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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

With Basic Training over and done, I was on my way to Biloxi, Mississippi to Keesler Air Force Base to attend Electronics training. The school at Keesler was the biggest one in the Air Force and, as it turned out, this was where I would spend the next 4 years. You lived in barracks, just like in basic, except now we had separate rooms that we shared with a roommate. The inspections continued, however, and everything was still military.

Once a month on a Saturday morning, we would all gather on the tarmac of the air field and have what was called a “parade”. It just meant we all got into formation and marched around a little and showed off for the officers. It was actually kind of fun. As long as you followed the rules, the Air Force wasn’t half bad. It was when you didn’t want to go with the program that you had trouble. Nobody cared about your opinion of anything. You did what you were told or else you suffered.

We went to class 6 hours a day and then used the rest of the day to study or do details, like KP (Kitchen Police) which is like you see in the movies. You peel potatoes or wash dishes or mop floors or do some other job that needs to be done. You got KP about once a month for a couple hours, so it wasn’t really that bad. There were so many students on the base, that the work was divided among several thousand people.

I saw a lot of movies while at Keesler, both as a student and later. There was a theater in Biloxi that played three Sci-Fi movies every Saturday afternoon. Since I basically had no life – there were practically no girls on the base, I went to the movies every Saturday. I have seen just about every Sci-Fi or monster movie made before 1950. Surprisingly, I am still a fan.

Sometimes we tried to get a date with one of the town girls, but they saw so many airmen that you had to be something really special to attract a local girl. I was anything but special and so spent most of my Air Force career just hanging around with the other guys.

I took classes in something called “Airborne Navigational Equipment Repair”. What that meant was every aircraft that flew had equipment on it which helped the pilot know where to go. Navigational Equipment. It’s very sophisticated now, but in the 60’s it’s was still pretty basic. We thought it was cool at the time, though. I took classes in something called “Omni” and another piece of equipment called “TACAN”. These were acronyms. TACAN stands for TACtical Air Navigation and you can look it up on Wikipedia if you want to know more. “Omni” didn’t really stand for anything, but it implied that it could pick up a signal from any direction.

At any rate, the planes (jets) carried this equipment and every now and then it would break down. Someone had to fix it and that was what I was learning to do. It was pretty cool. I enjoyed it a lot. I learned a lot about electronics and I learned how this equipment worked and how to fix it when it didn’t. The class lasted about 9 months.

More tomorrow…

Dad