March, 1964 – October, 1965

It was the Cold War! This was my Cold War Era! All the rest was HOT!

I had joined the Marines in a rather unusual way. I was what would be laughingly referred to as a political appointment. Yes Sir! Judge Dorr Davis of the Broward Country Juvenile Courts sent me well on my way in September of 1963, when he had my parents sign the documents in his courtroom when I was still Sixteen Years Old in September 1963.

Truthfully, I think it is the best thing that ever happed to me, and as silly as it sounds when you know a little about my history, it did save my life, and it did accomplish the one great purpose of the Armed Forces, It made me a man! No regrets! I owe everything I am today to the Marines, to the Cold War, and to the War in Vietnam, and most of all to Judge Dorr Davis.

Oh yeah! I had to wait until my seventeenth Birthday, but just like clockwork, the biggest Marine I ever saw, Sgt Bateman, was there at my parent’s home on my birthday, and I was on my way to Boot Camp at Parris Island SC.

Boot Camp in the Marines is tough, but it is even tougher when you are a wiseass Seventeen Year Old, and you guessed it, that was me! But, “Surprise! Surprise!” as the sitcom character, Gomer Pyle, would say, I made it through and was given my EGA (Eagle, Globe, and Anchor) upon graduation from Marine Corps Boot Camp. The only way you can become a Marine!

But, that was not the end of training, from Boot Camp, there was Infantry Training Regiment, and all Marines had to go to that training, because all Marines are Grunts first before anything else that they will be trained to do after the fact in the Marines!

Finally, I was placed in a Marine Line Company. I was placed in the Rifle Platoon of Echo Company, and I started my Marine tour of duty as a Rifleman in the fireteams of Corporals Kulpbrenner, Howard Free, Corporal Cloughtry, and others whose names have become a blur as time went by. They were a good group of men and they taught me a lot about being an Infantry Marine.

The 8th Marines, the regiment I was in, in the Second Marine Division were barracked in Camp Lejune, NC, main side, between the 10h Marine’s Barracks, and the 6h Marine’s Barracks. It was a short walk to the PX and to the EM’s Slopshut (Drinking hole), and the Mess Hall was immediately across the walkway from the Echo and Foxtrot Barracks, while the laundry was at the end of the line of 8th Marine Regiment Barracks.

The area was a beautiful, and it was a well-groomed area with a wide Grass grinder (Close Order Drill Field) and the athletic field between the 8th Marine’s Barracks and the 10th Marine's Barracks.

Sometimes, after morning inspections, a few times in Class A uniforms, but often times in Utilities, Drill was the order of the day, and we would drill for hours on the well-manicured grass of he common area grinder. We did our exercises for and hour each day, sometimes with, and other times without, our M-14 Rifles.

Being as we were in the change over period to the M-14 Rifle from the M-1 Rifle, we new Marines often heard the praises of the M-1 over the M-14 Rifle, but we were Marines and we were happy with the M 14 rifle we trained with, and it was better than going into battle with nothing but our teeth. The M-14 was a welcomed guest to any Marine.

Training at Camp Lejune was the same old endless marches into the back swamps of the North Carolina Coastal Region. You had to understand, Camp Lejune was either hot and it was humid, or it was cold and it was wet, but there was rarely anything difference of weather at Camp Lejune.

Fieldwork in Camp Swampy Lejune was in the tree filled forest complete with its own poisonous snakes, and its own quicksand, and its own tics and other wonderful training aids courtesy of the United States Marines. Aside form the forested areas there were beaches to practice beach landings on from the likes of the navy’s Mike and Peter boats as well as by Helicopters From LPHs off shore. An LPH was a converted Aircraft Carrier that carries assault helicopters and a battalion of Marines It really was the complete training area though, especially for what would lay ahead in my tour of duty with the Marines

But, The time at Camp Lejune was usually at a minimum, often times we were deployed on some sort of overseas FMF assignment.

A few months after arriving at the 8th Marines we were deployed on Operation Steel Pike 1.

This, Steel Pike, was a NATO exercise and it was in the fall of 1964. The Second Marine Division staged one of the biggest amphibious exercises in Marine Corps history. The entire division, minus a few outfits, and with some elements of the Second Marine Aircraft Wing embarked from Camp Lejeune, and Marine Corps Air Station Cherry Point, and MCAS Beaufort, and together we crossed the Atlantic Ocean, and we landed in the Andalucia region of Spain, in the province of Almeria, Spain.

This was in the dry southeastern corner of Spain, and it is generally a flat region that grows a lot of olives and is covered with sand and scorpions, and Pit Vipers. This was operation Steel Pike I, and there has been nothing like that has happened since then, that I know of.

The trip over to Spain was accomplished as we, my Battalion, the Second Battalion of the Eighth Marines, did on the LPH 7, the USS Guadalcanal. I seem to remember that there were other LPHs on the exercise, There was USS Boxer (LPH 4), and there was the USS Valley Forge (LPH 8). There was a Battalion of the 8th Marines on each of these LPHs. We were to be the Helo-Landing Regiment for the Division, while the 2nd Marine Regiment and the 6th Marine Regiment were the Sea Landing Assault troops in Mike and Peter Boats and in Amtraks, and they were on a combination of LSTs, APAs, and other such Naval Ships, and they would be the troops to climb down the nets on the side of the ships, and they would assault the beaches in Mike and Peter Boats, as I said before Amtraks.

While the other Regiments of the fleet were cramped for space on those smaller ships, we lived pretty well on the LPH. Their ships were so crowded that there wasn’t much the troops could do other than clean weapons and their equipment, or stand in line for chow, and it seemed like for those poor guys, the chow lines were never ending. They started at breakfast and continued all day until after evening meal. One of the few ways that they passed this time was to play Gin Rummy in the crew quarters that were a collection of racks set six high in some areas, and they could only play cardsin the opened walkway space between the racks (Beds).

While on the LPH, like I said, we lived much better. Our quarters were more livable, the Chow halls were bigger and could accommodate more people, and the Chow lines were much shorter. While, on the flight desk of the LPH, it provided an area where we could keep in shape, and to hold inspections, all be it, in the mid Atlantic, the ocean could be come very rough, and it was always an adventure to be standing at attention, and to be watching the ocean come up on the side of the aircraft carrier type ship only to see it go back down again, and to come up on the other side of the ship. It was a monster of a ship compared with the APAs and LSTs, but it seemed so small in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean.

As I recall it took the Division ten days, or two weeks, to cross the Atlantic, while maintaining unit integrity with the smaller and slower ships in the Marine Landing Fleet. We could only go as fast as he slowest ship in our group.

There was always the stupid things that happened on a cruise like this. I mean, everybody has idiots in the groups, and for us, while at Camp Lejune, there was a fellow that we called the MAD CRAPPER. He was a fellow that would leave a pile of his excrement in different areas of the Company area, and he never got caught at Camp Lejune. But, I heard that the 6th Marines had their own version of the fellow, and while we did not experience the attacks of The MAD CRAPPER on board the LPH-7, the 6th Marines did on their small ship, as was written about by others in the following bit of text that I had lifted from the Internet:
"Another tidbit of information about our Atlantic crossing, we had a "Phantom Shitter" in the battalion. The battalion chaplain published a daily newsletter with the help of the ship’s print shop. The Phantom Shitter would leave his signature on top of a copy of the chaplain’s newsletter. He didn’t strike every day, probably four or five times during the transit, and never on the return trip. Targets included the hood of the battalion commander’s jeep, a passageway in officer’s country, and the mess decks. Although efforts were made to catch him, he eluded capture. We never did find out who it was. Someone who didn’t like the chaplain? Or didn’t like the newsletter? Maybe it was the chaplain, or the battalion commander. Who knows?"

And, after reading that bit of news, a date long sense past my time as an Active Marine, I can only assume that he was one and the same man whom it was that did us dirty, and must have transferred from our Regiment to the 6th Marines Regiment, just before the operation was started, Although, there were too many to nail down any one man.

Anyhow, The Operation "Steel Pike 1," beach landing on the coast of Spain was the largest landing exercise in the Atlantic since World War II. And, our Helo-lift was something was not without its own deaths while coming ashore, we did lose 22 Marines in a crash of two of the UH 34 helicopters, and the sight was not a pretty one for us that just had gotten off one. I am quite sure that all the men on board those helicopters were dead before they hit he ground. It was a terrible sight. But, as it was, the operation had to continue, and after completing our 40-mile circuit of Andalucia on foot, we were taken back to our ship by Helicopter, and when all were on board, the individual ships of the assault fleet split up and went to different direction, and they all headed for various liberty ports in the Western Mediterranean and the Atlantic Coast and English Channel Coast of Europe.

Spain was dusty, and it was dirty, but the people we met were very friendly, with the exception of the Guardia Civil! I mean these guys were mean looking little SOBs that were on Horseback, and mostly in the country area. They worn something like Patten Leather Hats with the front brim flat up against the crown of their hat, and they had this great big cape, yes cape, that they wore, and under that cape was a submachinegun on a jungle sling that hung down along their sides on the level with their firing hand. I was told that these fellows had no problems with the using of that weapon, and they were pretty much the last word in the law of this area of the Franco Government ruled Country. Some of our guys that had served a Rota, Spain, had told us some pretty bad stories about these guys, and just looking at them, I believed them to be true.

Well, when we were boarded onto the LPH 7, we were immediately taken to Breast, France, for a couple of days of Liberty.

Breast France was a WWII German Sub port on the English Channel. But, the town was in France, what more can I say? The bars, they were dirty! The rest rooms, they were a hole in the floor, and you were never alone in one of them, because they were unisex over there. As it happened, while I was standing and I was doing my best shooting of old beer into this small hole in the ground on one of those Liberty nights, a French woman came into the room, and she just dropped panty at a hole next to me, and of course, she would look up and she would smile at me, and mine, as I just dried up, yet she just kept doing her thing with all of her female charms hanging out in the open. As stupid as it sounds, I started to grow, but she just got up and she picked up her panties, and she was gone!

But, all in all, the girls in France had longer hair in their armpits than they did on their head, what was with that? And, they smelled of rather cheap and aromatic perfumes that sort of made one’s eyes water when you got close to them. I had the feeling that they were masking other smells about them, anyhow, it was not conducive to even a short relationship.

Otherwise, they were the rudest, and the most disagreeable, and the dirtiest people on the face of the earth. It was a good day when we left France!

We set sail from Breast France, and we landed in Portsmouth, England.

Let me tell you, in the 60s England was ‘Party town’. The people were overly friendly, and there were members of the Royal Marines stationed there would stop us on the street with their families in the car, and they would ask if we would like to go to their place for a home cooked meal, and some English hospitality and drink. Man! England was a great place to be. I don't really think there was one Marine from our ship, anywhere in the fleet, that ever felt anything but altogether being a welcomed guest by the Brits of Portsmouth, England.

And, I might add, it was the same with the Brit women. You will never find anything bad written by me about the Brit hospitality towards our Marines. The Royal Marines in the bars would buy their American Cousins whatever was wished of them to drink. Those guys were real Party Animals. It was a GREAT place for liberty, and a welcomed change from France.

The trip home was uneventful, but it was much faster going then was taken going to Europe, as there were no slower ships slowing us down.

Arriving off of the North Carolina shore we were mounted into the Helicopters, and we were flown onto the soil of Camp Lejune. So ended Operation Steele Pike 1. My First NATO Exercise!

But, within another Two months we were sea bound again. This time we were not so lucky as to be on an LPH, instead, we were transported to Europe on an LST. Now, I could really feel sorry for how those men in the Sixth Marines and the Second Marines that accompanied us on Steel Pike.

The LST is a tanker ship with great big bow doors on the front of the ship, and in the hull of the ship that ran from doors to fantail there were Amphibious Tractors, Amtraks, that we would be making landings with all around the Mediterranean Sea. Believe me, riding in one of these Amtraks was a hoots. To start with, the driver would be revved up to the highest speed he could get out of those engines, and all of a sudden, he would let the brake go, and he would run that thing off of the front ramp at high speed, and into the deep water, and under the water, with all this water pouring in through the roof doors, and we would bob up from beneath the sea like a cork, and then he would motor his way to the shoreline to affect a landing on a hostile shore. What a thrill a minute it is to ride on an assault in one of these things!

But, the living quarters that were as I had described them in the Steele Pike story, were probably worst here because of the LST 1160, The USS Traverse County, was an old and a smaller ship that we were on. Whereas, the APA would carry a larger number of troops this particular LST was limited in the numbers of troops that could be carried. It was only our Company and the AMTrak Company that occupied the ship along with the Navy’s crew.

Living on a small ship was not even close to like it was living on the LPH. For instance, showers were limited to about two minutes a man, and they were taken in port and starboard side shifts (meaning the left side and the right side of the ship), and for much of the day the showers and the drinking water was shut down due to the limited capacity of storage water tanks and conversion capacity of salt water to fresh water on the small ship.

The LST 1160 USS Traverse County was a US Navy Transport ship, that was only 384 feet long and another 56 feet wide, with its bow doors being 17 feet tall, and it had a maximum complement of 600 troops and crew. Actually, it was not a bad ship considering that it was built in 1952.

On the sides of the ship were four great big causeways that acted as the ship's dock should it be needed on a foreign shore, or to make their own harbor for the transportation of equipment into a battle beach head. They also acted like barges when released from the sides of the ship to land large pieces of equipment should it be needed.

I am told that the ship is virtually unsinkable, but I would have preferred not to be on one of these ships if push came to shove in a combat situation.

We used to line up at the Aft of the ship on deck in all weather for chow at the rear Ladder well (Stair) of the ship. The mess hall could accommodate about twenty men at a time, and the Navy cooks were always in a bad mood, and their food showed what they thought of their duty.

Sometimes during bad weather, we could stand at the rear port (Navy for Door) for chow, and we could watch the bow of the ship raise and then arch, and then twist from side to side and then it would slam down on the water, and it would make a sound like an artillery round going off right under you, and below deck things were much worst as you could feel the ship bounce on the water as it slammed down. Truthfully, I never thought that Steel could bend like that, and all the time I feared the ship would break in half.

But, the very worst thing about this LST was that this was our home for six months while we cruised the Mediterranean Sea, provided that the ship did not sink or fall apart before we were done with our tour.

For anyone that has ever spent any time aboard an LST, probably the first thing that they will tell you about it, that they can remember, is the constant noise of the ship. If it isn't the engines, it is the bouncing on the water, and even on a glass like sea, there was the constant noise of the Deck Apes and their paint chipping from one end of the ship to the other. They would chip off every inch of paint on the ship from front to rear, and paint the ship, and when they were through painting, they would start chipping the paint off again. Add to that the steel of the ship rippling like an old can of Coke, and you will get the idea of what it was like.

But, they tell me, when there is bad, there is always some good comes of it. After all, we were going to be in the Mediterranean Sea for the next six months. There was Sicily, and there was Italy, and there was France, and Spain, and Turkey and Greece, and the different places we would stop and play war games with the different NATO Forces on old WWII battlefields in Sardinia and the likes. We would sometimes man the same positions that the Germans used during the Second World War, and we would think, "How in the hell did these guys get thrown out of these positions?" There was rocky Corsica and, of course, Sardinia just to name a couple. The whole area was just piles of rock with clear fields of fire in all directions. It was amazing to think that men actually threw them of and off of the islands.

The different ports of call were places that you could only ever dream of going to, but we were Marines and like always, duty calls, but from time to time, for instance, I was on guard duty on my 18th birthday on the fantail of the ship while we were docked in Naples, and there was the dock fight at the American Bar in Cannes, and the Scandinavian women that would pick us up on the Island of Majorca, Spain. Yet still there was Izmur, Turkey, where watching paint dry was a more exciting place to be, and if it wasn't for the dumb *** sailors that tried to steal a Turkish Flag, and almost became a guest of the Turk Government for the next hundred years, there would have been nothing to talk of about Turkey.

But, came June 65, and our tour of duty in Europe was coming to an end, and we thought we were going home, but as it was, we had been at sea for 7 of the last 9 months, and when we sailed through the Pillars of Atlas, as the Ancient Greeks and the Phoenicians called them (the Straits of Gibraltar) on our way home we thought, as we would follow the setting sun home to good old North Carolina, but soon the setting sun was lying off of our port side (to the left of the ship), which only meant we were headed north, and we were not going home.

Let me tell you, going through the English Channel on an LST is no walk in the park, and nothing like it was on the LPH. Guys that had not been seasick the whole 6 months were now meeting at the rails between the causeways, and more times than not, the sea was giving back to the individual more than he threw out to the sea, and many times the winds of the Channel were returning the Marine's offerings right back into their faces. It wasn't pretty a pretty sight at all!

Eventually, and what seemed like an eternity, we were being docked at Edinburgh Scotland.

Edinburgh is a beautiful place in June, and that was when we arrived there. It seemed to me that everything was up one side and down the other side of a hill in this city, and in the center of the city there was a Castle covered in ivy that must have been over many hundreds of years old. It was fantastic place.

Somehow, though, the Scots seemed less excited to see us. Not the women, surely, but rather the men wanted to prove something to themselves, or to us, I think. I saw one guy, just before he was damn near beat to death by a bloodied Marine, head butt the Marine while in a bar, and as bloodied as the Marine was from the broken nose, the poor Scotsman took a terrible beaten from this Marine.

I too had a disagreement with a Scot who felt like I, and Danny Daughtry, Don Kennedy, and a fellow name Janicki had taken up with his ‘birds as he called them. Well, I don’t know if it was me swinging first at him, or if it was him trying that headbutt thing on me first, but the timing was perfect, my right cross send him flying to the other side of the restroom where the man had followed me into, and I heard Lance Corporal Higgins talking from behind me.

”I saw the guy follow you in here. He has been watching you guys real close for the last half hour. The girl with me said that he was a bad one, and I better go check on my friend, but I see I didn’t need to!”

With that said, he passed by me, and he unzipped the zipper on his greens (We were wearing Greens because it was still pretty cold here after the Mediterranean Sea), and he urinated on the prone Scot as he lay bleeding on the floor, and the man started to move a little and to spit and to sputter from his inadvertent shower of ABD Beer (ABD = Already Been Drunk).

”Well! He’s alive anyway! I don’t think that he will be willing to go against too many more Marines though” He looked down at the guy, and he said, “Don’t do anything, just get up and go home. You’ve been embarrassed enough already. If either of us see you still here in five minutes, we’ll finish the job!”

The man rolled onto his knees, and then to his feet, and rather off balanced he walked out of the room, and we never saw him again.

Higgins was the fellow that went to Vietnam with me, and to the 7th Marines with me. He was a quiet guy, but he was as tough as nails.

Four days of US Marines is about all that any city can take before it is considered cruel and unusual punishment for our allies, and on the fourth day, we were leaving port, when it was noted that Janicki and Kennedy were not on board, and it was Daughtry that went to the Platoon CO and told him where the two Marines were at.

Somehow, we got the local Bobbies (Policemen) to go to the address and to get our two wayward Marines out of the arms of that Scot fellow’s girlfriend, and the Bobbies rode them back to fleet landing with that weird siren going and the two wayward Marines came running out of the police car with half their uniforms on, and it was lucky that the Navy still had the landing nets down over the causeways, because the gangplank had already been pulled in, and the ship was pulling away from the dock. Well, Kennedy was faster than was Janicki, and he caught onto the net, and Janicki followed, he also was able to catch a handful of net, and they both climbed aboard the ship.

Captain Duffy, a Supply Officer before he turned Infantry, and he should have stayed in supply, promised Office Hours for the two of them when we were headed home to the states, but first we were going to Norway.

Norway? Yes! Norway!

Not only were we going to Norway, but we were going over the top of Norway, and down the North East coast of Norway to an island that was just ten miles off of the border of the USSR.

It was on the 26th of June 1965, when we crossed the Arctic Circle at 10 Degrees East Longitude. This made all aboard the ship officially, by command of Boreas Rex, Ruler of the North Wind and Sovereign of all the Frozen Reaches it touches did thereby declare these Warm Blooded Newcomers to his Royal Domain, to be true Bluenose. The Honor is something like being a Shellback only going in the wrong direction as far as I was concerned. I hate cold weather!.

Well, we continued sailing north, and at this point, looking at the sun up there was no help to us any longer. It was light for 24 hours a day, and we kept going on, until one day we had two gigantic Russian Bombers flying over our ship. The plane was low enough to see clearly the face of the Russian gunner in the bubble aperture looking down on us.

I remember someone saying we were near Kirkenis, Norway, and we were going closer yet to the USSR border.

Finally, we were landed onto and Island that could best be described as a giant sponge. It was 6 Degrees, and we were told to not wear a field jacket with our uniform, or any heavy clothing. Hell, that should have been our clue right there that this was going to be anything but easy!

The Norwegian Northern Army was in trucks, and we, of course, were on the ground using that famous Biped power of the Corps. We chased those Norwegian Soldiers all over that island, and it was nonstop all the way. Like I said, the ground was something sponge like, and even where it looked like we would be stepping on dry ground we could find ourselves neck deep in Ice Cold water. It did not help that the Norwegians had these little electric fences that were pushing out a low voltage charge to keep the reindeer and caribou away from their vegetable crops that they had. With each time we stepped over one of these wire we were usually shocked right in the balls area, which only made us more mad at the Norwegians.

We had Marines dropping out because of heat exhaust, and I think it would have gone on for more than the 19 hours it did, had not a couple of US Marines not caught two of the Norwegian’s Trucks and burnt them up in protest, also, it was noted, the rough treatment of the Norwegian Soldiers by Marines that captured them. That was enough for the NATO Officials observing the exercise to get with the Commander of the US Force in Europe to stop the games before we really went to war with Norway.

As it was, when we were told to stand down, that our Corpsman, Doc Crepes, had a bottle of brandy with by special order of Colonel Ord, and he was like the famous St Bernard Dog that came to each one of us as he administered to each of us a shot of the magical medical elixir. But, we were so exhausted, and we were so wet from head to toe, and it never once felt like only 6-degree temperature, and we were falling asleep. Doc worked like a banshee trying to keep us all awake and on our feet so as we would not freeze to death, and finally, some sailors came around with arms full he distributed blankets to us to keep warm. The lucky guys, we thought, were the guys by the burning Norwegian Trucks, but the blankets helped tremendously.

Well, apparently, this was not the way that the operation was supposed to go, but our Captain, the former Supply Officer, was trying to make a name for himself as an Infantry officer, and he ran his men into the ground, when he was not supposed to do so, and he lost control of the company in doing so. This was not the way the operation was to be run.

Captain Duffy was replaced, ostensibly due to frost bitten toes, and the Executive Officer, Lt Lorienger took command of the company. We had about 30 Norwegian POWs at this point, and they were looking worried more and more, especially since we burned their trucks. I don’t think they had ever seen that in any of their war games before, nor had they been roughed up as much as the were by us. They really thought we were going to do them harm, and so did I.

We were pulled back to the ship, and we were finally on our way home!

Remember Kennedy and Jinicki?

They finally got their office hours on their way home, and it was Lt Loienger found them each in violation of missing movements, and each were confined to the ship until we returned to the USA, which was our next port of call, and they were fined $10.00 each, and given a carton of cigarettes from the ships stores. Now, that was Marine Corps justice beck in those days!

When we returned to the USA, half the company already had orders ready for them. Kennedy, Daughtry, and I were sent to Fort Meade Maryland to National Security Agency, and we were all given ten days leave and travel time to report to our next station.

Ft Meade was nice, but the Marines had just landed in Vietnam, and that was where I wanted to be, but with a Top Secret Clearance, it was not what the Marines wanted of me, and each day that I went to the CO and requested Transfer, I was told no! Finally, during, or just after and Eight Man Football Game with the 11th Cal in Late September, or early October, 1965, I started a fight with the Soldiers, and the Army Commander wanted my butt nailed to the wall.

I got my transfer approved and was out of the Barracks after the weekend and on my way to Vietnam!

So, that was my Cold War!

This message has been edited. Last edited by: Joe_Carey,

Posted by Joe:

quote:

This, Steel Pike, was a NATO exercise and it was in the fall of 1964. The Second Marine Division staged one of the biggest amphibious exercises in Marine Corps history. The entire division, minus a few outfits, and with some elements of the Second Marine Aircraft Wing embarked from Camp Lejeune, and Marine Corps Air Station Cherry Point, and MCAS Beaufort, and together we crossed the Atlantic Ocean, and we landed in the Andalucia region of Spain, in the province of Almeria, Spain.

This was in the dry southeastern corner of Spain, and it is generally a flat region that grows a lot of olives and is covered with sand and scorpions, and Pit Vipers. This was operation Steel Pike I, and there has been nothing like that has happened since then, that I know of.

Now Joe, You guys did it all wrong. You should have landed in the northeast section of Spain and came ashore on the nude beaches.
We had a pilot who flew along the beach in a FAC OV-10 Bronco and we heard that he got in big trouble.

quote:

Originally posted by Bullhunter:
Posted by Joe:

quote:

This, Steel Pike, was a NATO exercise and it was in the fall of 1964. The Second Marine Division staged one of the biggest amphibious exercises in Marine Corps history. The entire division, minus a few outfits, and with some elements of the Second Marine Aircraft Wing embarked from Camp Lejeune, and Marine Corps Air Station Cherry Point, and MCAS Beaufort, and together we crossed the Atlantic Ocean, and we landed in the Andalucia region of Spain, in the province of Almeria, Spain.

This was in the dry southeastern corner of Spain, and it is generally a flat region that grows a lot of olives and is covered with sand and scorpions, and Pit Vipers. This was operation Steel Pike I, and there has been nothing like that has happened since then, that I know of.

Now Joe, You guys did it all wrong. You should have landed in the northeast section of Spain and came ashore on the nude beaches.
We had a pilot who flew along the beach in a FAC OV-10 Bronco and we heard that he got in big trouble.

Well, You know how it is Bullhunter, we lost our compass and this was the quickest way to to the vineyards for Spain. We figured, enough wine and we did not care what they looked like!

That was very well written and very interesting. Thanks for writing it, and welcome home Marine...........

quote:

Originally posted by Golgoth:
That was very well written and very interesting. Thanks for writing it, and welcome home Marine...........

Oh Yeah! There is nothing like living in a large can and bouncing around the oceans to make you really appreciate being a land creature. Actually, It realy wasn't so bad.

I was just a baby back then, 17 and 18 years old, and everything was so new to me, and it was exciting, the good times and the bad times all. It was great!

Thank you very much for your kind comments, Golgoth.

Wow, one day I'll sit down and write my exploits. I used to come home on leave, take about 5 minutes to catch everyone up on what I had been doing for the last 2-3 years.
I made it to France and Hollnad, and a few other countries thanks to uncle sam. Hehehe, the german frauleins had some serious pit hair to match their leg fur. The americanized ones took care of themselves a bit better. When I got to Germany on my 1st tour there. Everyone had to take a 2 week German Headstart class. Teach you the basics, culture, some of the language. On the last day, we took a mandatory field trip to Frankfurt to learn the mass transit system. Well, everyone knows what is across the street from the Frankfurt bahnhof! Needless to say, it was very enjoyable outing.

quote:

Originally posted by Joe_Carey:
March, 1964 – October, 1965
The 8th Marines, the regiment I was in, in the Second Marine Division were barracked in Camp Lejeune, NC, main side, between the 10h Marine’s Barracks, and the 6h Marine’s Barracks. It was a short walk to the PX and to the EM’s Slopshut (Drinking hole), and the Mess Hall was immediately across the walkway from the Echo and Foxtrot Barracks, while the laundry was at the end of the line of 8th Marine Regiment Barracks.

The area was a beautiful, and it was a well-groomed area with a wide Grass grinder (Close Order Drill Field) and the athletic field between the 8th Marine’s Barracks and the 10th Marine's Barracks.

Geeze joe -

I guess things change. I was stationed at Camp Lejeune from 1961 to 1963 with the 2nd Pioneer Battalion (Combat Engineers), 2nd Marine Division. When I was there, the 10th Marines were nowhere located near the 8th Marines, or the 6th for that matter. They were up by us Combat Engineers, you Grunts were way on the other side of the Camp.

In my day at Lejeune, we didn't have grass grinders, we had plenty of asphalt grinders to practice drill. That is, if we practiced drill at all. And in my day, Regiments had entire areas on the Camp with multiple barracks not just a single barracks. As a 2nd Marine Division Combat Engineer NCO, I was all over the 2nd Marine Division areas of Camp Lejeune. If my Platoon Sergeant had sent me to the "8th Marines Barracks" for a work order, I'd look at him with a "Huh?"

The only "laundry" the Combat Engineer Battalion companies had was a coin-operated washing machine in each squadbay ($0.10/wash). You 8th Marine Grunts had a laundry? I'm jealous.

I guess things at Lejeune changed significantly from the time I was there in 1963 and when you were there in 1964.

Or not.

- LarSim

USMC Combat Engineer
1959-1965

This message has been edited. Last edited by: larsim,