Welcome to Beaufort

I tutored my niece, Alex, and got her to post on my forum. She also started her own blog last night. I will link it when I have the address handy. Tennis is progressing fine. Like I stated before it's me and two older women. So I get a work out as they take turns hitting against me :P

Beaufort -- Part 1:

After C School I took some leave, it just happened to fall on the christmas time of year. So this puts us at Christmas 1989. I believe I didn't have to show up to my new duty station till mid January. By this time my brother was enjoying his time in boot camp (sucker). :) He shipped off a week or so before his 18th birthday in October. My parents didn't / couldn't make that same trip to San Diego twice so he got the short end of the stick there. My sister was living in Petoskey at the time, her husband was a recruiter in that city. He was a recruiter before I went in as I mentioned his infamous call to my drill instructors earlier. By this time she had two kids, Danielle and Alex.

I believe my entry to Beaufort was through Savannah, Georgia's airport. I took a cab to the base some 35 miles away. I didn't own a car at the time so this was my only option. I checked in at various spots and finally made my way to the barracks I would end up in. I was assigned to a room with a Hispanic guy who wasn't in town at the time. He was off on his wedding / honeymoon and I never really spent any time with him. So in a sense I was lucky to not have a roommate for the first time in the corps. The next morning I had to rush to the cafeteria (chow hall) and get back to the barracks in the hopes of catching a ride to work. I had no idea where it was... etc. I arrived at the Electric Shop that morning. I noticed that I was the only "newbie" on board. The nearest guy to my age was Darren Sproal (Sp?) another Lcpl. But he was a terminal Lcpl, meaning he was arriving at the end of his contract and would remain a Lcpl. I guess I'll explain why. The USMC had this dumb idea to guarentee individuals Cpl to people. Well congress regulates how many Cpls, Sgt etc that can be in the corps. This meant that everyone that didn't have this guarantee was screwed because of the backlog it created. This would affect my promotions as well, but not to the extreme it did for Darren.

Darren was a blond guy from California. He reminded me of the surfer type. He kept his hair as long as he could get away with. He took care of me those first few months. I even went out a few times to the clubs in Savannah with him. He had a nice truck, the bed had a cab over it and was carpetted.

I wouldn't get to know most of these guys very well as most of them were ending their time in the corp. The exception was Cpl Foss. Foss was another blonde guy with blue eyes and looked like a cookie cutter Aryan guy. He was a product of a Marine Family and took me under his wing during the first few months. After I knew what I was doing we didn't speak much.

I'm not sure how detailed I want to get here so I'll just hit the highlights I guess. ;)

My first few months would be spent tagging along and learning various maintenance procedures. I also had to "troubleshoot" the launches that went out. This meant standing with headphones on and if the pilot had a problem you had to plug into the jet and talk to him and solve the problem... if you could. He would either ignore the problem or shut down and switch aircraft if it couldn't be solved in a timely manner.

I learned that we would have our first deployment in April of that year (1990). This deployment would be to Eglin AFB, in sunny Panama City Beach, Florida. The Air Force would be paying for our accomidations at a hotel on the beach there. At the hotel we had two people to a room but we each had our own king sized beds. The hotel had it's own bar and swimming pool. I didn't drink but that didn't stop Foss from trying to get me to. I was under aged at the time so I refused. I did spend alot of time at the pool though. The one time I did go out there I did so with Ssgt Huckabee.

Huckabee was a slightly strange guy. He was a dark haired guy, kind of skinny and wore a mustache. He was a good staff NCO and tried to get me to take a more active leadership role as the years went on.

I believe someone, possibly Huckabee, had a rental car there and took a few of us to a bar in downtown Panama City Beach. Nothing to exciting to tell just was my first unexiting venture off the beaten track... if you will.

When the deployment was over we had another new Marine waiting for us. Rob Reynolds was his name. He was a tall skinny guy with dark hair. I had to rub it in about the great deployment he just missed. This also was the time I got to work on my first "gripe" from start to finish. It was the changing of the F/A-18 strain guages. I even started to tutor Reynolds in working on the jet. {I'm a quick learner :) }

That's enough for part I.... see you next installment.