A Special Day

Image via Wikipedia

This is a very special day in my life. So, I will depart from the distant, distant past and relate a story from the mere distant past when Richard Milhouse Nixon was president, Viet Nam was raging and I was 20 years old. On this day, forty years ago, Pat and I got in my little dark blue Plymouth Valiant at 4 o'clock in the morning and drove to Charlotte North Carolina to the Military Induction Center. Pat had to leave me at the door and go somewhere and do something - I have no idea what - while I was being injected, inspected, detected, infected, neglected and selected. She was about 4 months pregnant at the time.

Sometime in the afternoon we were allowed to go outside to our families. Pat and I spent our last hour together before I left, sitting on the curb outside the building. About dark, we were herded onto a bus and thence to an airport and onto an airplane (my first ride) and shipped off to San Antonio Texas. We arrived at about 11 o'clock at night and were bussed to a sheltered area on base (Lackland AFB) where we waited until about one in the morning for everyone to arrive. Then it was off to the barracks where we were told to sleep. Fifteen minutes later we were told to get up and get outside - someone had forgotten that all incoming servicemen had to be fed within a couple of hours of arrival. We walked to a chow hall where I had my first military meal, found out what SOS looked and tasted like and then got back to bed by 3 or so. At 5:30 we got back up and went back to the chow hall for more food and then we were bussed to Medina Air Force Station. (Medina was the site of the first sizable nuclear accident in the Air Force. In 1959 a "nuke" was being disassembled there and yeilded with approximately the force of 60 tons of TNT. According to locals, it was "pretty loud". According to the Air Force it was "non-nuclear." One very large concrete bunker disappeared.

At Medina we were ushered into a huge blue auditorium where we started finding out just what the hell was going to happen to us. I was still numb and relatively dumb at that point and decided to wait and see. Around 1000 hours (note that I was now on 24 hour time and "o'clocks" were a thing of the past) we were herded into groups and marched down to our barracks, assigned to our rooms and informed that since it was now the Fourth of July we had the rest of the day off. At some point I had a couple of minutes to myself without the luxury of being yelled at and I took that time to ask, "What have you gotten yourself into this time????"

The ride had been a mere "didibop" until that day!