Seeing a pair of Saudi officers in the mess hall at Pensacola Naval Air Station was a mere curiosity in 1986. My squadron had sent me there to attend something called Naval Aircrewman Candidate School. The Naval Officer Candidate School across the street from us, not long before portrayed in the film An Officer and a Gentleman, was our model. For them it was their boot camp, Officer Training School (OTS) with an aviation focus. Candidates wearing comic chrome helmets were continually harried by Marine Drill instructors, all of senior enlisted rank.
For us it was bootcamp-lite. Very light. Up early for physical training and classes and usually done and at liberty by three or so in the afternoon. The course was dominated by water survival training. You did things like swim a mile in a flight suit, tread water for ten minutes in same (not as easy as it sounds), and of course the legendary "Dilbert Dunker", a simulated water crash wherein you had to escape blindfolded from a great big barrel dropped in the water and turned upside down.
A couple of days camping hungry at Elgin Air Force base constituted survival training. The land there was spare woods of small thin trees, strafed by the sound of OV-10 Warhogs and occasionally the sinister drone of "Puff the Magic Dragon", a C-130 mounted with a 25mm gatling gun.
Pensacola was pleasant, especially compared to the giant scrub patch that is Camp Pendelton.
Spanish moss draped the trees and the architecture was colonial. Overhead you might see the bases' Blue Angels flying team practicing. We chased girls at night and talked about it in the day, without shame. Political correctness wasn't here yet.
9/11 was years away.
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Power working behind the scenes used to be so much more subtle. The pancake make-up was barely lifted from the president's increasingly ...
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2 comments:
Dennis:
I remember Pensacola of those bygone days as well. Hell, it was pretty much the same up until the mid-to-late Oughts. However a recent influx of cash from a seemingly benevolent former hospital administrator who struck it rich has radically transformed the place from a sleepy beach town with a massive military presence to a more “cosmopolitan” small city. I hear a lot more foreign languages in the grocery store than in those bucolic bygone days.
From the comfort of my living room sofa as I type this, I can see the contractors working diligently across the street, putting the finishing touches on the three (3!) new houses they built where only one had stood for the previous 75 years or so. This sort of thing has accelerated since the Great Recession wiped out a decade of housing value “gains”. Now it appears we are in bubble territory again. This follows a general trend of massive construction spending over the past four years. I honestly don’t know where the money is coming from.
As for the shooting a few weeks ago, it seems as though it’s almost disappeared from the radar even here. I’ve seen no word on the fate of the SA military personnel who were allegedly recording the event, nor any follow up on a specific motive after the initial few days, other than the expected “no immediate threats from other SA military” pronouncement by the Feds. And so it goes.
Should you ever decide to visit your old stomping grounds again, please remember my long-standing invite for a beer and some good old Florida cracker seafood. Trader Jon’s is long gone, but there’s still a few of the old places around if you know where to look.
Merry Christmas.
-Geschrei
Thanks. I hope to take you up on that.
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