BLUE LOTUS--
Feb-Mar, '67--The fake ID incident headed with them two babes up to Santa Ana fits into the scenario somewhere in here but also can't pinpoint the chronology. The fake ID was from Pensacola radio school and was used to get into the beach bars. So there's a good possibility that the two girl episode when Downie and I were hitching back to base that night might have been in February-March, '67. Spent a few weekends with that babe and one night she said she didn't want to see me again.
Check the mess duty record on SRB.
29 April 1967---Fell into the cactus, treated at dispensary. Thought the cactus incident was part of the Blue Lotus Op but that wasn't until; Nov-Dec, '67. There is a lot of undone history here.
05 May 1967--Ensenada, Mexico for Cinco de Mayo with RB Elliott, D Downie. Coco's Bar, playing guitar. In cousin Debbie's VW, spare tire stolen. Given a ticket on the way back up to Garden Grove for driving on the shoulder northbound, I-5 and open container. Never paid the ticket, was busted when back from VN and fined $200.
USS Monticello,
........................................................
Following participation in Operation Blue Lotus, a First Fleet exercise, 28 November–4 December 1967, Enterprise returned to NAS Alameda for her first Christmas in her new home port, conducting a Family Day Cruise on 9 December, and carrier qualifications, 11–16 December 1967.
Enterprise VIII (CVAN-65) (navy.mil)
..............................................................
page 29//pdf
A Chronology Of The UNITED STATES MARINE CORPS 1965-1969 PCN 19000318100 (hqco9thmarines.com)USS Ogden, Blue Lotus might have been the toothache-fiorinal-pumped stomach episode but now can't be certain.
The Long Beach Independent 05 Dec 1967 Page 23
The USS Ogden
1968.pdf
02 December 2021
3/28 Radio Platoon--Camp San Mateo, 1967--
____________________________________________________________________
01 December 2021
#MESSDUTY--3rd Battalion, 28th Marines--"PUSHIN' TOO HARD" 1967
TO SANDBAGS//TURK FROM LATRINE CMDO//JC SUBJ COMMO STATUS
(LZ 410)--Reduction in rank, and forfeiture of pay, like mess duty, followed me around from duty station to duty station. My tenure at K Company in Pensacola came to an abrupt end one night when, drunk, I got into a fight with a sailor who promised he would deliver by,
"How do you want it, New York or Philly style?"
I replied,
"Here's Reno style,"
and I punched him in the face and broke his nose. But that wasn't what pissed off the CO RL O'Brien. I went back to the barracks and proceeded to punch holes into the bulkheads in a fit of rage over all that had been coming down ever since I'd been assigned to the training unit. In the blowback, it was, on 14 February, 1967, execution of yet another incident prior to that one, that the sentence of reduction-forfeiture was imposed. On 10 March, 1967, under "Administrative Remarks" in my Service Record Book (SRB), RL O'Brien made an entry that I had been disenrolled from the CommTech "R" course. In the "Record of Service" section, the page shows 3 April '67 as the first entry for H&S Co., 3rd Bn, 28th Marines. I had been transferred, finally, to an infantry unit, at Camp Pendleton no less.
Maybe O'Brien thought he was ridding himself of a pain in the neck, quite possibly true. The real truth was that the 5th MarDiv had been recently reactivated and was in need of every able bodied Marine it could muster, in spite of the negative entries in the SRB. Whether anybody over in that faraway Shangrila of Company K realized it, there was a shooting war in its second full year in Southeast Asia. In the Company K barracks, we used to sit around and mull over the possible duty stations we might get; Marine Barracks, Washington, DC, stand in front of Chopper One and salute CINC when he boarded. What about Cyprus, or Italy or some other far off exotic place where promotions happened every other month and you could be a Gunny, like Gunny Wood in a couple of years? The only place you were going from the 28th Marines, a line infantry regiment, was to Vietnam.
My first major assignments at H&S, Camp San Mateo weren't radio training, teaching others the rapid speed I had on Morse code I learned in Florida, but chopping back all the ice plant off the sidewalks in front of the quonset huts, firewatch and guard duty all night. Following that, although there is no entry in the Record, sometime between my arrival in April and my going AWOL to the Summer of Love in Haight-Ashbury, San Francisco in late July, I was again assigned to mess duty. It was after a field training exercise where, in the Sick Call Treatment Record, the entry shows my being treated for falling on a cactus on 29 April '67. The attack of the wild cactus happened when we, acting as aggressors, ambushed a convoy of tanks somewhere on a Camp Pendleton ridgetop road, and somebody tossed a smoke grenade into the lead tank. It was not well received and the rest of the tanks chased us down the side of the mountain and tried to run us over, I survived by diving into the cactus patch.
The Camp San Mateo (62 Area) former 3rd Bn, 28th Marines messhall from Google earth today. It is now a fitness center. Look close and you might see the ghost of Pvt Mertz handling the GI cans on the back landing.
At San Mateo 3rd battalion messhall, the chief was Sgt. Dabney, a real slave driver but he laid off me and I was assigned the officers' mess along with CD Rossi, also from radio platoon. The star of the show, hands down, was the "bird" Pvt. Mertz who worked the GI cans out on the back landing. No matter what they threw at Mertz, it would roll off. After I'd gotten out of the brig in October for the AWOL junket to SF, we had just returned from another field exercise and were dead in formation one morning with MSgt "Top" Casella giving us the lowdown,
"What's the matter with you people, am I pushing you too hard?"
In the ranks, Mertz begin to sing the Seeds hit released in October, 1966,
"You're pushin' too hard, you're pushin too hard...."
Mess duty at Pendleton was no picnic, but it was by no means the brutal experience that I had endured at Corry Station under CU Farley. Ironic that the very day that the suspension order at Corry, February 14, was executed, there awaited an even bigger day the following February. It would be on Valentine's Day, 1968 we would depart from El Toro in C-141s with the 27th Regimental Landing Team to Danang.
Here's where we hear all the talk about that training I had been getting for two years as a Marine paying off, converted from a "ditty-taker" (code) at Pensacola, to a bona-fide field radio operator at the 28th. None of that will matter as the business of going out on patrols and ambushes would be left to the grunts. There's a hundred books out today on all of them bragging about getting sprayed with automatic weapons fire and barely getting into the trench before the artillery round hit next to them. I'll leave all that glory stuff to the heroes, I had more important things to do in-country.
FOOTNOTE: The sailor at Corry Station outside the Navarine Club reported to his CO that he started the fight so I was not held accountable. Memory is a funny thing. I wrote the report three hours ago and just now remembered that detail. (07/19/18/2040PDT)
TO BE CONTINUED-- Next stop, Duong Son (2)--
(LZ 410)--Reduction in rank, and forfeiture of pay, like mess duty, followed me around from duty station to duty station. My tenure at K Company in Pensacola came to an abrupt end one night when, drunk, I got into a fight with a sailor who promised he would deliver by,
"How do you want it, New York or Philly style?"
I replied,
"Here's Reno style,"
and I punched him in the face and broke his nose. But that wasn't what pissed off the CO RL O'Brien. I went back to the barracks and proceeded to punch holes into the bulkheads in a fit of rage over all that had been coming down ever since I'd been assigned to the training unit. In the blowback, it was, on 14 February, 1967, execution of yet another incident prior to that one, that the sentence of reduction-forfeiture was imposed. On 10 March, 1967, under "Administrative Remarks" in my Service Record Book (SRB), RL O'Brien made an entry that I had been disenrolled from the CommTech "R" course. In the "Record of Service" section, the page shows 3 April '67 as the first entry for H&S Co., 3rd Bn, 28th Marines. I had been transferred, finally, to an infantry unit, at Camp Pendleton no less.
Maybe O'Brien thought he was ridding himself of a pain in the neck, quite possibly true. The real truth was that the 5th MarDiv had been recently reactivated and was in need of every able bodied Marine it could muster, in spite of the negative entries in the SRB. Whether anybody over in that faraway Shangrila of Company K realized it, there was a shooting war in its second full year in Southeast Asia. In the Company K barracks, we used to sit around and mull over the possible duty stations we might get; Marine Barracks, Washington, DC, stand in front of Chopper One and salute CINC when he boarded. What about Cyprus, or Italy or some other far off exotic place where promotions happened every other month and you could be a Gunny, like Gunny Wood in a couple of years? The only place you were going from the 28th Marines, a line infantry regiment, was to Vietnam.
My first major assignments at H&S, Camp San Mateo weren't radio training, teaching others the rapid speed I had on Morse code I learned in Florida, but chopping back all the ice plant off the sidewalks in front of the quonset huts, firewatch and guard duty all night. Following that, although there is no entry in the Record, sometime between my arrival in April and my going AWOL to the Summer of Love in Haight-Ashbury, San Francisco in late July, I was again assigned to mess duty. It was after a field training exercise where, in the Sick Call Treatment Record, the entry shows my being treated for falling on a cactus on 29 April '67. The attack of the wild cactus happened when we, acting as aggressors, ambushed a convoy of tanks somewhere on a Camp Pendleton ridgetop road, and somebody tossed a smoke grenade into the lead tank. It was not well received and the rest of the tanks chased us down the side of the mountain and tried to run us over, I survived by diving into the cactus patch.
At San Mateo 3rd battalion messhall, the chief was Sgt. Dabney, a real slave driver but he laid off me and I was assigned the officers' mess along with CD Rossi, also from radio platoon. The star of the show, hands down, was the "bird" Pvt. Mertz who worked the GI cans out on the back landing. No matter what they threw at Mertz, it would roll off. After I'd gotten out of the brig in October for the AWOL junket to SF, we had just returned from another field exercise and were dead in formation one morning with MSgt "Top" Casella giving us the lowdown,
"What's the matter with you people, am I pushing you too hard?"
In the ranks, Mertz begin to sing the Seeds hit released in October, 1966,
"You're pushin' too hard, you're pushin too hard...."
Mess duty at Pendleton was no picnic, but it was by no means the brutal experience that I had endured at Corry Station under CU Farley. Ironic that the very day that the suspension order at Corry, February 14, was executed, there awaited an even bigger day the following February. It would be on Valentine's Day, 1968 we would depart from El Toro in C-141s with the 27th Regimental Landing Team to Danang.
Here's where we hear all the talk about that training I had been getting for two years as a Marine paying off, converted from a "ditty-taker" (code) at Pensacola, to a bona-fide field radio operator at the 28th. None of that will matter as the business of going out on patrols and ambushes would be left to the grunts. There's a hundred books out today on all of them bragging about getting sprayed with automatic weapons fire and barely getting into the trench before the artillery round hit next to them. I'll leave all that glory stuff to the heroes, I had more important things to do in-country.
FOOTNOTE: The sailor at Corry Station outside the Navarine Club reported to his CO that he started the fight so I was not held accountable. Memory is a funny thing. I wrote the report three hours ago and just now remembered that detail. (07/19/18/2040PDT)
TO BE CONTINUED-- Next stop, Duong Son (2)--
#THEPOTSHACK---Mess Duty, The First Shift --PART ONE: CORRY FIELD, 1966
ATTN TACNET//CD VIA COMMO PLT//JC SUBJ PLAN OF THE DAY
(LZ410 DANANG)--Mess duty was no stranger to me. It followed me from duty station to duty station, from the minute I set foot on Corry Field in Pensacola to the first step through the gate at Camp Pendleton. Being enlisted didn't help the matter at all, everyone with more time in grade would skate from the messhall. So the chores, the back-channel effort to feed the battalion, fell on my shoulders.
My first experience with mess duty came in 1966, fresh out of boot camp, at Corry Field in Florida, a class-A Navy communications training base. We were there to learn radio and Morse code, our detachment was Company K, Sub-Unit 1. The CO was RL O'Brien, a Captain when I first arrived but promoted to Major later. His immediate subordinate was Lt. Sepulveda, an up-through-the-ranks former enlisted who really had an attitude, directed at his former comrades, the enlisted. Then there was "Gunny" Wood, although I never saw him having related to being a Gunnery Sargent, strutting around with that MacArthur corn-cob pipe all the time. His utilities were so starched he could barely walk in them and the recruits at the field had no nice words and some suggestions about the pipe and the reason he walked the way he did.
(Company K, Sub Unit 1, 1966, unknown attribution)
Command was merciless when it came to outclassing the sailors on the base, O'Brien was constantly showing off his company by making us do absurd things, like run in formation around the airstrip in 100 degree heat. The heat rolled off the runway in waves so we would run half-way out, fake it like we were still running, then turn around and come back in. Gunny Wood, looking through field-glasses, thought we were running all the way out to the fence line.
(Photo by Bob Comer c. 1966-67)
Mess duty came up as I was in "casual" company, some limbo a new recruit to the radio school would land in waiting for a security clearance to proceed to the next phase of training, the classified section known as "R-branch." All of this was very impressive and it was not difficult to be overwhelmed by it and follow orders to the letter. That is, until mess duty rolled along and I was assigned to it for 30 days. It wasn't until many years later when I discovered entries in my Service Record Book that my security clearance had actually been processed and command was just using me for the dirty work around the company, on mess duty, firewatch and barracks field days, to make them look good.
(NCTC Corry Field chow hall, 1966 photo by CC Cook, USN/CTR2)
Reflecting sunglasses was the trademark of the black petty officer in charge of the messmen. A mixed batch of sailors and Marines, we had a name for Charles Underwood Farley, it was "Chuck U Farley." Whether this was his real name or not, it didn't matter much, mess duty was a grueling ten to twelve hour daily shift that had us reporting in an hour before zero-dark-thirty and getting off long after the sun went down. Aside from the usual daily assignments of chopping carrots and celery all day long, we would wash down the dining area three times a day in a drawn out process of moving all the tables and chairs, flooding the tile floor, then mopping it all up. There was no AC, it was Devil's Island for real, with Farley watching every move from behind his reflecting shades.
Reflecting back on all of this, I had no idea just how valuable this tortuous lesson would be in the future, more valuable than anything I learned in radio school. I never finished the school, eventually literally fighting my way out with the usual reduction of rank and forfeiture of pay. But I was headed to the West coast when new orders were cut, the 28th Marines infantry regiment at Camp Pendleton.
(Above: 2 photos of the Corry Co.K barracks taken circa 1967, taken by Rick Swan)
FWD MERTZ GI CAN DETAIL 28TH C. SAN MATEO--
(LZ410 DANANG)--Mess duty was no stranger to me. It followed me from duty station to duty station, from the minute I set foot on Corry Field in Pensacola to the first step through the gate at Camp Pendleton. Being enlisted didn't help the matter at all, everyone with more time in grade would skate from the messhall. So the chores, the back-channel effort to feed the battalion, fell on my shoulders.
My first experience with mess duty came in 1966, fresh out of boot camp, at Corry Field in Florida, a class-A Navy communications training base. We were there to learn radio and Morse code, our detachment was Company K, Sub-Unit 1. The CO was RL O'Brien, a Captain when I first arrived but promoted to Major later. His immediate subordinate was Lt. Sepulveda, an up-through-the-ranks former enlisted who really had an attitude, directed at his former comrades, the enlisted. Then there was "Gunny" Wood, although I never saw him having related to being a Gunnery Sargent, strutting around with that MacArthur corn-cob pipe all the time. His utilities were so starched he could barely walk in them and the recruits at the field had no nice words and some suggestions about the pipe and the reason he walked the way he did.
Command was merciless when it came to outclassing the sailors on the base, O'Brien was constantly showing off his company by making us do absurd things, like run in formation around the airstrip in 100 degree heat. The heat rolled off the runway in waves so we would run half-way out, fake it like we were still running, then turn around and come back in. Gunny Wood, looking through field-glasses, thought we were running all the way out to the fence line.
Mess duty came up as I was in "casual" company, some limbo a new recruit to the radio school would land in waiting for a security clearance to proceed to the next phase of training, the classified section known as "R-branch." All of this was very impressive and it was not difficult to be overwhelmed by it and follow orders to the letter. That is, until mess duty rolled along and I was assigned to it for 30 days. It wasn't until many years later when I discovered entries in my Service Record Book that my security clearance had actually been processed and command was just using me for the dirty work around the company, on mess duty, firewatch and barracks field days, to make them look good.
Reflecting sunglasses was the trademark of the black petty officer in charge of the messmen. A mixed batch of sailors and Marines, we had a name for Charles Underwood Farley, it was "Chuck U Farley." Whether this was his real name or not, it didn't matter much, mess duty was a grueling ten to twelve hour daily shift that had us reporting in an hour before zero-dark-thirty and getting off long after the sun went down. Aside from the usual daily assignments of chopping carrots and celery all day long, we would wash down the dining area three times a day in a drawn out process of moving all the tables and chairs, flooding the tile floor, then mopping it all up. There was no AC, it was Devil's Island for real, with Farley watching every move from behind his reflecting shades.
Reflecting back on all of this, I had no idea just how valuable this tortuous lesson would be in the future, more valuable than anything I learned in radio school. I never finished the school, eventually literally fighting my way out with the usual reduction of rank and forfeiture of pay. But I was headed to the West coast when new orders were cut, the 28th Marines infantry regiment at Camp Pendleton.
(Above: 2 photos of the Corry Co.K barracks taken circa 1967, taken by Rick Swan)
FWD MERTZ GI CAN DETAIL 28TH C. SAN MATEO--