Military
Experiences
Ted Jenning’s posting on November 25:
How often I recall NROTC and destroyer duty - almost always positive memories,
whether marching with "Victory at Sea" blaring from Hitchcock or
steaming east from Spain to Lebanon in '58 - at top speed as soon as Dick Mann
had lit off the 3rd and 4th boilers.
Which of us on the Listserv did what kind of duty? Has it
affected our reaction to the various "peace at any price" movements
over the years? Do we look back on that service as "wasted time"? How
about the courses we might have taken if it weren't for the Military Science
requirements?
Maybe my nostalgia is colored by the consideration that I
probably wouldn't have met Sally if I hadn't had to spend a particular weekend
in Boston submitting to a special "can you really hear anything?"
physical.
Any vivid memories out
there? Ted J
Bob Adelizzi responded:
In response to Ted's comments regarding the military, the four years I spent in
the Marine Corps were well worth the time. I made many lifetime friends,
including Bill Cosby who was a 19 year old
Navy Corpsman assigned as our trainer
on the Quantico Marine Corps football team I played for. Fortunately, I got
assigned to San Diego where I met my wife, Tommi. In San Diego, I had the
opportunity to command a company of drill instructors at the Marine Corps
recruit training command at a time when recruit training and the drill
instructors were under intense scrutiny after the unfortunate "McKean
incident" at Perris Island. What a terrific group of dedicated
men. It was absolutely amazing to see them transform a "herd"
of frightened and often dysfunctional kids into a sharp, proud and
confident fighting unit in 12 short weeks. Tough love does work. I
successfully defended so many drill instructors accused of maltreatment and
other related offenses that I began to think I was Perry Mason and eventually
became a lawyer. Not bad for four years of your life--serve your country
in a proud and distinguished organization, meet many terrific people, including
the woman to share your life, learn many valuable life lessons and find a
career path. Much to be thankful for.
Bob
From John Lange:
Ted: What a delightful surprise. I was steaming to Lebanon at the
same time in 1958 as ASW officer on the destroyer USS Ingraham (DD694).
What ship were you on?
As a regular viewer at the fraternity house of the
Victory At Sea television series, I hummed the theme all the way through OCS in
Newport June-Nov 1957 and was not disappointed by my 3 years on the
Ingraham. It was great fun; I do not regret it and -- while sorry to have
been hauled away by the Kennedy Administration in the middle of graduate school
to serve again on the destroyer John Hood -- I even liked being at sea
then.
Did this change my politics? No. Did I join
the Vietnam war protest movement? Yes, when I was a VP at City Bank in 1968, I
was convinced that protest was necessary.
John
From Dick Duncan:
Looking back, I think I wasn’t really ready to make it sol through the
world when I graduated from Dartmouth.
But I was, when I got out of the Navy three years later.
I had no experience comparable to being Officer of the
Deck of a destroyer in bad weather, changing station and reorienting the screen
in a carrier task force in the Sixth Fleet at full speed in the wee hours of
the morning, then going straight to fueling stations for an hour of being drenched by green water
breaking over the 01 level. One or two
of those and I recall actually inspecting myself for gray hair at 22. Once in one of those maneuvers at dawn the
ship ahead and to the right of us jammed its rudder at full turn in heavy
seas. I turned right with full rudder
to avoid her and watched the captain go flying from his chair and across the
bridge, while all the breakfast dishes crashed to the deck in the galley below. The CO forgave me; the cooks did not.
We put a Soviet sub to the bottom off Norway and tried to
bang on its hull with a grappling hook.
We patrolled just a few hundred yards off Haiti for a week to protect
PapaDoc Duvalier from a Castro invasion.
We failed – Fidel’s guys got ashore elsewhere - I learned several years
later when I was covering Haiti for TIME – but his Ton-ton mahouts butchered
them on the spot. Dick Duncan
From Randy Aires;
Ted, Dick and Bob: Thanks for those memories of our destroyers plowing through
those North Atlantic storms in November 1957. I think there was more
seasickness than flu on our ship, but what did we know (or care, for that
matter, when you are that sick). I well remember the Firth of Clyde and expect
to get back to that area next June. I'll look for your castle. Ted,
our ship was in Southampton, England and I was in London during that weekend
when Sputnik took the world by surprise. I'll never forget it,
particularly the reaction of the Brits. I bought a Harris tweed sports
coat that weekend which still hangs in my closet. The fit isn't quite
what it used to be, but I can't give it up. It's my Sputnik coat.
I think quite a few of our NROTC classmates wound up on
destroyers. My ship, the HUGH PURVIS (DD 709), was in the same squadron
with Dick Duncan's destroyer for at least part of the time you served on that
ship, Dick. By the way, I'm sure that that ship that made you take a hard
right turn was not ours. I have a lot of great memories from my time in
the Navy, and I agree that the leadership of men and responsibility aboard the
ship increased my maturity level greatly.
In early August 1958 our ship was in Bremerhaven, Germany
when we received word that our ship was assigned to proceed to Lebanon (remember
the summer 1958 Lebanon crisis?) That news affected me in two ways.
First, my leave to go to Brussels for the World's Fair for a few days was
cancelled. Second, my wedding date of August 12 in Carlisle, PA was in
jeopardy. The ship was due back in the U. S. on August 8 before the
Lebanon crisis came along. When I left the U. S. in early June right
after Ginny graduated from Skidmore, we agreed that the wedding would be a
small family affair. But during the two months on the high seas and in
European ports the wedding had turned into a large church affair with 400
invited guests. Panic set in on both sides of the Atlantic.
Fortunately, just as we were preparing to head for Lebanon, the U.S. Navy
decided that our ship, with midshipmen aboard, was not going to be part of that
mission. Our ship got back to the U.S. (Boston) a day late but three days
before the wedding and Ginny met me in Boston. I had blood tests taken at
the U.S. Army Hospital in Bremen. Without them I would have missed the PA
deadline and the wedding would have been delayed. Close call. Randy
Dick Duncan Responded:
Good stuff, Randy. Seems we all remember that mad dash to participate in the
"invasion" of Lebanon. In the eighties I had a chance to talk to some
Lebanese about that operation, and they recalled with mixed mirth and respect
the sight of combat-ready marines pounding up out of the surf, then wending
their way through girls in Bikinis to the head of the beach.
I'm pretty sure it was the Dickson that had the rudder locked
left. They got it centered pretty quickly by hand, but not before doing
something close to a 360. Dick
From Bob Copeland:
For the record, our move into Lebanon was called "Operation Blue
Bat". I can remember at least one occasion in which we sailed, with
little change in course, in a circle for close to thirty days (out of sight of
land). We stopped once so that everyone who wanted could jump over the
side for swim call, but that was about all other than replenishment and
refueling activities. When we left the Med I had to get rid of all our
various classified publications that no other ship wanted (we were due to go
out of commission) and spent several unpleasant days at sea burning the
stuff. Probably much of it shouldn't have been classified, though there
were a few interesting things such as the pubs on using atomic shells in our
8" guns. Probably the only ones the Navy ever developed, at least
operationally. Not that we ever had any of the shells on board.
Oh, one other occasion strikes my memory. In the
fall of 1957 or that winter the Asiatic flu threatened the fleet so they
decided to give us all shots. None of this business of refusing to take
shots in those days. At any rate, more than 2/3rds of the crew was
knocked out of action for several days. We kept sailing, but it is lucky
that we didn't have to do anything very serious.
Dick Duncan again:
Bob, I remember that flu epidemic of the fall of 1957. It struck us as we
headed across the North Atlantic in November for Operation Strikeback, one of
those maxi exercises the admirals designed to prove the Navy could strike
the Soviets with atomic-capable bombers as well as the Air Force could,
meanwhile blocking the Iceland-Faroes gap so the enemy subs couldn't get
through, etc. etc.
There was a constant succession of storms. Aircraft were
swept off carrier elevators. A couple of sailors were swept from their ships
and lost. Then an atomic sub - I think
it was the Nautilus - humiliated all of us destroyer types, signalling a
whole new era in sea warfare at the same time, by catching the fleet from
behind, something no sub was supposed to do, and steaming through the open part
of the screen, merrily firing off yellow flares to simulate sinking ships. Dick
From Dick Bugbee
Dick Duncan referred to a terrific storm in the fall of 1957. USS Manley
(DD940), the destroyer I joined in July 58 (after Thayer School), was caught in
that storm, nearly ran out fuel, and was hit by a huge rogue wave in the dead
of night. The wave crushed in the port side of the main deck
superstructure, ripping the galley stove from the deck. The stove crushed
and killed two sailors. The Officer of the Deck was flipped from the
bridge onto the awning above it. Luckily he was not swept overboard.
Manley limped back to Norfolk, was repaired and then went on a
Misdshipman cruise in Summer 58 where I joined it in Kiel, Germany. I am truly
enjoying hearing service remembrances for our classmates. Keep them
coming. Regards, Dick
Ted Jennings adds
I was on the (Sadie) Hawkins - "Daily News," I recall - DDR873. We
had the height-finder radar instead of torpedo tubes, and steamed (usually) out
in front of those big circular formations doing early-warning work. Flatterers
called us the vanguard; we thought of ourselves as fringe players.
That huge operation off Norway - I couldn't be
commissioned until the end of summer '57, which meant Sally and I couldn't
marry until August. Unfortunately, that meant I had to go to sea three days
after our wedding (remember that occasion, in Connecticut, Herb?). But the
skipper gave me leave for a honeymoon after we got back. Our officer complement
was at about 50% - we stood watch and watch most of the time.
My favorite incident involved our exec/ navigator. One
night he shot nine stars, so when he was through he'd be really sure where we
were. Lo, he got three very nice, but separate, fixes. They weren't close
together. After plotting all three on the big chart of the whole North
Atlantic, he covered all three with the palm of his hand, picked the central
spot equidistant from all of them, muttered the phrase (first time I'd heard
it) "Close enough for government work," and reported the compromise
as our position.
It wouldn't have mattered much - we were, after all,
supposed to be off by ourselves watching for bogies coming from the North Pole
or Murmansk or wherever - except that the Wisconsin was trying to find us to
refuel us. Between not knowing where we were, and trying to pretend that we did
know, and to make connections via encrypted messages with their inevitable
delays, there were a few moments of wondering what we'd do if we ran out of
bunker C. Ted
Bruce Sloan Tells His Story:
I left Dartmouth after our sophomore year and was drafted a few months later. I
had expected to get drafted into the Army, but did not know until I showed up
at the induction center that the Navy was drafting that month. But I was glad
to get into the Navy and hoped that I would see some of the world.
Alas! For most of that time I was a seaman apprentice in
the gunnery office on the aircraft carrier Valley Forge (CVS 45) in Norfolk,
VA, which was being outfitted. We then spent a few on short (2-3 days)
shakedown cruises. A few weeks before we were scheduled for a Med cruise I was
transferred to a guided missile destroyer, the USS Gyatt (DDG 712) which was
being retrofitted in the Boston Naval Shipyard to carry missiles.
My time on the Gyatt was primarily spent on mess cooking,
which meant washing dishes 12 hours a day. When renovations were complete, we
spent several months in Newport, RI on picket duty, cruising the Atlantic for a
week and then in port for a week. A few weeks before the Gyatt was scheduled to
go on a Med cruise I received an early discharge because my two years would run
out in the middle of the cruise. (I was willing to extend my enlistment for a
few months to complete the Med cruise, but at that time the Navy was cutting
back on personnel and most draftees were getting out early.)
So I returned to Dartmouth, majored in geology, finished
my degree, and lived happily ever after.
Bruce
Bob Marchant talks about his ‘white hat experiences:
To Bruce Sloan: My apologies! Prior
to your note, I only knew of one other white hat in our class, Quig Porter. The
situation becomes somewhat confusing because Quig Porter and I were originally
55's who later attached ourselves to the class of '57. From what I gather from
your mail you were a '57 who graduated at a later date but kept the '57 class.
I don't blame you. It was a great class and that is why Quig and I took the
mantle of the class of '57.
I don't know whether I was typical or not, but I had a
tremendous respect for the young ensigns with whom I served. I was aboard the
USS Hornet as a flight deck photographer. The job was sort of a breeze and gave
me a great deal of time to ponder my fate and the mysteries of life. My
strongest recollection, probably, was of the tremendous responsibilities that
were heaped on those young guys. You have to realize that those were guys who
were just a couple of years older than I. Guys like Humpie, or Sparrow who I
knew as my fraternity brothers at Dartmouth were now officers of the deck of a
major aircraft carrier. I can relate to many of your stories, if only because I
knew that I wasn't ready for that kind of responsibility. I saw that you all
were handling it somehow. Let me take a minute to tell a short story by way of
amplification.
Most of us who had grown up to expect to go to a college
like Dartmouth and had actually had gotten there were used to a certain respect
for what we had accomplished at that young age. Once you put on that little
white hat you were branded as something else. Who you were before and what you
had accomplished was entirely wiped out. The world, your officers, your petty
officers, all branded you as an air-headed screw up. This was my impression of
how we were looked at during that time at least. Example: I was stationed at
the Naval Air Training Facility at Norman Oklahoma on the campus of the
University of Oklahoma. The Captain gave us a stern lecture on the kind of
representatives we were of the US Navy. We went out with the worst kind of
women. We spent all our liberty time in dives. Our money went not to anything
that would enrich our lives but to crap games cheap gifts for loose women. That
was only a day or two after I was not allowed into a public symphony concert at
the University of Oklahoma because of my uniform. No coed would even talk to me
over a cup of coffee (perhaps that was more personal than a view of the uniform).
It was about that time that I said if that is what the world thinks of us with
the white hats then I am free to be one of them and not give it another
thought. After that I had a great time in the Navy. I figured Norfolk was
Norfolk and Hanover was Hanover and it worked for me. There are those who would
say that I on my return to Dartmouth I carried my Norfolk days over to my
Hanover days. Any recollections confirming that are total
"misremembrances."
Just as you DD ensigns learned responsibility in the Navy,
I learned humility. I learned that my fellow man, while maybe not as advantaged
as I, was a pretty good guy and a lot of fun. Bob Marchant USNR
Bob Copeland comments:
Thanks for sharing some of your memories of the Navy. Now that I reflect
on it a little, life was not all skittles and beer. The Navy was trying
for the first time to overcome its shares of some of society's problems and not
doing a very good job.
Discrimination against blacks was blatant and bad.
I did finally meet (and room with) a black officer, but they were very scarce
and not well treated by the predominantly southern senior officers. He
told me once that they had deliberately not assigned him to a destroyer because
there would no place to hide him there. He could be swept under a rug on
a large cruiser. They tried to do that to him, but he was so much better
than some other junior officers that he became well respected. Black
enlisted men had the best chance of promotion as mess stewards. The only
Asiatics I saw were Filipino mess stewards.
The Navy had a simple solution for anyone even suspected
of homosexual tendencies. Out of the navy as fast as possible with as bad
a blight on his record as could be given. One young seaman who worked
with me (he had risen to radioman 2nd in three years) was the best we
had. He got drunk one night and made a pass at another sailor and was
sent back to the US before morning. What a waste! Of course, we had no
women on board as they now do.
All of this has nothing to do with the fact that the Navy
was both very good for me and to me personally. It was struggling with
society's ills and, in a sense, prepared me somewhat for the conflicts and
moral compromises I would be faced with wherever I worked.
Bob C
Bob Shirley relates his medical fun!
Mates-I think that I had the most fun in the USN. Dean Syvertsen
enrolled all of us at DMS in the Ensign 1995 plan so that we could be deferred
until we finished specialty training before going active with the
service. Tom Hall was not acceptable to the Navy because he had suffered
22 fractures (if you ever watched him play rugby you could tell why). So
he went into the Air Force.
After being deferred each year from 1958 on to finish
residency, I finally went active duty in 1966. 23 ob-gyns were activated
that year (22 draftees and one reservist), and 22 went to Nam and one was
assigned to the USNaval Hospital Annapolis. Thank the Lord for Dean
Syvertsen!
-One day of sea duty, with the Gold Star mothers as we sailed into the Chesapeake
Bay to lay wreaths on the water.
-Chief Petty Officer's wife who came in with a battleship gray diaphragm which
she had been using for 14 years. When asked why she didn't get a new one
sooner, she said that he was away half the time on sea duty.
-Playing first base and pitching for the hospital softball team, bowling for
the hospital on a team with 4 captains, playing golf at the Naval Academy
GC from 6 to 8 a.m. each morning.
-Pigging-out on dirt-cheap clams and oysters often, scooping hard-shelled crabs
off the pilings of the Chesapeake Bay
-Delivering one baby a day with Ward Gypsum D'55 and Jo Johnson, a Texas U.
draftee who went to school on a basketball scholarship and really beefed up the
hospital bb team.
-Being told to forget my plans to study the effects of radio energy on
spermatogensis because it was a court-martial offense to masturbate and
therefore I couldn't get any specimens. I had found a number of
radiomen's wives unable to get pregnant, who had none, bad, or poor sperm in
their cervix when they should have been active and perky.
-Hauling our kids out of the local county school system when the principal told
me that Tom was getting " a right smart lot of readin'" in the school
curriculum and putting them in the Naval Academy Primary School.
-Profoundly sad messages about the Corpsmen whom we had trained catching it in
Nam a few weeks after they left us.
-Prolonged 24-hour alert as a member of the hospital "Evacuation
Team" ready to help the Israelis in the 1967 War if they needed us.
They never took us off alert. All it meant to me was to get shot up with every
antigen known to epidemiology in preparation for going to the desert.
They liked us and we liked them. They offered us a
next billet in Irkutsk, Japan if I signed on to stay in the Navy. Alas,
we quit and came back to the Hub of the Universe in plenty of time to watch the
Big Dig. Wah Hoo Wah...Meatball (Dr.
Bob Shirley)
Herb Hanson remembers:
1958 - July. Escorting Marines to Beirut so they could go ashore through
the blankets of bikini-clad lovelies/seeing a white-hat sentry killed while on
forecastle watch on our companion destroyer at anchor in the Beirut harbor.
1962 - October. Receiving and decrypting the message that
put our missile submarine in a position to launch our nuclear missiles within
15 minutes. We remained in this posture longer than I like to remember. This
was made even more difficult because we really had no idea what was going on re
the Cuban crisis. Were our families all right, etc.?
1963 - April. Receiving the message, as watch officer,
operating at deep depth, that the Thresher had gone down. I, as many, had many
personal friends on that ship.
1963 - November. Coming off Polaris patrol to learn of
JFK's assassination. Most bizarre - staying at the Officer's Club in Prestwick,
Scotland, and watching the TV coverage in one room, while half the crowd was
dancing and drinking in another part of the facility.
1968 - May. Getting the initial news of the Scorpion loss
in the Azores. I became quite involved with the aftermath, while finishing my
tour as the Engineering and Materiel Officer for Sublant in New London.
And all these recollections remind me that I, and many
classmates and others, became involved in these activities to protect our
rights to live in what continues to be the greatest country in the world. Sure,
we have our challenges and our differences. Nevertheless, this wonderful forum
that Adam has created and maintains is evidence aplenty, that while people can
differ in philosophy, the exercise of actually thinking and discussing about
what has been going on has proven to be very salutary. Herb
Randy Patterson --his record 38 years in the Navy!
I, along with others, have enjoyed the remembrances of many of our classmates'
military experiences. I agree that the lack of widespread opportunities for
some sort of military or public service does a disservice to our youth today.
I owe a lot to the Navy and its "Holloway
Scholar" program which essentially paid my way through Dartmouth. I
suppose I begrudged the Naval Science courses and their restrictions on other
electives at the time, but this was offset some by the freedom allowed by the
$50 check that arrived every month, and the exotic places we were privileged to
visit each summer - Little Creek, Va, Corpus Christi, TX, Guantanamo Bay, Cuba,
and the like. I am pretty sure I would never have made college visits to Europe
as a product of a conservative Midwestern family, were it not for the
Midshipmen Cruises.
I was one of a handful of our class that stayed in
the Navy beyond the obligated two or four years (Herb Hansen, Jim Mayer, Jack
Stouffer, and a few others), and the monthly retirement check that now comes
every month is another reminder that I
made a good choice. The certainty of this retirement security enabled me
to pursue other avenues for their interest if not their reward after I left
full-time active service, and the retirement letter from SECNAV, acknowledging 38
years of Naval Service is a source of pride.
At graduation, I was pointed to being a Navy pilot, but
changes in the Navy's pipeline requirements meant that I was only in Pensacola
for a few weeks before shipping off to a troop ship in the Pacific. Never even
got IN an airplane. However, a year or so on an Amphibious Force ship (some of
the time with Randy Nord) convinced me that this was not the way to go, and I
pointed toward the Submarines.
Just a couple of the cutting edge adventures and
assignments: A tour in a diesel submarine out of Pearl Harbor, and the schools
for inertial navigation and digital computers when the best of these were still
at least refrigerator-sized led me to a new Polaris submarine, which I rode
down the ways at launching and have outlived by several years. We patrolled out
of Scotland, thankfully submerged under often horrible weather, and evaded what
we could hear of Soviet trawlers and submarines in the North Sea and Med for
four operational patrols. We
searched for two weeks for the remains of the "Thresher", using our
(then) advanced sonars. Kaye thought she was a widow when someone stopped in
the store and asked if she knew a sub
"making test dives" had been lost - JEFFERSON was also at sea
on test dives that day, and it was several hours before the Navy announced the
name of the lost ship.
I was an assistant intelligence and operations
watch officer at Pearl Harbor when we recognized the sinking of the Soviet
"Golf" sub that later became the object of the "Glomar
Explorer" retrieval, and I wrote many patrol report endorsements for the
activities described in the book "Blind Man's Bluff". As I was
never anointed for a nuclear command by Admiral Rickover (something about the
lack of a good education, I guess), diesel boats which I could command were
being decommissioned at a good rate and the path to commanding an
"Electronics Research" ship was cut off by the "Pueblo"
incident, I decided to
seek my fortunes elsewhere. Besides, my Dad had asked, "When are you going
to get a REAL job?" at some point while I juggled family and Navy
priorities
Surely I never expected to have such a story to tell when
we all nervously gathered in Blunt for our first NROTC meeting in the fall of
'53. Randy Patterson
Dick Duncan Responds:
Randy, that's a great recital of a full career. Funny how our lives intersect
at certain memory points. I think of
that Golf sub in the Pacific, and the fact that a TIME reporter in Washington
got a leak on the story, including the fact that the sub broke in half at
the surface as it was being lifted, sending all the Soviet codebooks back
to the bottom.
Shortly after I got a call from a senior person at the
CIA asking that we not print the story. I consulted my bosses, then replied
that we intended to print. Bill Colby went over my head, properly, to the
Editor in Chief, who decided to acquiesce and not print the story, because
Colby said it was essential to national security that the Soviets not know what
happened to their codebooks.
We didn't print the story. But the LA Times did five days
later. Shows how much good it is to withhold a story. Dick
Herb Roskind shares his WWII Navy Pilot heroes:
Howard Hendrickson of Edgartown, MA won the Navy Cross in WWII having sunk a
Japanese battleship in the Sea of Japan in his TBM Avenger dive-bombing through
a hail of bullets. Howard helped found the MVY EAA chapter in Martha's Vineyard
three years ago. He is the Secretary and sometime lecturer. There is a
reconstructed TBM at Quonset Naval Base, RI with his name on it for static
display. He is a living hero and is very modest about it.
Howie Ross of Chicago is still an active pilot and CFII
at the age of 82. He flew a Hellcat for 231 hours of combat in the pacific.
Three of his carriers were lost while he was in the air. Some of his planes
came back with so many holes they were thrown overboard. Howie collects WW II
war birds and shares them freely with interested friends. He let me fly his
Navy T 28 and T34. The T34 was just a supper Bonanza, but his T28 was a real
11,000 lbs 1180 HP thrill. Maybe this year we will fly his P51.
The Navy changed these men's lives and they have in
turned shared and changed other lives. Howie's great lesson is the answer to
what is important? While flying over Arizona last year he told me the secret.
TODAY IS IMPORTANT!
Herb
Randy Nord joins in:
I am enjoying this topic. Like so many others I look back on my Navy
years as a learning and maturing experience, in my case probably equal to
Dartmouth and more significant than graduate school.
Learned from this exchange that JD Lange and I were at
Newport OCS at the same time after graduation from Dartmouth, but instead of
going to a destroyer in the Atlantic as so many others did, I spent 3 years in
the amphibious Navy in the Pacific(APA-195). As Randy Patterson noted we
were shipmates for a time.
Spent a good part of our last trip to WestPac as part of
the so called Amphibious Ready Group (3-4 ships fully loaded with marines and
equipment) steaming in circles in the South China Sea as Laos and Vietnam were
heating up. Little did we know what was to come. Randy
Dave Cook comments:
As our wives will surely attest, "sea stories" of our military
experiences will never die. In my circle, wives simply hold up a hand
with extended fingers to advise the teller how many times he has told that tale
at the latest gathering. Doesn't stop us though.
Randy Patterson's closing comment in his 11/28/00 career
summary talked about the freshmen who gathered nervously in Blunt for our first
NROTC meeting in the fall of '53. The building then was known as Crosby
Hall, Blunt being the new name assigned when the building was converted to
alumni activities. A visit to Blunt today gives precious little
clue of what went on during the days of Captain Tonseth and Naval Science, when
our classes were inspired by World War II exploits, pre-GPS navigation and
obsolete guns of yore. My destroyer, the Purdy, DD734, likewise obsolete,
was scrapped within ten years of my departure in 1960. The memories, on
the other hand, will never fade, become out-dated or lose their association, in
my mind, with NROTC at Dartmouth.
Dave Cook
Al Rollins on NROTC courses:
The NROTC courses proved to be some of the most interesting and useful
courses I took at Dartmouth. I loved naval history having steeped myself
in all things related to the sea from an early age. Navigation to me was the
essence of "going to sea" with celestial navigation being the
ultimate challenge. Sadly, it's no longer even taught. It proved to
be very useful background material when I took surveying in my graduate forestry
program. Naval engineering has provided me with a great background for
many of things involved in physical plant management and construction and the
same can be said of the leadership course in many other contexts as well.
Active duty as navigator on the Vesuvius (AE-15) for two
WESTPAC cruises was a challenge, but I can't really think of anything else in
my life equal to making a landfall on Marcus Island after two weeks of solo
steaming using only celestial navigation. On my first WESTPAC cruise we
were on station for 30 days during the Quemoy-Matsu incident.
I put in another 30 years in the Reserves and had great
experiences. Retirement was in 1989 just in time to miss being recalled
for Desert Storm. My Military Sealift Command unit was deployed to Naples
for Desert Storm. Al
Bob Mowbray’s edited military career (was two pages of
memories)
I believe that I may have mentioned here earlier that I consider the three most
influential experiences in my life to have been my 4 years at Dartmouth, 3 years
on active duty in the U.S. Marine Corps, and 3 years as a Peace Corps Volunteer
in Ecuador.
During the 15 months I spent in Okinawa I served as a
Forward Observer, Platoon Commander, and Battery Executive officer. While a
Battery Executive Officer, I was a member of the first Marine Battalion Landing
Team afloat in the Pacific (similar to the Med cruise for those assigned to
LeJeune) and had the privilege of serving under a Battery Commander who had
come up as an enlisted man in World War II and Korea. Captain Oliver
pretty much turned the responsibility for training and readiness of the battery
over to me. During our cruise about the western Pacific we visited Hong Kong,
Taiwan, Japan, and eventually spent about a month in the Philippines (Manilla,
and Subic Bay) because it was closer to Laos (the Indo-China trouble spot in
those days before Viet Nam) than Okinawa.
As for so many of us it was a great learning, growing,
and self discovery experience. And like Al Rollins even some of the
academic training came in useful at Yale Forestry School - meteorology at
flight school, the use of an aiming circle (similar to a surveyor's transit) to
line up the guns of an artillery battery, and map reading are a few
examples. Bob
Fred Kumm asks about service in the Intelligence
I would like to know if any classmates spent their service years working in the
intelligence business. I was the first
field agent for Field Operations Intelligence in Europe. FOI was a new spin off
of CIC in the Army Intelligence (oxymoron).
My undercover work took me from Vienna to Geneva to Copenhagen. My work was classified for thirty
years. Fred
Bob Mowbray responded that Neil Sween (a
backstroker on the swim team) went to Army Intelligence School at Fort Holabird in Baltimore.
Dick Canton on Intelligence activity:
I also attended Ft Holabird and left the CIC for FOI (Field Operations
Intelligence) and shipped to Japan. A number of classmates at Holabird went
uncover throughout the Far East. I was assigned to an overt operation in
Okinawa(U.S. Army Liaison School). It was our cover for working with Far East
personnel training to be double agents.
I think there were about 7 classmates there at the
time...Fred Serby...Bob Sproul..I was the only non officer of the 57s. Dick
Bob Porter on the CIA
I was at CIA as were a number of ''57s but the community includes NSA, DIA,
NRO, and the FBI to mention a few/ unquestionably some of us overlapped. It
would be enjoyable to know who's who. If you like to exchange a few war
stories on or off line, make yourself known if you can. Five years ago I wrote
some thought down on my CIA experience which I'm including below.
Basic Spying 101 (three pages of good copy but we had to
edit)
The CIA was a real educational experience. The class
competition was about two hundred applicants for each position. I thought
we were a very good group, but we were not gods. We were all mere human
beings, and no one was seven feet tall. There were two common
characteristics: each one had some specialty, something he had probed at depth
in his life, and we were a very self-confident group. At the end, I
had the choice of whether I would be a covert or overt employee, a "case
officer" or an analyst.
There was really "a loss of virginity and a
disillusionment with life" phase that came from parts of the
training. You learned the hard facts of life: That a witting
professional will beat an unwitting amateur almost every time; in fact, it's no
contest; that self-aggrandizement dominates all other instincts; and that the
human species doesn't have much of a claim to
integrity. I understood all this in theory before, but I had never
confronted how effectively tradecraft could be implemented by even unscrupulous
people. Further, knowing how to play the game empowers people and once
one has power, he's fighting human nature not to misuse it.
Finally, the game is relatively easy to learn, if you
have a big organization behind you. It would be easy to become a Howard
Hunt or G. Gordon Liddy. It's frightening, but make no mistake, the game
is necessary.
Like guns, information doesn't kill, people do! Bob
Bill Muldoon comments on families in the Military:
Marine officer Bob Mowbray may have been on Okinawa when a group of junior
officers petitioned the commandant, Gen Randolph McCall Pate, to let them bring
their wives to Okinawa like the other branches did. Pate's reply made Time
Magazine..."If the Marine Corps wanted you to have a wife it would have
issued you one!" Of course, the truth in retrospect is obvious. Many of us
were often moments away from being called into a fray, and families nearby were
excess baggage. Bill
Charlie White’s Fort Dix Frolics
When I started reading about my classmate’s military experience I never thought
I could bring myself to share my Ft. Dix "vacation". But here
goes: I enlisted in the Army Res. in the 6 month, 5 1/2 yr deal, and
arrived at Ft. Dix in Oct. '57. Apparently, it was the smart thing to do, for
half the Company was college graduates. We also had baseball
players-Sandy Koufax, Don Drysdale, and a journeyman pitcher named Jim
McMahan. I was drinking beer with them when it was announced that the
Brooklyn team would move to LA. DD was ecstatic, but Sandy cried over the
prospect of leaving Brooklyn.
Three weeks into it, I got pneumonia, spent next five
weeks in hospital. When I returned to my Company, being the only recruit, they
wouldn't recycle me because I was too handy: I was their fireman, keeping about
ten coal furnaces going. Also, I could type. I next went to another
basic company, repeated a bit, but got thru the 5th week basic. Got sick,
this time scarlet fever, came close to dying, four weeks in hospital.
Returned to Company, typed for a few weeks (this company was newer, had
electric heat, no fireman’s position). Went to new company, completed 5th
thru7th weeks, got infected toe. Went to hospital, operated on toe,
returned to Company with 3 days left in my 6 m. active duty. By the way,
during one of my hospital stays, Leo McKenna came in with pneumonia.
And I never finished basic training!!! Two years later
when I move to Portland, Maine, I joined a Reserve unit that had just been
changed from an MP unit to Landing boat unit. Of the 100 plus members, I was
the only one who knew Port from Starboard, but I was a typist, so I never even
saw any of their boats. They kicked me out 12 months early because I
refused to re-up for three more years.
Charlie
Gordon Haley Fort Dix Doings:
Charlie White is correct. At least half of the recruits going through basic
"training" in the Army in that 1957-58 time frame were recent college
grads avoiding the draft or avoiding a longer commitment required as an
officer candidate.
I remember a cold rainy night cradling my rifle while
crawling through the mud under live machine gun tracer bullet fire on the
training course and looking back to see one of my pretty fat and flabby platoon
buddies who was a PhD from Harvard wearing milk bottle bottom thick glasses and
struggling to keep up. The incongruity of it all made me burst out laughing
which was a bad mistake because when I got to the end of the course my sergeant
wanted to know what I thought was so *(#@!*# funny about his training
program. Of course I got to crawl back through the course three more times that
night until he believed I could seriously appreciate it. Gordon
Dick van Riper remembers
Fort Dix!
Gordy Hally's fond recollections of his days at Dix
prompt me to add a few of my own. I had joined an Army
reserve Photo Interpretation Unit in the fall of '57 and went off to Basic
Training at Dix in January of '58. Others having the same experience were Skip
Kerr and Leo Mc Kenna '56 who were in my same Company and Bob Ramsdell, my
senior year roomie at Chi Phi. He, being a cycle ahead of us already knew how
to salute. Several weeks into our training, we were hit with a major snow
storm, about a foot as I recall, and everyone had to fall out with their
entrenching tool to clear the Company Street. There we were hundreds of olive
clad troops shoveling snow a spoonful at a time to the man next to him who
shoveled it to the man next to him who---well you get the picture. The place to
be was obviously in the center of the street. After a productive morning, we
were allowed to go back into the stairwells of the barracks, where crushed
together in our long underwear, lined field jackets and the heat blasting out
of the radiators, I managed to nod off standing straight up. The next thing I
knew I had a sergeant in my face chewing me out while trying not to laugh.
Another cold day we were out on the rifle range
experiencing what Maggie's Drawers really meant and trying to stay warm by
huddling around a gasoline fired field stove. As a Squad Leader, the sergeant
put me in charge of the group huddled around our stove with the admonishment,
"van Riper, if this stove goes out, don't touch it!!" Yessss
sergeant. He no sooner left than the stove went out and after a few minutes of
cooling off I remembered my years of Boy Scout training and took charge.
"Stand back men" I said, and proceeded to kneel down and throw a
match into the bowels of our stove. KaaaBlaammm! The smoke stack blasted 20
feet into the air while Korean War combat vets dove for cover. By the time I
staggered to my feet the sergeant was in my face screaming every 4 letter word
in his extensive vocabulary while
simultaneously ripping off my squad leader stripes. When he got through with
me, the CO got in his licks while all around us the troops were convulsed with
laughter. So what's so funny about a soot covered ex squad leader? (and there were more stories) Did the Army change me? I guess you could
say that. Rip
Fred Kumm’s buddies at Dix:
As "luck" would have it one of my Fort Dix basic compatriots was
Elvis Presley. You all may remember how Elvis tried everything he could
to avoid the Army. While he was at Fort Dix his effort to avoid Military
Discipline was ballistic. The drill sergeants had their hand full with
this egomaniac. Steve Lawrence was there at the same time and the
contrast of Steve and Elvis was something to see. Steve had the proper
attitude and went with the "flow". When I saw Elvis again in
Europe he had secured the sweetest billet and spent his time "entertaining
the troops." This thread is sure bringing back many memories. Fred
Kumm
Alan Dessoff remembers:
It's been fascinating reading and am inspired to join in. I also enjoyed Dick's
baseball memories. I was student manager of the baseball team and remember
vividly a beauty of a game Dick pitched against Vermont at Burlington. It was a
night game, and I think we won 3-0. Also, Ron Judson beat the Marines at
Quantico on our '57 spring trip. He struck out the side in the ninth to close
out the game. Tony Lupien, the ex-Red Sox first baseman, was our coach. A
terrific guy!
Now, the military. Facing the draft after graduate school
ended in June 1958, I joined the District of Columbia Army National Guard, and
was shipped out to Fort Knox for basic.
Dick talks about winter in New Jersey. Ever spend a
summer in Kentucky? On the Fourth of July, an off day when our sergeants
disappeared, I discovered the air-conditioned base library and spent the whole
day there. One night, coming back from a march, we were greeted with cold
lemonade and cookies outside the mess hall. This was the Army? On other days, guys
were passing out all around me.
As with Dick, they made me a squad leader. One day, while
crawling ahead of "my men" through a thick field, I felt something
crawling up me. It was a snake. I immediately jumped up, yelled
"Charge," and led "my men" on a wild scramble through the
brush. Later, the sergeant overseeing this exercise congratulated me on my
"leadership." I never told him about the snake.
I know it could have been a lot worse, and was for so
many who served in wartime. I was fortunate to serve in peacetime. It's been 36
years since I walked out of the DC Guard Armory for the last time, but I still
hold mostly fond memories of the entire experience. Alan
And finally from Dan Pollick
Uncle Sam reached out and touched me in 1958. I left my job at GE, left
my new wife at home, and headed out for basic training. I resisted
consistent efforts to sign me up for OCS because I wanted to get out
ASAP. Ended up at the Education Center, HQ Company at the 82nd Airborne
at Fort Bragg, teaching high school. I'll never forget being alone at
Thanksgiving during basic training, which was partially offset by a tremendous
feast put on by the Army. Played artful dodger and got out of all but one
day of KP by playing regimental football during basic, then getting excused
thereafter because I was a teacher. Fascinating experiences with my
non-com classes who had to finish their GED in order to retire in grade. Hated
every day of conscription, yet there are plenty of valued memories as
well. There was a teacher shortage in public schools and I was released
early to teach high school as a civilian. Turned out it was a "blackboard
jungle" high school -- a story in itself, for another time. Dan