The Next Phase Begins

When I arrived at Keesler AFB in Biloxi, MS back in April of 1973, all the technical schools were running from 6 AM to midnight in 3 shifts named (not surprisingly) A, B and C. (It was quite well organized - almost as if it were a "military operation".) I spent most (but not all) of my time on "A shift" (6AM to noon), which meant I had to be in front of the dorm sometime around 5AM for the daily briefing after which we "formed up" on the road behind the building and marched to school... As I recall, that meant getting up sometime around 4:15 AM... And I'll have more to say about that in a later post.

Aside: All the dorm buildings in the "Keesler triangle" were demolished and rebuilt a few years ago (as was Cody Hall where most of the electronics schools were) so there is almost nothing left that I remember. They even got rid of the roads that ran across the triangle. Back in my day Falcon Street ran near the bottom and Phantom Street across the middle. Our buildings were located between the two streets not too far from the southwest corner.

The bowling alley (now the Vandenberg Community Center?) was across Falcon Street from the dorm, we were right next to one of the chow halls and a only a block or two from a small BX (base exchange), so it was actually a pretty good location. The only downside was the distance from the schools. We had to march across almost the entire base of the triangle (on Falcon), then halfway up one side and across the flight line (past the reviewing stands) to hangar row where the training buildings were... That was well over a mile and we did it twice a day (there and back)... Yes - I know that's not terribly far, but we're talking about the Mississippi Gulf Coast here (think heat, humidity and torrential rain)...

OK - this part was really cool:
I was originally scheduled to graduate from radar maintenance school in mid-January 1974 which meant I'd have a 2 week break for the Christmas holidays (it's called "Keelser Exodus" now) then I'd have to return for a couple of weeks to finish my training. But based on my test scores I was allowed to take Basic Electronics Training self-paced. That normally took something like 10 weeks (out of the 39 week total), but I completed it in 4 weeks which allowed me to finish radar maintenance school at the end of November. And that meant I got to spend about a month at home over the holidays before heading to my next assignment... But I'm getting ahead of myself :-)

I recently ran across some comments online indicating that there's a lot of people on "power trips" at Keesler these days, but I don't remember it being at all like that back in 1973 and I can think of a handful of possible explanations:

First: The military was not all-volunteer yet... Those of us who enlisted were mostly hippies in search of free food and career training. The point is I don't remember anyone being particularly "Gung Ho" :-)

Second: My squadron was made up entirely of electronics trainees. We tended to be smarter than most (according to our Qualification Exam scores) and our stay at Keelser was lengthy (6 to 9 month). So it's possible that the TIs in our outfit were more lenient with us than in some of the other outfits.

Third: The drinking age on base was 18 and beer was super cheap. (Two for a quarter on Tuesday nights at the airman's club). Yeah - we were "toasted" a lot of the time.

Fourth: If they had somehow managed to round up all the "dope" in the triangle it probably would have filled a semi trailer... OK. That's a slight exaggeration, but there was a lot if it - and if you got caught all they did was slap you on the wrist and make you pee in a cup for a while afterward. (That was officially known as "Operation Golden Flow".)

Keesler was still undeniably a military base... In addition to all the marching and saluting you had to keep your room clean, floors shined, fatigues starched and pressed and boots polished, and school could be tough at times... But I don't recall there being any homework, which meant we had lots of free time... And sometimes we even did things that didn't involve getting wasted :-)

So yeah - I have to admit that (on the whole) I had a pretty good time.