50 Years Ago Today

I know I just posted about how good the navy can be for a young person to get a good start. I received an email from an old friend this morning asking if I remembered this day 50 years ago. I thought for just a moment and the answer came quickly. This was my answer:

50 years ago today I was working 12 hour shifts in the galley at Naval Air Station Guam.

I had just finished 18 months of training in boot camp, aviation electronics school, Airborne Early Warning Tech school, escape-evasion-survival school, APX-7 repair school, APX6 repair school, Loran repair school and AN/ARC-27 radio transmitter repair school and then because I was not yet a petty officer I had to do my time in the galley.

94 days of scraping leftover food off metal trays, making sandwiches for out-going flights the next morning and cooking eggs on a grill at 0600 in the morning.

I was bitter and frustrated that after all that training I was working in a galley like a non-rated sailor who had just finished boot camp and had no schooling at all. At that time almost every young sailor had mess duty or compartment cleaning duty for 90 days. 

My first deployment on flight duty was not to be until April of 1965.

I had been married 13 months in February of 1965.

I was making about $80 per month in the navy.

The navy said they had overpaid me the year before, so they gave me two paychecks in a row for $0.01.

After being paid $0.02 for the month of February, my next check was all the way up to $10.

And you thought college was rough. Ha!

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So there you have it, the worst of my time in the navy was those 94 days early on. Consider this, those 94 days out of my 3942 in the navy was 2% of my time in the navy and out of the 25,732 days of my life it was 0.3% of my life. And while those days were bad, I have had worse days, a lot worse days at jobs outside the navy.