Veterans Day

One of the things that I love about having a husband in the military is that we often run into older service members. They recognize Tim’s high-and-tight and begin to share their stories and advice with us. We love listening, and are somewhat awed by their lives. Most of them were only eighteen years old at the beginning of WWII.

One character who sticks out in my mind is “Dja-Dja’s Husband.” Dja Dja is a Jewish Holocaust survivor who grew up in Poland. She is a character herself, but one day I started talking with her American husband, a WWII veteran. 

“People say that we shouldn’t have a draft and that eighteen is too young to be fighting. Well, I’ll tell you what’s bad, is when we have twenty-some-year-olds who are married. Then when they get in the foxhole they start thinking about their wife. You can’t have a wife and fight. You can’t have a wife.”

Mr. G, a church friend of ours, must have been of a different opinion. 

“When I married my wife, she had to bring her report cards home to me to be signed. Our parents thought we were too young to be married! When the draft came, I didn’t have a choice. I became an MP and was stationed in Albuquerque. That was the home of the Atomic Commission, and we had over 500 MPs stationed there. My pay was $78 a month, and that didn’t even pay for our apartment. I worked at the commissary bagging groceries for people, and my wife had to get a job for us to be able to live together.”

Tim and I often wonder what it must have been like growing up in the WWII era. 

“Do you know what today is?” Mrs. W. asked the ladies in our sewing group. I had no idea. “Is it Victory in Japan Day?” a lady asked. She was right. I went home and looked later – it wasn’t even on the calendar.

Some Americans complain about the military. What’s strange is that military members today have a choice. They are not forced to join the military – they choose it. They choose to defend complaining Americans. Many veterans did not choose their service. They did what they had to. And they still love their country. 

Mrs. W. had a unique memory of V-J Day. 

“Sixty-six years ago today my sister and I were on the boardwalk in Atlantic City. All of a sudden bells started ringing and they started bringing the wounded soldiers out of the hospital and putting them out front. The service members were standing in a line, and then one of them grabbed a girl, kissed her, and passed her down to the next guy. One of them started to chase my sister, but she ran - in high heels, too! He never did catch her.”

Patriotism isn’t just loyalty to your country. It’s also thankfulness for what you have. Do you know a veteran? Why don’t you ask him to tell you about his time in the service? Why don’t you ask his wife what it was like for her? That is the best cure for ungratefulness that I can think of.

Second Impressions...of Pensacola

 

Rules of the Road
(in Pensacola, Florida) 

Don't use your turn signal
It is okay to use the turning lane belonging to the opposite lane of traffic
Text and drive (a lot)
The median counts as a lane
You can turn LEFT on a red arrow, as long as no other cars are coming

If you are over sixty, drive however you want and make sure you honk your horn while doing it

Your car does not need a hood or a bumper to be road-worthy
Up to five cars may go through a red light - as long as they stick together

These are not isolated cases of bad driving that I’ve observed – they are pretty common occurrences. The senior drivers are just rude, but the college students are rude and dangerous.

Florida does not have a vehicle inspection requirement. Every time I’m tempted to think that they need one, I look at our faithful 1992 Toyota Camry, and am thankful that there is no vehicle inspection. After all, it still drives! We call it our beach car, because it’s okay if it gets sand in it…unlike our 2010 Honda Civic, which I’m not even allowed to eat popcorn in. 

In case you are wondering where your tax dollars go, I found out this week. 

Tim is in VT-2, a T-34 training squadron at Whiting Field. The T-34 is a Korean War era trainer turbo prop. Tim has pages and pages of emergency procedures to memorize for this aircraft, because there is no eject option. 

The T-6 is a newer training aircraft, designed by the Air Force, incidentally. This trainer aircraft has one main emergency procedure – eject. Before the student pilots fly this 6 million dollar trainer aircraft, they learn to fly in the T-6 simulators – the 16 million dollar simulators. If a student in this 16 million dollar T6 simulator accidentally touches the screen in the 16 million dollar simulator, his instructor has a heart attack. This is because the entire screen must be replaced at the low cost of 700,000 dollars. They say that in the long run, these 16 million dollar simulators save money.

Although Tim has a ton of stuff to learn, he loves it. He is so excited to finally be studying what he joined for in the first place. He had his first test yesterday on the aircraft systems, and got an A. I am very happy for him! I could go on and on about how smart and wonderful he is (and he is!), but then I remember OCS, TBS, and our stint in California, and I know that it is only by God’s grace that we’ve gotten this far. During each of these training experiences there were times that the training was long, miserable, or unfair, and we asked God to do a special work to get us through. And He did get us through. So here we are!

First Impressions of California

Tidepools at Cabrillo National Monument, CA

First, I owe Mom Horner a big thank you for being willing to travel 2000 miles across the southern US with me. We had a fun time! For everyone out there who likes to drive fast, did you know that the speed limit in western Texas on I 10 is 80 mph? No kidding. Of course, in our new Honda, it didn’t even seem like we were doing much more than 65.

Our first night in Texas, we stayed with Mr. and Mrs. Grauke. We had never met them before, but Tim and I had met their son and daughter in law at our church in Pensacola. Mom Horner asked me if it bothered me to stay with people I had never met before. I explained the military bond. People connected to the military understand other people connected to the military. If you’re a Christian in the military, that bond becomes especially important.

Our second night was spent in Las Cruces, NM. We could see Mexico from the road, and I wasn’t too thrilled about having to drive by so close.

Our third day we got to drive through Arizona before hitting California. We drove by Saguaro National Park and saw a LOT of saguaro cactuses. We also saw a homeless man riding a bike down the highway with a cart attached and a dog peeking out of the cart. I wonder how he could afford to have the dog.

We passed through three border checks in all. The first two were to make sure that we were both US citizens. The third one was a special California check. They wanted to know if we had any fruits or produce with us and where they came from. I turned over a bag of oranges that didn’t have labels, and they explained to us that California had natural barriers that kept out foreign matter. According to Tim, it works both ways. It also protects the rest of the US from California.

Our first night in California I got to stay with Tim in the BOQ (Bachelor Officer Quarters). He had compared it to the Hilton – the Hanoi Hilton. It wasn’t that bad, though. Tim found a hotel for Mom Horner in town. I think she prayed a lot that night – when we drove up, the front of the hotel had scaffolding and plastic flapping around, and it was right next to a seedy looking haunt.

I got to see the Pacific Ocean for the first time on Sunday morning. It was cold. After church we got to eat lunch at Ruby’s, a restaurant that’s perched on the end of a pier. It was a really fun diner with an amazing view – we were surrounded by the ocean and could see the green hills and brown mountains in the distance. Looking over the dock, we could also see surfers. It was my first time to see real surfers, too, standing up on their board and riding the waves just like on TV.

Life on Base

Christmas at 3rd Tracks, Camp Del Mar

I got to learn my way around base by myself. My record for getting lost and turned around is six times in one day. By the end of that day I was feeling very sore and sorry for myself. When I tearfully told Tim, his first inclination (which he did not act on) was to have me to drive it again and then look at a map and see what I did wrong. But instead he bought us milkshakes.

You see, at Camp Pendleton the Marine Corps is very creative when naming streets, for instance, it uses letters of the alphabet, like A Street and B Street. After naming these two streets, they had to come up with some other names, like 11th Street. They really liked 11th Street, so they used it three times, for three different roads on base.

One thing that families do around Pendleton is hang banners for their husbands or fathers that are coming home from deployment. I passed one today with a picture of a baby girl that said,

                         Welcome home daddy.
                         If you thought Afghanistan was bad
                         wait til you see me!!!

Of course, some Marines enjoy being stationed out of the continental US, like the one I saw with a sticker on his truck that read, “Defend Hawaii.”

So, right now, Tim is defending the office at 3rd Tracks, Alpha Company. He doesn’t even get to make copies or fill the coffee machine. Pray for him if you think of it – he’s about to go nuts trying to find things to do.


On the beach at Del Mar - Our Backyard

First Impressions of Naval Air Station Pensacola

Moving in - Moving out - Getting Ready for CA

Wait a minute, I thought he was a Marine. Another truth about military life... sometimes Marines have to train on Navy bases!

Well, it looks like our first impressions of Pensacola are going to be very short, but I'll share them anyway.

Even though we live a little further from base, it isn’t bad – I 10 is nothing like I 95. In fact, here are some of the license plates we saw in the DC area of Virginia:

H8 95N
I H8 I95
I 95 SKS

We were prone to agree.

We have some interesting bill boards here, such as the one on I-10 advertising a box of free steaks - with windshield replacement. Along with windshield replacement, there are numerous paint and body shops along the little back roads - for good reason. While parked at the beach last weekend, someone decided to give us a paint addition on our Camry and didn't think to leave their name or number.

A lot of our neighbors are senior citizens, and are very friendly. Today I met Mrs. Richardson. I told her my name, and she told me how I could remember hers. She bent down and touched both of my knees. Her name is Nini.

Today Tim had a class on alcohol and substance abuse. In order to convince the lieutenants that the class was pertinent, the instructor asked, "Which of you has never gotten high on drugs or drank alcohol?" Out of fifty guys, one raised his hand.

Tim isn't the only one who gets strange looks. I got a strange look from my doctor when she realized three things. A). I'm 23. B). I'm not promiscuous. C). In addition to "B)", I'm also married. Apparently I'm a little out of the national average.

Well, we're settled in here in Pensacola, but Tim found out that he's being moved to California in two weeks - for four months. Lord willing, I'm going to try to follow him out there once he finds a place to stay. We'd appreciate your prayers as we try to figure this out.

You Know that You're Married to a Marine When...

This is what Tim does most days after TBS

1. Your washing machine has a layer of silt in the bottom
2. Your husband's socks are organized by color
3. You must check your husband's dog tags before you hug him (they all look the same from the back!)
4. You multiply a recipe's serving size by four each meal time
5. Supper is any time between 6 PM and 1 AM
6. On some days, you can smell your husband 25 yards away
7. You find that 80 percent of your home video collection is rated R for war violence
8. When things go wrong, you say, "Semper Gumby!"
9. You enjoy driving on base because you get saluted at the checkpoints
10. You know more about your husband's buddies than he does, because you know their wives
11. Your husband doesn't know his buddies' first names
12. You find that timidity is not an option in life
13. The colors of your husband's rainbow tend to be tan, brown, green, olive, and black
14. Going to the shooting range qualifies as a date
15. "Secured" is your favorite word (that means time to come home!)
16. You think your husband needs a haircut if his hair is more than 1/4 inch long
17. The bulk of your shopping tends to be on the 1st and 15th of each month (payday!)
18. Your friends' baby showers tend to coincide with their husband's promotion to captain (twice as much pay as 1st. Lt.)
19. You think that the commissary is the best thing since sliced bread
20. Your husband can't run errands on his way home from work (not allowed to wear camies when off duty)
21. Your husband refuses to use an umbrella (he claims this is a well known rule)
22. Your husband has a dress code, even when off duty (Collared shirt, no flip flops, no rips or tears, no tatoos...)
23. The neighbors can follow a trail of mud from your car to your front door.

More from Tim about The Basic School

Well, a few more observations from not-quite-paradise…

Some of you may have entertained the question, “what’s the difference between your typical McDonald’s-eating comfort-seeking civilian and these camouflaged killers they call Marines?” The following anecdotes may help to clarify the issue.

First, what does your typical McDonald’s-eating comfort-seeking civilian do when forced to be outside when it’s 105 degrees out? Correct. He will put on a favorite old t-shirt and shorts, sip on his icy McDonald’s Frappe, and lounge in the shade with an expression usually reserved for Somalian war refugees, while mentally applauding himself for “enduring through this inhuman weather.”

And you thought he was exaggerating - I took this during Land Nav 2

What do Marines do?

It was our Land Navigation Final Exam, and it consisted of finding between 7 and 10 red ammo boxes in 8 hours in an area that was about 5km by 4km. The fact that it was 105, high humidity, and no breeze didn’t deter us for a minute. Nor did the fact that we were in full woodland camouflage uniforms (sleeves down), or the fact that we had about 40+ lbs of gear. Unfortunately, I started on the side of the training area that had some of the worst terrain that I had ever seen. In some areas, 10 feet was the visibility limit. Worse, Quantico has apparently imported thorny vines and planted them all over the training area in order to drive lieutenants to agonizing despair. That combined with the weather, the gear (which caught on everything), and the inability to find boxes at all made me realize the weakness of the English language. “Frustration” is unsubstantial. “Irritation” has no weight. “Mind-wrenching anguish” might be a little closer to the truth. In four hours, I had found 1 box.

I would like to say that I rallied, pushed on, and ultimately succeeded in finding 7 boxes. In the end, I found 6 boxes in the eight hours allotted before ultimately succumbing to a nice case of heat cramps. Finally, after two hours of staggering through the woods, I made it to a road where I was picked up by part of a search party. The long and the short of it was that ultimately I got to visit the professionals at base medical care, and for the second time in my life I got to experience an IV. And yes, the fact that I failed Land Nav meant that I had to go on remedial on Saturday in order to pass it (it’s a requirement to graduate). To be fair, though, half the company failed, and about 30 people had to go to medical that day.

The interesting part was getting back to the BOQ and hearing some of the other stories from the day. “I wasn’t able to walk more than 100 meters without taking a rest.” “I couldn’t remember which number came after 7.” “I had tunnel vision and lost my depth perception.” “I was unable to write the letter ‘A’ when I found my box.” “I can’t remember much from the day.” “I found four lieutenants down with heat case and had to get help.”

The interesting thing about it all is that we more or less took it as a course of life. “It happened, people. Time to continue with training.” I think that’s what makes the Marines the best. Bad times don’t stop us.

Lts. Goode, Gearlds, Horner

FEX II

One of the things that helps keep life interesting at TBS is that we always have the unexpected popping up and destroying our illusions of control. Case in point: Field Exercise II. We were out in the field conducting operations for a three-day period. One day in the offense, one day in the defense, and one day to pack up and head back.

Item 1: Thunderstorms. There’s an ancient Indian curse on the highlands of Quantico that makes it rain whenever a training company is out in the field. The rule is, the more inconvenient the rain would be, the harder it will rain. We had a regular monsoon going, which gave the plants a new outlook on life, the animals a new place to find water, and the lieutenants a new reason to hate life. The second night, in a spectacular demonstration of Murphy’s Law, it began raining just after we went to sleep. I woke up in an inch of water and spent about 2 hours offering prayers as to why it would be nice for the rain to stop.

That’s when I became acquainted with corollary #1: The remarkable thing about life is that it’s never so bad that it can’t get worse. At 1:00 in the morning, we were awakened to find out that we had a surprise 9-mile hike back to base. Lucky us. Average weight of gear: 100+ lbs. Average amount of sleep over the past 48 hours: 7 hours. Average condition of boots, socks, and gear: waterlogged. The look on the average lieutenant’s face when he realized that this was serious, and actually not some sadistic practical joke: priceless. By the way, there’s a corollary #2: Nature has a cruel sense of humor. The rain stopped just as we stepped off.

Patrolling

I promised a story in the last posting that I wrote, and here it is. My squad was out learning how to patrol. Lt. McCool and I were the right flank guard, which meant that we weren’t always able to see the main body. To complicate things, we were in low visibility terrain (maybe 5 feet). He and I were supposed to keep abreast of the main unit, but due to the conditions, we were unable to see them at all. In the end, we didn’t realize that they had stopped, and we ended up 50 meters in front of them.

Quick rabbit trail. When Marines are unsure who’s around them, they will shout out a sign, e.g. “red.” The challenged individual will give the countersign, e.g. “meatloaf.” The alternate method is to have a prearranged number, for example, 11. The challenger will shout a number, and the challenged individual will give the number that will add to 11.

Well, back to the story, our sign/countersign was apple/Coors. Our number was 9. And McCool and I knew that we were ahead of the rest of the squad and were waiting for them to catch up. All of the sudden, we heard shots from the squad. With a flash of enlightenment, we realized that they were shooting at us. “Stop! We’re friends!” we shouted as we hit the deck.

“It’s a trick! Keep firing!” we heard.

“We are your right flank! McCool and Horner!” we responded.

There was a moment of silence. “Four!” I heard.

Relieved, I called out “Five!” (adds up to 9, remember).

There was another moment of silence. “Apple!” they called out, apparently not yet satisfied.

McCool and I looked at each other, both having completely forgotten the countersign. While I pulled out my notebook and frantically flipped through it looking for the answer, McCool decided that he would give it a shot in the dark. “Black!” he yelled.

I did not know what the correct answer was, but I definitely knew what it was not. There was another moment of silence.

“They’re enemy! Everybody open fire!” We both hit the deck again as the entire squad opened fire.

Suffice it to say, when it was all over, there were a number of learning points on both sides.

One final note

We had our Engineer Field Exercise about a week and a half ago. For those who don’t know, that means a whole day of playing with explosives. I will say this. TNT, det. cord, and plastic explosives are every bit as awesome to play with as you would imagine. And for the interested taxpayer, during that field exercise, we blew up exactly $5,447.47 of taxpayer money.

Thank you all for paying your taxes.

Tim with the MK-19

Marines...from a Five-Year-Old's Perspective

2010 Mayfield Family Reunion, Georgia

The brain processes of a five-year-old are an intricate thing. I have had opportunities to observe this since I give tours to five-year-olds around the National Museum of the Marine Corps. This is a challenging job, especially since most twenty-year-olds aren’t even interested in history. To keep the kids attention, you must give them jobs which help them feel very important and involved in finding historical data. For instance, count the buttons on the Marine’s coat. Then tell your tour guide the color of the ribbon in the eagle’s mouth. Can you count the red stripes of the flag? Who can be the first to answer THE QUESTION?

For these kids, the most exciting part of the tour is not answering THE QUESTION. It is being chosen to answer THE QUESTION. For five seconds, they have everyone’s attention. Mathematically, it is not possible to have everyone’s attention for more than five seconds, because no child can think about one thing for more than five seconds, unless it is in a movie.

When the child doesn’t answer the question, it is okay, because everyone’s answer is a good try, even when they don’t have an answer. The chosen one then decides to wrap himself/herself around the tour guide’s legs, in an attempt to hang on to the source of attention.

For some of the five-year-olds, history can be quite real. The “soldiers” (they haven’t yet figured out that Marines are not soldiers) in the displays are very lifelike. They wonder if they are real people, and ask when they are coming to visit.

To them, history is also quite traumatic. In the early 1900s display, we have a model T ambulance that was used in the Philippines. In the back of the ambulance is a man with a gaping bloody wound on his knee. When the children see this, they look at their tour guide with horror, and ask, “Teacher!!! If he is hurt, then WHY is he SMOKING???”
Well, maybe he thought it would help him feel better. No, you’re right, smoking is bad for you. Okay, next display.

Speaking of children…
If you ever lock your keys in your car on Quantico base, make sure you lock your child in, too, or some prescription medicine. You will want to do this because base security will only unlock your car for you if you have locked your child or medicine in the car. As it turned out, our roadside assistance didn’t go into effect for seven more days. Oh well. And all this after drilling into the kids at the museum that Marines are here to HELP you. But only if you lock your kid in the car.

A Moment in an MP’s Life
Imagine you are a Military Policeman doing gate check one night. You have the late shift (early, depending on how you look at it), and most of the people who come through are officers getting back from an evening in town. And then all of a sudden a female civilian comes through the gate with a plate of food on her lap. You groan and roll your eyes. Eating and driving? How dumb can you get? Then she insists that she wasn’t eating, and that the food is for her husband. You take her ID card, and identify the smart looking woman on the front of the card with the tired, wilting girl inside the car. You graciously remove a piece of rice from the card, and hand it back to her. Somehow, you can just see her in ten years… coming through the gate, grabbing the card out of a teething infant’s mouth, and handing it to you. No wonder they require you to get all those immunizations every few years.

Mayfield Family Reunion
Tim and I got special permission to leave our 300 mile travel radius to go to a family reunion at Unicoi State Park in Georgia. The USMC, which cares very much about our safety, had us fill out a form which stated when we would leave, when we would take a break, where we would be, and at what time we would return. Tim was also limited to driving four hours at a time, and both of us could not drive more than twelve hours in the day.
After Tim got over the initial shock of sleeping in a tent (as opposed to under the stars), the surprise of having showers and restrooms (as opposed to having just the great outdoors), we had quite a great time with the family. One highlight was our hike to Anna Ruby Falls. Instead of driving in to see it, and paying two dollars a person, we saw it the free way – we hiked five miles to it from another direction.

The actual reunion was on Sunday, and we had a picnic at the beach house. Tim got to meet a lot of the family that wasn’t able to come to our wedding, and we had fun catching up. One interesting part of the reunion was when the all the adults sat down to discuss methods to keep unity in the family. Both Tim and I are blessed to come from stable families with loving extended family.

Coming back from beautiful, cool, mountainous, Georgia to Quantico, VA was a leap from paradise to not-paradise, especially for Tim, but I’ll let him tell about that.