Bert, the Army Years

   After my divorce, I joined the U.S. Army, on September 20th, 1984 (under the Delayed Entry program). I reported for Basic Training at Ft. Leonard Wood in Missouri on December 4th, 1984.

    After three months of frozen limbs, raw throats, sore muscles and various other indignities visited upon myself (not the least of which being Army food) and my fellow trainees, I graduated Basic and reported to Monterey, California to take a year long Basic Russian Language course at the Defense Language Institute. After graduating DLI, there was a very unpleasant three months of additional training at Goodfellow Air Force Base in San Angelo, Texas, before getting orders to go to West Germany for a two year tour of duty. I have greatly expanded this 'memoir' into a small book with pictures, which I am in the middle of writing. This page is just a brief synopsis of those times.

    The Defense Language Institute was an incredible time. While classes were tough (6 hours a day, 5 days a week, with at least 3 hours of homework per night, for a total of 47 weeks of classes), the area was and is beautiful and I will always remember it fondly; beach parties in Carmel, getting a beer served to me by Clint Eastwood in his "Boar's Head Inn", being trapped in a female soldier's wall locker for 4 hours while a Health and Welfare Inspection was being carried out (I wasn't supposed to be in her room in the first place)... One of those memories is of painting two large murals for the 1985 Army Birthday Ball, one of which is shown here....
After graduating the Defense Language Institute with a 92% GPA, it was on to Goodfellow Air Force Base in Texas. After the wonderfully happy time I had in Monterey (classwork notwithstanding), Goodfellow was a rude change from the more laid back DLI. While both schools were tough (our training cycle started with something like 148 persons. 38 graduated from the classified training at Goodfellow), Goodfellow seemed to be about trying to run you out of the Army, and there were times where, if I could have, I would have left the service.

The two ladies pictured here are, on the left, Kelly, and next to her is Stephanie. They were roommates at DLI. Stephanie didn't graduate with us that day at Goodfellow. We were linguists and our training was finished. She was an Intelligence analyst and had a little more training to perform before being stationed in Germany (another part, unfortunately) herself. Kelly was a Reservist who had been activated to fulltime for the training at DLI and Goodfellow. After graduation, she went home to Pennsylvania and I went to New Hampshire for a short leave before going on to Germany. It was Stephanie's locker I had been locked into, to avoid being caught having been with Kelly with the door closed. This was a major no-no in the Army, but it was tough to enforce when you have co-ed barracks. However, being caught did carry repercussions, so I wanted to avoid that.... Kelly and I spent most of our free time together in Monterey, we were very close. Goodfellow was more stressful for both us and we started realizing that unless she was going to move to Germany, we evenutally were going to have to say goodbye to each other. She wasn't very enthused about moving (she is, or was, a High School French teacher) and while she did make the trip to visit her sister who was also in the Army and also stationed in Germany, I got to see her myself for a brief period over Thanksgiving weekend, 1987. While not the greatest, most passionate get together in the history of romance, we did get to see Paris together over that weekend.

    Be that as it may, after a couple weeks leave in New Hampshire, I was flown to Germany to serve my country in the 103rd Military Intelligence Battalion, subordinate to the 3rd Infantry Division, Wurzburg, Bavaria in September 1986. A few months later, I went on my first Field Training Exercise. Don't let anyone tell you northern Germany isn't cold! This is a picture of my barracks mate, Ron, as he is setting up our BIVOUAC site. This was in September, and the fog would roll in in the mornings and freeze on the tree branches. Very cold indeed. At one point, on another FTX, we were told it got down to about 60 below zero. I liked Germany, but I couldn't wait to get back to Arizona!
    Ron and I were in First Squad, led by SSG Strock, a fantastic linguist and soldier. We worked with mobile Intelligence gathering platforms, such as the truck mounted TRQ-32 V1, and later the tracked-vehicle mounted Trailblazer Platform. The TRQ was a good receiver, but the Trailblazer was deadly accurate and at the time, one of the most powerful intelligence gathering systems available. Besides that, it was HUGE...
    I later inherited First Squad when SSG Strock was rotated back to a US duty station, and later on, before I myself was transferred to Savannah, GA. and the 224th MI Battalion, I was sent on several TDYs (sort of like out of Unit training) to instruct other MI units in Germany how to get more out of their Trailblazers. I tell you, if I could have done that forevermore, I would have stayed in the service until retirement. Interspersed with all that training in other units, I was in many "Dog and Pony" shows, static displays of our Intel equipment to touring French and British military Allies, Command Post Exercises (CPXs - otherwise known as war games), I was the Unit Postmaster, I was on the Equal Opportunity Council for our Unit, and also on the Unit Fund Council. I did original artwork for my Unit and at one point, was asked to join the art department at Division HQ, which my Battalion Commander strictly forbad.

However, even these times had to end eventually. I was transferred to the 224th MI Battalion in Savannah, Georgia for my last year in the service. I was put in charge of a remote antenna intelligence gathering system which was just constructed for our purposes, one of only three in the U.S. Our first month of operations, I was told we got a call from the NSA. They wanted to know what the heck we were doing down in GA? The amount and quality of Intel we were providing was 1600 times what the other two stations were producing. So I had units at Ft. Polk and Ft. Benning very upset with me... but this was by and large a rougher period for me. I had received orders in Germany to be stationed at Ft. Huachuca in Arizona, which would have been perfect, as I was planning on getting out of the Army and returning to Arizona anyway. However, three days before I was to fly out of Germany, those orders were rescinded and I was issued new orders to Savannah. The 224th was always more of a Spanish mission than a Russian one, but at least they had diverted a couple dozen other Russian linguists (most straight out of DLI), so I wasn't totally alone there. We had a good time, especially in the Blues bars on River Street.
    I was stationed in Savannah with a large detachment of U.S. Rangers as well. My barracks were on the flight line, so I was able to watch C130s carrying Rangers down to kick Noriega's ass. The planes were leaving every 7 minutes or so. Of course, now Noriega is in prison in Miami, where supposedly he has discovered Jesus. I would imagine it's pretty easy to find a lot of people in a Miami prison named Jesus, so I don't guess that was too hard for Noriega to accomplish.