Guided Missileman Schools

Albian B the Third was in my Guided Missileman A School class at Dam Neck VA. Dam Neck was pleasantly nestled between Virginia Beach and The Great Dismal Swamp. The GDS was rife with poisonous snakes and other friendly critters.

Al was from a well to do family in Pennsylvania and was way more streetwise than this young straight out of high school kid. When we all went into town on Wednesday nights and weekends, he always wore what I considered to be very fashionable clothes. He was a bit on the swishy side but was a lot of fun. One evening at the EM Club someone challenged him to a chugalug contest.  Al had said that nobody could chug beer faster them him. He sounded a bit like a blowhard so naturally someone called him on it. They both had a full pitcher of beer in their hands. Just before the start Al started hyperventilating. We all started feeling sorry for Al as they started. He picked up the pitcher and just poured it down his throat without gulping. It was a straight pour as if he was pouring the  beer down a sink.

Joe C was what we would now call a redneck from Old Town Florida. Old Town is on the shore of the Sewanee River. His father was the sheriff  of Dixie County. You can’t be more of a son of the South than that. We all called him Gator. One weekend, Gator asked me if I wanted to go snake hunting out on the big pond in the swamp. Stupid me, did I say stupid, said OK. All we had to do is go to the local hardware store in town and buy some frog gigs heads. The we put the heads on some swab handles. We checked out a rowboat from Special Services and off we went. There were trees that came out over the water and we were rowing under them. We stopped and Gator said in his slow Florida drawl “Why don’t you spear that snake right over your head?” I looked up and didn’t see any snake. I told Gator that wasn’t what I considered funny so he picked up his gig and speared a snake right over my head. Have you ever been in a small rowboat with a really pissed off venomous snake? It isn’t exactly like zoning out at a yoga camp in Big Sur. Gator calmly, calm is the best way to describe gator, picked up a big burlap bag that he brought along and flipped it into the bag. We had about six or eight slithering madder than hell poisonous snakes in the bag when Gator dropped the bag and they all tumbled looking for revenge. I jumped on a seat so as to allow our fellow voyagers their own space in the bottom of the boat. I didn’t crap my pants and I didn’t scream like a little six year old little girl but beyond that I was at a total loss as what to do next. Gator calmly snagged the monsters up and one by one flipped them back into their bag and tied a knot in the top. With the calmness of  Los Vegas professional gambler holding four jacks I said that maybe we should go back to the barracks and so we did. When we came in the back door, there was the group of New York City guys playing pinochle at a table. They asked “Where have you two been?” Gator replied that we had been snake hunting in the swamp and they asked if we had caught any. Gator replied that we had caught a few and “Do you want to see them?” These self-proclaimed big city guys said “Sure”. With that Gator dumped the whole bag of short tempered wounded poisonous snakes on their card table. I felt real proud of myself for putting my very life in Gator’s hands and keeping my cool as the whole table of big city boys screamed like six year old little girls and ran for their very lives. After the screams died down in the distance as the ran away old Cool Hand Gator calmly flipped the load of snakes as he had done an hour earlier in the rowboat. Right then and there, I decided that I was living a charmed life and that it would take more than a bag of angry vipers to kill me.

In our Guided Missileman A School we were the creme de la crème of the Navy. I arrived two weeks before our class started and the week before our class met we were informed the we would be reviewing trigonometry. About half of our class were guys straight out of boot camp the other half for one reason or another were “coming out of the fleet”. Coming out of the fleet is one of those navy things who’s words belie the real meaning. For a few guys one, or two, actually came out of the fleet. One came back from a Naval Air Station in Argentia Newfoundland.

Another was at the Naval Academy and was booted out. He ended up our class leader. After sixty years I don’t remember has name. I confided to Mr. Dropout that a review of trig sounded OK but I didn’t have the foggiest notion what trig was. He took me under his wing and told me he would “horse me up”. Which meant, at least in the Navy, coach me. I think his name was Paul and we found out why he was bounced out of the academy. He was attending Guided Missileman A School when he was accepted into the academy. After getting booted out of the academy it was “Back to the fleet”. Which in his case back to GS A School. Paul had a little drinking problem. He took the expression “drink like a sailor” to a new higher level. He missed a lot of school for being in the county jail for repeated DUIs and we never heard what happened after being booted out of A school.

On the first day of class the instructor(s) started talking about Ohm’s Law. I had thought that being a Guided Missileman meant being a highly trained mechanic. I turned to the guy sitting beside me and said “Who gives a shit about this electrical stuff?” He replied that I better start giving a shit about the electrical stuff because that’s what we’re going to be doing.

I had jumped through a lot of hoops to get there so I knuckled down. The school was six months long and before long I realized that I had a knack for this electrical stuff. By the time we graduated I was second in our class. About ten weeks into the school, we were all handed a book titled radar special circuits. We were told that this radar stuff was grueling so we should start boning up before we got into the radar phase. I started reading the book and I understood every single concept that was offered. It was like reading for pleasure.

During A School

In February 1961, we flew to LAX and attended Terrier BT3 C School at the General Dynamics plant where they were built. I graduated first in that class and I was on my way.