volunteer typist.  Everyone in every branch of the military knows enough not to volunteer for anything, but I went against this innate kernel of military wisdom.  I decided that a typing job could be no worse than marching and standing on a sore knee hour after hour.  Although not immediately apparent, my boot camp survival was now guaranteed.

It was no accident that I really could type.  My mother had persuaded me to take a yearlong typing class in grade 10.  At the time I thought no 14-year-old boy should be in a class among 27 girls and only two other boys.  I survived the heckling from my classmates, however, and amazed even myself with a final test speed of 72 words per minute.  After landing the battalion yeoman job I had reason to thank my mother for my typing skills.

The first day of my new job I got up with the men in my company and went to breakfast with them, but while they were out learning the manual of arms and marching, I sat in a soft chair at a desk, answered the telephone, made coffee, read the Blue Jackets manual, typed out reports and did some filing.  I didn’t dare tell the guys what I did during the day for fear they might kill me if they found out.  They were beat at the end of the day and I had energy to burn.

Recruits were normally required to run when not part of a company formation.  I was given a yeoman’s armband and carried a permanent walking chit, which let me go most anywhere on base without having to run.  One morning, while I was crossing the grinder alone, a company commander stopped me and demanded to know why I wasn’t running.  I displayed my permanent walking chit and assumed I was free to go, but he found a fictitious discrepancy with my uniform and ordered me to hit the deck to give him a bushel of pushups as punishment.  After that, whenever I spotted anyone of authority I changed direction or slipped inside a building to avoid a confrontation.

If I recall correctly, there were 16 recruits assigned to the battalion yeoman staff.  One of the senior recruits was assigned as Recruit Chief Petty Officer (RCPO) and put in charge of the other yeomen.  The primary job of the yeomen staff was to provide courtesy replacements to takeover the job of barrack’s fire watch during the day whenever a company had a scheduled “all hands” activity.  Our most important job was to make coffee for the battalion staff.  By the end of my second week in boot camp I was beginning to feel that I had a handle on the whole Navy boot camp thing.  But I quickly lost any sense of nirvana when the battalion commander stormed through the office yelling a blue streak, proclaiming that I was the new RCPO in charge of the battalion yeoman.  I never found out what happened to the old RCPO and was probably better off not knowing.  After just two weeks in boot camp I had been promoted to the highest rank a recruit could hold in a position that had the long-term job security of a firecracker, where any little infraction or mistake could cause an instant flameout. 

After my abrupt promotion, I made sure I got to the battalion office early every morning to make the first pot of coffee.  I also took charge of the battalion reports, as I seemed to be the only yeoman with real typing skills and the math ability to correctly tally the muster numbers.  Filling in the courtesy watch bill was relatively easy as every recruit company followed a preset schedule and all I had to do was make sure someone showed up on time to take over the barrack’s fire watch. 

Like every Navy recruit, I had to attend mandatory all-hands activities with my company that included Dante’s inferno fire school, teargas training for cry-babies, square-needles immunizations, sound-off phone talking, needs-of-the-Navy career counseling, and number two pencils written tests.  I did miss out on most of the routine training classes that covered all important topics like Emily’s military etiquette, why knot, and scrub-a-dub-dub-tub ship-board hygiene.  I also missed out on rifle and small arms training, that became a bit of an issue later.  My yeoman job allowed me time to read every page of the Blue Jackets manual and I managed to attain the highest combined score on the written tests, making me the academic award winner from company 035. 

There is still more to part 1.   

Company 035 after taking the Navy’s “Dress For Success” advanced fashion course. 

I managed to stay out of trouble and keep my RCPO stripes all the way through boot camp graduation.  Several days before graduation, I typed out a ton of award certificates to be given out to select recruits at the ceremony and parade.  The pile included two for me that noted my RCPO status and academic achievement.  On graduation day I wore my dress blue uniform for the first time.  Every recruit was issued a set of white spats to cinch down the bell-bottoms of their dress blue pants during the graduation parade and it was the first and last time that I ever wore white spats.  Outside of boot camp, I think the only Navy men required to wear white spats were assigned to special honor and parade units.

A large number of parents and relatives were able to attend the graduation ceremony and I’m sure they were duly impressed.  The graduating recruit companies marched past the reviewing stands with flags flying and rifles in hand.  I had never seen such a display of military pomp and circumstance, except on the television news, and then it was always a Russian military parade of tanks, missiles and infantry troops.  I was duly impressed on this occasion with the pageantry; however, I sat in the bleachers during the marching part of the ceremony because I had not learned the hut-hut, loopy-loop routines.

The day after graduation everyone was given a weekend pass for boot camp liberty.  Many of guys had family members in town for graduation and they took off with them.  On Saturday morning I took the local bus with a few of the guys to downtown San Diego.  We had no choice but to wear our dress blues.   Our new uniforms along with spit-polished shoes, bright white hats, and skin-head haircuts instantly indentified us as freshly minted boot camp graduated refugees.  Within minutes after we got off the bus an old man came up and asked for any loose change we had.  This was my first encounter with anyone asking for money and I really did not know how to answer.  There was one fellow from California in our group and he just kept walking, telling me as he went past that “It’s your pan, man.”  I had no idea what he meant at the time, but I followed his lead and just kept walking.  Truth was the old guy probably had more money in his pockets than we did.  We spent the day enjoying our freedom as we walked, talked, laughed, smiled, and watched the local women stroll by.  The women of course were familiar with the look of new recruits and walked right past us, just like we had the old man asking for money.  Ouch!  We did manage to make it to San Diego’s Embarcadero waterfront and took a tour of the Star of India sailing ship.  There wasn’t much more to our day of liberty as we had to be back at the barracks for an early curfew.  The next day most of us stayed inside the fence and wandered around base in order to conserve our meager government grub stake for boot leave.

All in all, I found that the worst of boot camp’s physical and psychosomatic torture techniques paled when compared to delivering newspapers in blizzard winds at 20 below zero, cleaning pig barns, climbing a fully extended 40-foot extension ladder, and first-time flying phobias.  Although my request for a CTM billet had not yet been approved, I received orders to begin my Navy schools.  As a result of extending my enlistment, I was promoted to seaman apprentice on April 2, 1970.   I was allowed two weeks of boot leave and then had to report back to San Diego’s BEEP School for basic electricity and electronics training.  After demonstrating I was a competent seaman apprentice by merely staying out of trouble during boot leave, I was promoted to seaman on April 15, 1970.  (I had to work harder for my promotion to petty officer.  It took slightly more than four months before I stitched on my crow, September 4, 1970.)   

There were of course more lines to endure before I could leave boot camp on April 3, 1970.  I stood in line to turn in my rifle, blanket, sheets, pillowcase, and set of white spats.  There was a general lack of interest when I tried to turn in my yeoman armband and permanent walking chit, so I kept them on the off chance that my next assignment might operate under boot camp rules.  There was a line to pick up my “walking papers” that gave me permission to go on boot leave along with orders to my next duty assignment.  I lined up one final time to board a bus with a big “airport” label.  I said goodbye to the guys headed to other destinations, and to GMGC Buechlein who, like a tired, worn-out ship, was close to retirement and wasn’t leaving for anywhere.  I ran into a few of the guys over the next few years, but I never had occasion to meet Chief Buechlein again. 

I was obviously an ignorant “boot” and had a lot to learn about the Navy.  Then again, I’d only served in the Navy for less than three months and still had more than enough time to learn the ropes before walking up Little Rock’s gangplank for the first time on August 30, 1973.