211203 Sentinel, Cracking Eggs

I was making some eggs for my supper last night.

As I was cracking the eggs, my mind went tripping back to the end of 1964. My first 16 months in the navy were spent at boot camp in Great Lakes, Il. Millington,Tn. Glynco, Ga. and Barber’s Point, Hi. All those months were consumed with training schools. I had orders for an early warning squadron VW-1 at naval air station Agana, Guam. I arrived there ready to go to a flight crew and start using all that training I received, but that was not to be just yet.

I was not yet a rated petty officer, so I was sent to be a galley slave at the Agana naval air station there. I was not happy with that! I had 94 days of 14 hour shifts. I started working in the scullery, scraping used metal trays of leftover food, loading them into the huge dishwashing machine and emptying 50 gallon garbage cans, just the sort of thing a young man looks forward to doing.

Things did get better half way through my time there when I was shifted from the day shift to night shift. That was only 12 hours and there were just 3 of us supervised by a second class cook named Cruz, and a native of Guam. He was very particular about how we scrubbed the huge pans left over from the dinner shift, but that was not as tough as the trays on day shift. Once that was done, we started making sandwiches for outgoing flights the next morning. That was not difficult at all and I had all the luncheon meats I cared to eat.

The shift went on into the start of breakfast and Cruz Assigned me to run the grill for breakfast. I had never cooked anything in my lifetime, so I was a little tough at first, but I learned fast. I progressed to the point I could have 2 pounds of bacon and sausage on the grill and could cook eggs to order for the hungry sailors in line. I could crack 2 eggs at a time, one in each hand and never break a yolk, unless it was requested. The eggs we got on Guam started in the USA, loaded from a farm to a cold locker in San Francisco, to a slow ship that went 5,798 nautical miles across the Pacific ocean at roughly 10 nautical miles an hour. They were months old by the time they reached our galley on Guam. On occasion, I would crack an egg and it was a horrid green color and would go skittering across the grill. I would have to catch and scrape it off the edge of the grill and then keep going like that never happened.

Finally I finished galley duty and was assigned to a flight crew. That was when the fun and excitement began.