At the end of the class, this official looking guy came into our class and announced that Keesler needed instructors and would any of us like to volunteer to stay there in Biloxi and become an instructor. Well, I thought about it and thought about how I could get sent anywhere, like Greenland or Vietnam. This navigational equipment was usually hidden in the bowels of the airplane and to remove it and fix it, you had to crawl into the airplane and find it and unbolt it and drag it out. Sometimes you had to do this in sub-zero weather or 110 degree heat.
Or I could stay in Biloxi and work in an air-conditioned building teaching other airmen how to fix the stuff and have a reasonably comfortable 3 years in the service. Seemed like a no-brainer to me and so I volunteered. Turned out, it was a great decision. I have never done anything I have enjoyed more than those 3 years of teaching. I was now considered “Permanent Party” which meant I was assigned to the base and not just temporary like the students were. Also, there were 10,000 students to do all the work and so the instructors hardly ever had to do anything except teach. I never did KP again. I did have to march in a parade once in a while, but that was easy.
I moved into a barracks where we had nice rooms that we shared with another guy. My roommate was John Bachman for most of the time I spent there. He and I became good friends and I kept in touch with him after we were discharged for a couple years. After I got married, I lost touch. The last I heard he was in the Boston area, but that was about 1967.
We taught classes that lasted about 3-6 weeks. Most of the time, we taught men that were in the Air Force and were American like me in that they were going through the class to learn how to fix the equipment. Now and then we got a class from Vietnam or Korea. We had an agreement with these other countries to teach them so they could work on their own planes. It was a real challenge communicating with these guys. Some knew a lot of English and some didn’t know much at all. Since I didn’t speak Korean or Vietnamese, I’ll never know just how much they learned. I’m glad I didn’t have to fly the planes that they fixed when they got home. Some of the most interesting people I have ever met were from those countries. One Korean boy gave me a small pair of plastic shoes when he graduated. They were the type of thing one might buy in a tourist shop in Korea, but I loved them. I kept them for many years until they literally fell apart and I had to throw them away. Losing them was like losing a part of my past.
We taught in a huge concrete block-like building that had no windows. So, if you turned off the lights in the classroom, it was utterly black with no light at all. In one class I remember, I had a student who was always falling asleep. I have to admit, I was a fairly boring teacher. Anyway, he left one day to go to the bathroom and the rest of the class decided to play a trick on him. We waited until he fell asleep and then someone turned off the lights in the classroom. I went on talking like nothing had happened. Then I asked him a question. Hearing his name woke him up and he started screaming he was blind. Everybody laughed and laughed. It was a mean trick, but he never fell asleep again.
Tomorrow..Miscellaneous Memories of the Military
Dad