Long Beach

   We arrived in Long Beach on Halloween 1064. The moment I stepped off of the ship I though I like this place. I want to stay here. We had bought a new 1964 Turbocharged Corvair Monza Spyder Convertible in Seattle. It was a fantastic car. To this day, I still love that car. In December, I went out and bought a Christmas tree. I hauled it to the car and thought, oh shit, the trunk is in the front of the car. I then thought here I am in California in the middle of December and it's 72 degrees outside. So I dropped the top and stuck the tree in the back seat. I love California.

   One of the first things we did after arriving in Long Beach was to take on a load of 39 missiles which took most of the day. When loaded, some sandcrab handed me an IBM punch card and told me to sign here. On the card was the description Missile Unit of issue Each quantity of 39 and on the upper right hand corner it said 5.7M. Nothing else. Now by now I was familiar with these cards but normally it would show the cost $3.95, or whatever. I asked the sand crab what the hell the M stood for and he said "Million". Now this was 1964 and that was a hell of a lot of money and I was only 21 years old at the time but what the hell, I just made the largest purchase of my  life. Now that we had some toys to play with, we went playing. I was the only guy in the Missile Division that had mad a missile shot so they wanted me upstairs in the missile control radar room to man the console. Everything went along just fine until the end of the shot. The warheads on the missiles were the continuous rod type. The most effective "hit" is actually a four of five foot pass by.  This gives the rod bundle a bit of time to start forming its buzz saw shape. The missile passed by the target but the drone came to a full stop from 375 knots to zero all at once and just hoovered there. I grabbed a pair of binoculars and went out on what we called "the patio" a small weather  deck just outside the radar room. The director was not moving at all and still tracking the target. I sighted up to where the director was pointing and said oh. The Missile Officer was standing next to me and asked what I meant by oh. I passed him the binocs and he looked up and said oh. A chief was standing next to him and grabbed the binocs looked up and said oh and so it went down the line. The jet propelled drones that they use as  targets aren't cheap so they pop a parachute for recovery. The bird apparently made skin to skin contact with the deone and knocked the chute loose and with no weight on it, it just floated around way up in the air.
   After that we spent time off of San Clemente Island learning the intricacies of the 5"/54 naval gun and it's associated fire control system.
   We spent quite a bit of time operating out of San Diego learning