Dateline 30 June 2013

Believe it or not, I have actually done good deeds.

Recently I did a little business with an Air Force officer and he brought up the subject of the Air Force Academy which is in Colorado Springs. I was stationed at nearby Ft. Carson for a lot of my hitch.

It actually is an unremarkable incident and a somewhat foggy memory but I do remember that sometime about Labor Day the Air Force Academy used to let the Doolies out of their cage for a day or two and generally a couple of them would tangle with their army counterparts and get roughed up a bit.

I was living on Academy Boulevard at the time in a nice apartment that most likely has been torn down by now. They were new at the time and I was told that after a few years the builders planned to sell them off to be used for public housing.

There was a pizza joint nearby and at the time the drinking age was 21 except for 3.2 beer which 18 year olders could imbibe. You could get just as toasted on 3.2 beer if you wanted to. All you had to do is force down twice as much.

I do believe I was with my wife at the time but it very well may have been someone else. Maybe a neighbor or another GI but my mind says it was my wife. We were having a pizza.

There was a cadet there, alone which was rare and he was truly plastered. He wasn't a big guy, and I wondered why he was alone.

Anyway, he wasn't being too obnoxious so I told the waitress that I'd scrape him up after we were done. Truth is I I just wanted to check out the Academy.

I recall the cadet started getting a little loud so I went out to my car and got a jug and quietly gave him a snort or two and he promptly passed out.

Then we finished our pizza, scraped the hapless cadet up and stuffed him in the back of the VW squareback and headed up Academy Boulevard. He was in the  back of the car pretty much inert.

 I don't recall if the gate was guarded or not but we stopped at the guard shack for directions. I said I wanted to visit my kid brother or something and some airdale gave me directions.

 Shortly thereafter we got near the Beast Barracks and found a couple of people and turned him over.

I recall making sure the people we gave him to were doolies because we didn't want to turn him over to upperclassmen who would likely haze the holy hell out of him.

They carted him off and we watched him stumble off with them. He was a real mess.

We drove around and looked at a few of the sights, which are pretty fuzzy in my mind today except for the chapel which was beautiful. We didn't enter it, though.

Then we left.

I tend to be pretty forgiving toward kids like that. You take a dopey kid fresh out of high school to an elite military academy and the academy spends all summer running these kids through basic training and filling their little heads full of superiority and then they turn them loose.

No wonder they get in trouble. These days, I suppose, they are a damned sight less forgiving than they used to be and I see two sides to that. I won't enter that arguement here.

I hope the kid made out all right and had a good career.

It's actually too bad during my stay in Colorado Springs that I didn't make time to take a tour of the Academy because it would be something nice to look back on.

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While there are accidents in the maritime trades and Rumor Control is buzzing from time to time, a lot of times we don't get the details right off.

A while ago there was an accident that killed two sailors and injured another three. It was a couple of days before we found out it was a van that rolled over during the guy's time off. Apparently they were having a barbecue and were going or coming and rolled a van somehow.

Still, until we found out it was an off time accident a lot of us were digging for details and of course could not find them because we were looking for a maritime accident.

One of the funniest things out here is a story that went around several years ago about some guy in a shipyard that was building a fuel tank out of plate steel.

He installed a manhole so as to be able to put a guy into the tank to clean it. This is fairly common. Our fuel tank has one and every time we go into the shipyard they muck the tank out.

Apparently the welder was a pretty hefty fellow and welded himself into the tank but was too big to get out of the manhole.

Of course hilarity ensued and they simply took a torch and cut a hole in the tank and welded it back together but the poor guy had to listen to the ballyhoo for months if not years.

He's actually a pretty good welder and still works there but they don't let him make tanks anymore, at least with a standard sized manhole installed into it.




To find out why the blog is pink just cut and paste this: http://piccoloshash.blogspot.com/2009/12/my-feminine-side-blog-stays-pink.html