My Military Service

After basic training, which I have talked about before so I won’t get into that again, I was sent to Fort Hancock New Jersey which for some mysterious reason I remained at for the rest of the three years. The Fort was a beautiful place and was the home to an anti-aircraft missile base which could launch nuclear missiles at oncoming fleets of planes. It was the home to the famous Nike Hercules missile and before that the Nike Ajax missile. The Ajax missile was far more dangerous than the Hercules, since it depended on liquid fueling. Before I got to the base and when it was a Nike Ajax base, one of the Nike Ajax missiles had blown up during fueling and killed over twenty people. The way they were set up was they were in pits with the crews. They crew had no protection if anything went wrong. They had switched over to the Nike Hercules missile which was solid fuel and much safer before I had gotten there.

It turned out I had nothing to do with the missiles whatsoever and I thought it was just as well because those soldiers had to work all types of crazy hours. I spent most of my career in the motor pool and for the last year and one half of my duty I had become the platoon sergeant for the motor pool detachment. The motor pool only worked office hours and we were off on Saturdays and Sundays just like as if we had a civilian job. The only exception to this was the occasional weekend inspection and we were excused from that due to the fact the company commander didn’t want us around  when other offices conducted inspections since our clothes were in bad shape due to grease and battery acid and there was nothing we could do about that. I remember the day when the first sergeant called me in to his office and told me to get lost during inspections and take the men with me. Anybody who was in the military would know how great this was. I say men because in those days there were no women mixed in with the men, they had their separate units.

Soldiers had a reputation for foul language in many cases it was probably deserved but I have to say on my trips to Fort Monmouth where there was at least one company of women, their platoon sergeant had us all beat. I had never heard a woman talk this way and I had come from a rough neighborhood.

Because of the hours I worked, I had a lot of free time which allowed me to take a part-time job as a cook at the commissary. I was married at the time and we lived in a house trailer on the base and I needed a second job because the Army certainly didn’t pay very much money at the time. It turned out there was a woman who ran the commissary during the daytime who hated soldiers. She wasn’t the one who hired me and every morning no matter how I cleaned up the commissary at night before I left, she would complain. I think she was afraid to fire me because it would look like she had something against me since everyone else knew I did a good job and the place was spotless when I left at night.

The commissary did pretty good at night and it was almost more than I could handle since I was all alone and had become popular especially on those days when no one liked the food in the mess hall. A story which I have told before I think is good enough to repeat. The commissary was set up with a long stainless steel counter with glass cases on the side and people used to line up along this counter to get to the part in the front where I was so they could put in their order, and it could get very busy. On this counter were condiments in bowls. It was ketchup, mustard and a slightly watery mayonnaise. On one particularly busy day I had a lot of people lined up and as they stood there a roach came from somewhere walked along above the counter and fell into the mayonnaise bowl and made a little blip. At that point everybody online turned around and walked out and believe me I couldn’t blame them. That was the only time I ever saw a roach in the commissary.

A lot of things happened in the motor pool, some of them were funny, and some of them were tragic. Fort Hancock was a very interesting place and had been around since Revolutionary War times. There was some very old structures there, but the bulk of the structures were from World War II. The motor pool was surrounded by concrete lookout towers. It wasn’t that they were entirely concrete but they were set in huge concrete blocks. They were composed of extremely thick steel pipes with a diameter in excess of 14 feet or thereabouts. They were made to stay up. There was a time when the military decided it was time for them to come down. Since the motor pool seemed  to be in the center of these towers it became the base to set off the explosives which had been planted around the towers. When the explosives were set off the towers still stood but the explosions had killed a naval captain who was in charge. He was actually the only one I saw killed when I was in the military.

I’ve gone back to the base twice and it is no longer a military base, but part of Gateway National Park. Before that it had also been a proving ground before it became a World War II Fort and various types of cannons were tested there. What most people don’t know is when Robert E Lee was a captain, he designed the battlements. Of course, that was before the Civil War in 1857. The fort stands today as a monument of past technology which spanned over 200 years and includes two huge guns which were raised and lowered behind concrete bunkers after they’ve fired. That experiment failed because they never operated correctly. Today, the fort is not in very good shape, it is probably suffering from lack of funds but is still an interesting place to visit.