Tales of the 172nd Light Infantry Brigade (ARCTIC)

I woke up this morning and it occurred to me that while I had documented my travels to and from Alaska, I never really talked about living there. I have met several people who have lived in Alaska and I can honestly say that I have never encountered anyone who seemed indifferent to the state. You either love it, or you hate it. There doesn’t seem to be much of a middle ground. I suppose this is because Alaska is a land of extremes. Everything is kinda the same in Alaska, but yet it is different. 

Okay, what do I mean about kinda the same, but different? Sometimes it was the little things. One of the first things I noticed driving around Fort Richardson was there were these six-foot tall red metal bars with a three inch “Flag” welded on the end, attached to every fire hydrant. These were laying over (It was June) and my wife asked me, “What is their purpose?” I replied, “They turn them up to a vertical position in the winter, so that the fire department can find them in the snow.” In most places, you don’t have to be concerned with so much snow on the ground for so long that you lose sight of important things, like “Where is the damn fire hydrant?” 

Another insight that I was moving in to a brave, new world was when I went to the Central Issue Facility (CIF) to draw my field gear. At every military post, you were issued your standard field equipment for the region (your field equipment issue varied from region to region) and Alaska was no exception. What was unusual was the volume of equipment we were issued. At most posts, CIF issue required a duffle bag to hold all your specialized field equipment. Helmet, pistol belt, load bearing equipment or LBE (A harness you attach to the pistol belt to allow you to carry several pounds of equipment on it.) a liner for your field jacket, sleeping bag, a rucksack and mat to sleep on, were all part of this equipment. The difference here was you were issued so much more equipment. 

Aside from the basic stuff you got at every assignment, here you also received:

• An ARCTIC sleeping bag (rated for below negative 20 F)
• Field Shirts (Similar to old army green fatigues but made out of the same material as a wool army blanket.)
• Field pants with suspenders. (Worn over your normal uniform pants to form a second layer.)
• Arctic parka
• Arctic over-whites (White covers for your parka and field pants)
• Trigger-finger mittens (Mittens with one finger for your index finger so you could fire your rifle in the cold.)
• Arctic mittens (For when it was so damn cold you didn’t worry about firing the rifle.)
• A full-face balaclava
• Arctic face mask (for when the balaclava wasn’t enough)
• Arctic boots (Also known as Mickey Mouse boots. Cold weather boots to keep your feet from getting frostbite in sub-zero weather)

We were issued a bunch of other items, (total issue was five large bags of equipment) and when you were finished, you signed a hand receipt with a value exceeding a month’s gross pay.  So, okay, this place was a tad bit different than I was accustomed to, when I was assigned to Fort Hood, Texas. 

Next came some specialized ARCTIC training which every newly assigned soldier was required to complete. The first training requirement upon arrival was your Cold Weather Indoctrination class (CWI). CWI was a two-week class on how to survive in an arctic environment. It felt weird taking the class in the middle of the summer. It was 65 degrees outside and you were learning how to avoid freezing to death in the winter. Then I occurred to me that while it was mid-July, winter in Alaska started a mere six weeks later, in September. CWI was taught in the summer, but the final exam was not given until later in the fall. 

The final exam required one thing, cold weather. On the first night, when the weather was forecast to be minus 20, all the “Arctic Cherries” (People who had not experienced the Alaska winter.) were informed that after retreat (5 PM for you civilians), to report for their final CWI exam. You brought your rucksack, sleeping bag and mat etc., and you had to be ready to go at 1800 hours. The exam was simple. We were trucked out to a field site in the local training area and dropped off in the woods. We would be picked up in the morning in time to go to breakfast, have fun. Our task was surviving the night and not getting frostbite in the process.

The senior Non-commissioned officer (NCO), a Staff Sergeant, was in charge and he merely told us to stay within eyesight of one another. We all picked out our spots to bed down for the night. There were no tents, cots or heaters, only a porta-john because pollution regulations and the impracticability of trying to dig a latrine in the frozen ground. We were all on our own to deal with the elements. I didn’t like to take chances with the weather so I chose a spot to bed down under an evergreen (just in case it snowed). There I laid out my bed roll and sleeping bag. We didn’t waste much time milling around as it was soon dark. As night fell, all you really wanted to go was curl up inside that sleeping bag and get/stay warm. 

We were taught dressing in layers. Everyone was wearing long underwear and several layers of cold weather clothing. I took off my mountain boots, then climbed into my arctic sleeping bag fully clothed (it was below zero already. The temperature dropped fast as it was a clear night). The one thing you could not do, was sleep fully clothed. Sleeping fully clothed resulted in your sweating and moisture condensing in your clothes was one of the fastest ways you could freeze to death. I waited until I was warm enough in the sleeping bag to almost break into a sweat, then I opened the bag and removed a layer of clothing. I laid these inside the sleeping bag alongside my legs, laid back down and zipped up again. You repeated this process until you were down to your skivvies and then you zipped up for the night. I slept well enough and woke up all warm and toasty. I unzipped the sleeping bag and sat up, lit a cigarette (I had that nasty habit then) and basked in the morning light until I started to get chilly, then I dressed for the day. Passing the CWI test gave you confidence in what you learned and we were signed off on that requirement when the platoon sergeant picked us up that morning.

Fort Richardson is located in the suburban shadow of Anchorage, the largest city in Alaska. One of the other survival techniques we were strongly encouraged to follow was to keep adequate survival supplies in our personal vehicles. Food, clothing, blankets, spare parts for the vehicle, extra spare tires, were all recommended. If you drove ten minutes out of the Anchorage city limit, in any direction, you were five minutes into the wilderness. That doesn’t seem like a lot until your vehicle breaks down and you hike five miles back to civilization in four-feet of snow in sub-zero temperatures. It was always in the back of your mind that this place was always trying to kill you. Alaska knows no mercy, it was up to you to know how to survive.

Alaska was one of the first places I was stationed with a standardized physical training (PT) uniform. When I joined the military in 1978, we were still old school and the standard PT uniform was fatigue pants, tee shirt and combat boots. Somewhere between 1978 and 1984, some genius decided that combat boots and a duty uniform was unhealthy to run in. Physical training needed running shoes and sportswear. At my first assignment, PT uniform was civilian sportswear. (Running shoes, shorts and tee shirt, sweatshirts and sweatpants when it got cooler etc.) At Fort Richardson, there was a specified uniform. Artillery Red (Yes, this is a real color) sweatshirts emblazoned with the battalion logo and navy-blue sweatpants (you still could pick your own shoes). The only modifications were as it got colder, the balaclava and trigger-finger mittens were added. I also learned through painful experience also to add a sock strategically located in my underpants to keep a prized appendage of mine warm too. PT was conducted no matter how cold, no matter how much it snowed. If there was snow on the ground, then exercises were done inside the motor pool shop. (It had an open area the size of a small warehouse and was heated.) The only time I ever saw PT cancelled was when it rained.

We ran in formation to cadence just like everywhere else, but there were little differences. Take a four mile or longer run for over half an hour period. In freezing temperatures, you will see and experience some interesting things. We wore knit blue full-face balaclavas, red sweatshirts and blue sweatpants. At the end of the PT run, we’d all be covered in frost. (We looked like snowmen.) As you ran and worked up a sweat, the sweat evaporated and passed through your clothing. There it would condense and freeze and, you ended up covered in frost from the top of your head to your feet. You learned to run with your head turned slightly to one side so you didn’t run through your breath. This was to prevent freezing your eyelashes shut from the moisture you exhaled.

We’d been in Alaska a few weeks and we’d moved into housing on post. My assignment had been changed on arrival and we were re-directed from Fort Wainwright to Fort Richardson. Our household goods however, had been shipped to Fairbanks thus delaying their delivery. For a while, we lived using temporary furnishings from housing. My wife, only had a radio for her source of news and entertainment. (Our household goods were still in Fairbanks.) One day she was telling me about a reported problem with Aleuts she’d heard on the radio news. She wondered why game wardens couldn’t just shoot them? (Aleut was an unfamiliar term and she assumed they were some sort of indigenous wildlife.) I had to break it to her that Aleuts were Alaskan Indians and that they might take a dim view of being shot at.

Nothing humbles you more than the Alaskan winter. Alaska has four seasons, just like the rest of the world, they are name them differently; June, July, August, and Winter. This became very apparent to me the day I planned to winterize my trusty Ford F-150 pickup truck. It was a Saturday morning in late October, 1985, a day that I’ll never forget. The Friday before had been a beautiful fall day and then I woke up to a deep freeze. The plan was to change to a lighter weight engine oil (In Texas I’d used fairly 10w40 weight oil) to avoid any trouble starting it during the winter months (Another lesson from CWI). The sudden temperature change had caught me by surprise and now, just like I’d been warned, the engine wouldn’t crank. I assumed the battery was old and weak (I’d bought the truck used, the summer before my Alaska assignment.). My neighbor took me to the post auto parts store to buy a new battery. Lo and behold, after installing the new battery, the truck still would not turn over. 

We tried to jump start the truck without success and when It finally occurred to us that the 10W40 was so thick that the starter could not turn the crankshaft through the oil. This was confirmed as it took four hours to drain most of the oil from the engine. After adding enough warmed 5w30 winter weight the engine finally started. By noon, since the temperature was slightly above freezing, we took that opportunity to also install a coolant heater. The coolant heater percolated coolant so that the truck engine would stay warm at night. In Alaska, power outlets mounted on posts in front of your primary parking space for that purpose. In winter months, when you parked your car for the night, you turned on the defroster and left it set, before you shut down the engine. This allowed coolant to circulate through the heater core. The heat would rise up the open defroster vents and keep the windshield free from ice and the cab toasty warm too.

To be continued ….

Resurrecting the Mustang

It was the summer of 1988. I was completing my Advanced Instruments portion of my flight training and coming up on my first break since I had started training in February. My wife’s car (a 1968 Ford Mustang she’d bought from her father before our marriage) had just spun a bearing in the engine requiring an overhaul. Because we needed 2 functional cars, I’d bought a 3rd card (a 1972 Ford LTD Station Wagon) we named Bernadette as a temporary vehicle while the Mustang was sidelined. Money was tight. We had a new baby, two other children and the normal bills people have, but I had Anna, the greatest money manager a husband could have. She had managed to work the budge out to where I could afford to fix her car.

The repair of the car was going to be a well-orchestrated and timed maneuver. I had a Thirteen-day gap between Advanced Instruments (The Bain of my existence in flight school) and Basic Combat Skills. During that two weeks I had two, two-hour classes and no other demands upon my time. The engine overhaul was a go.

This is not an endeavor I was taking lightly. I had never rebuilt an engine solo before. I had worked on several with my father growing up and done some engine work with my brother (a master mechanic) and I had been a Wheeled-Vehicle Mechanic as a soldier before I had gone to flight school. But even there I had never rebuilt an engine as that was work done at a higher maintenance level than I had been assigned. Regardless, here I was borrowing the neighbor’s engine hoist and lifting this engine out of the car by myself. My neighbor was working and Anna was busy keeping track of three boys leaving essentially on my own.

Pulling the engine was pretty forthright and I cannot recall any major hurdles. It seems the engine came out with the minimum of hassle and mistakes by yours truly. The engine teardown also went pretty smoothly. I’m sure I’d called my father and talked to my neighbor Stanley about different things and I was prepared for what I needed to get done. I took the 289 cubic-inch engine block, crankshaft, camshaft, and heads to a local machine shop to have the block checked and machined as needed. I knew the heads needed some valves replaced, new valve seats and seals and new bearings for the cam and crank. I got a call from the machine shop the next day telling me that the crankshaft could not be salvaged but that he had a used one available for$100 or so. I told him fine and to continue with the machining of the engine. No other surprises emerged and I picked up the reworked block with cam and crank installed, and the reworked heads. Now it was my job to put it back together.

While the engine was being reworked, I had taken the time to clean up the engine bay and to try and assemble all the parts I would need for the build. Since I was rebuilding, all the build parts plus whatever was needed for an engine tune up, (Plugs, points, filters etc.) were also needed. The engine had failed due to the manufacturer’s use of a nylon toothed timing gear on the camshaft. They were used to make the engine quieter but they had a defect that as they aged the teeth on the gear became brittle and would break off. These bits of nylon would them make their way through the oil channels to the oil pan. When enough had broken off, they were sucked into the oil pump inlet where the eventually clogged the filter screen on the pump. This deprived the engine of oil and the main crank bearings failed due to oil starvation. As a result, both the oil pump and the timing gear and timing chain were also replaced.

The new timing gear was solid metal and is still working to this day. I gapped and installed new piston rings .030 oversize due to cylinder wear. (I was lucky as the cylinder wear was even and little machining of the cylinders was required.) and over the next few days installed the pistons and heads, adjusted the valves, installed the new oil pump and timing gear assembly. I can clearly remember one moment in this build. I was torqueing down the head bolts on the engine and my oldest two sons (David & Kevin) were watching me with great interest. I could see in their eyes the amazement that their father was a great mechanic who could rebuild engines and fix anything. At the same time, their father was praying to God to let this damn thing work. I found that moment so iconic and ironic.

Finally, the engine is together. I got the hoist out, drop the engine back into the car, bolted up the transmission and connect all the wiring and hoses. Now comes the moment of truth. Will it start? With great trepidation, I got into the driver’s seat and turned the key. The engine fired up immediately! Unfortunately, there was also a loud metallic squall associated with the engine. A quick recon revealed that I’d made only one assembly error, I had installed the flywheel backwards on the engine and the 3/8-inch difference was just enough that the flywheel was rubbing on the transmission bell housing. Three hours later, I had pulled the block back out, reversed the flywheel and reinstalled the engine. Viola! The engine started without a problem. A little fine tuning and minor adjustments and the build was finished and the car resurrected. I think I even had a day to spare.

A few weeks later, we determined that we couldn’t afford to keep three cars and that the 1968 Mustang and the 1977 F-150 Supercab were the vehicles to keep so we decided to sell Bernadette. (I really liked that car too.) I put for sale signs in the back windows and it was only about a week before we got a call from some nice soldiers from the Netherlands who decided to buy the car. $600 in traveler’s checks later, the car was sold and we went on to our next adventure.

The Joys of Driving a Semi

For three years of my life (1978-1981) I worked for RAM Industries, an insulation sub-contractor in southern Indiana. At the beginning, I thought that I might be working for a company that was going somewhere. That somewhere ended up a dead-end road but that is another story. But first, a bit of background.

RAM Industries was the brainchild of Richard Antonio Madonia (You can see where the RAM came from). When I first started there, the company was headquartered in a shack, in a warehouse complex in Clarksville, Indiana. I was hired as an insulation installer and for the next three years of my life I itched. Fiberglass is not a fun product to play with and if you work with it any period of your life, you become accustomed to itching.

Over the years I worked there, I started as an installer then I took over the warehouse and eventually I also inherited driving the semi-tractor trailer we used to make deliveries to General Electric Appliance park off of Newburg Road in Louisville, Kentucky. When I started, RAM was a growing concern. They had just bought out a competitor, Lyon Insulation and they were quickly becoming one of the largest insulation contractors in the Louisville area. They secured contracts with Crest Communities and Ryan builders and RAM was growing. Rick was a forward thinker and a great salesman. One of the things he wanted to do was eliminate his dependence on Owens Corning for blown in fiberglass. So, he created a new sub-corporation making his own blown in fiberglass and called it RAMs Wool.

This operation utilized scrap insulation bought from General Electric (GE) from their recycling operation and hence this was our initial contact with GE. From there, Rick quickly created another sub-corporation and Thermacoustics was born. About the same time, RAM moved from Clarksville, to Bennettsville where Rick had bought an abandoned warehouse, conveniently across the street from my house. Thermacoustics made die cut fiberglass parts and our main contract was with GE making the sound wrap for dishwashers. This is where the Semi-Truck and I come together.

The semi-tractor was a well-used 1971 International Fleetstar. The Fleetstar design was tried and true old school conventional design that had been essentially unchanged from the 50s. This truck was no prize and its main desirable feature for RAM besides being cheap, old and worn out, like all the other RAM trucks, was that it had a gasoline engine. Its transmission was a four-speed with a two-speed axle (No ten-speed road ranger like most tractors) and while it had tandem axles, the second axle was a “dead-axle” (no drive) and air suspension. This truck was old and tired and if we had been hauling cargo that weighed anything, it would not have lasted a couple weeks. To make this tractor look good in comparison, RAM also bought a pair of Strick 40-foot trailers. These were rejects from a scrap yard and looked like it. It took a lot of work and engineering to just get the lights to minimally work and again since we carried no load of any weight, the trailer brakes were not a major concern.

Three days a week, Monday, Wednesday and Friday, I got up about 3 AM and made an early morning delivery to GE. Technically, the doors to Building 3, where I delivered, opened at 6 AM. These were the outer doors to docking bays at building three. Six docking bays with outer and inner doors. You opened the outer door, then backed your trailer into a 90-foot-deep bay up to the dock, where there was a second inner door. Once at the dock, you closed the outer door and waited for the first shift to start at 7:30. Trucks were unloaded in the order of arrival so it was best to get there at 6, and that is what I did. At 7:30, the inner doors opened and if you were lucky, someone would condescend to start to unload you by 8 or 8:30. On the average, I was getting out of the plant somewhere after 9. One of the other advantages of the early arrival and the slow unload was I generally missed the seven to nine AM morning rush hour.

This day began normally in every way. The trailer had been loaded the day before and I’d already fueled it and had it parked ready to go. By 4:30 I was at work and on the road by 5. I arrived at Appliance Park, building three at 6 and backed into Bay 1, closed the door to the bay and climbed into the cab for a nap. Back up at 7:30 and we had the 3,000-pound load (The trailer was cubed out top to bottom, front to back, the load just weighed nearly zero.) unloaded by 9 or so. Now for a quick trip back to the warehouse empty.

The route back was simple. Newburg Road north to the Watterson Expressway, West on the Watterson maybe a quarter-mile then the on ramp to Interstate 65 north. This ramp looped around the Kentucky Fair and Exposition Center as it merged into three northbound lanes. The interstate then turned to the right and up an overpass crossing Eastern Parkway before heading downtown. Eastern Parkway was also landmarked by the Ralston Purina grain silos that were adjacent to I-65.

I could usually manage to wind out this poor tired truck by the end of the ramp and somewhere between 55 and 58 MPH was top end. I made the lazy right turn and I climbed over the rise of the Eastern Parkway overpass in the center lane to be greeted by a sea of red brake lights.

The entire highway was at a complete stop. I slammed on the brakes and went for the slide of my life in a cloud of blue-gray tire smoke. It was fortunate that the center lane was clearer and I was going between cars stopped in the inner and outer lanes. I look ahead and I see myself closing way too fast, bearing down on a light blue 1978 Mercury Monarch with a white half vinyl roof. I had my entire 6-foot plus frame bearing down on the air brakes in the five-and-a-half-foot cab praying that I wouldn’t kill anyone in the wreck. The trailer started to jackknife to the left and I gently turned into the skid as I watched the distance close on the Mercury. Time seemed to slow as 16 tires were squalling and I was still trying to figure out how I had gotten into such a mess.

Finally, I came to a stop. It was a miracle! I looked over the nose of the tractor and all I could see the front half of the roof and the hood of the Mercury. I couldn’t have missed the bumper by more than a few inches. Then all the smoke and burning rubber smell, enveloped us, adding to the flavor of the situation. I also have always wondered what the driver of the Mercury thought about when he heard the noise and looked to see the huge grill of that red International truck bearing down on him shrouded in a cloud of blue smoke. I’m sure he was soiling his pants, I know I was. Eventually, the traffic cleared and I managed to get back to Bennettsville without any further incident.

It was only a few weeks later that I had learned of the precarious financial situation of RAM and all the other sub-businesses when GE stopped production at Building three for about a year. RAM quickly closed down after there were no more GE deliveries. Rick had mortgaged the business to tool up for GE and had no contingency for the sudden end of the contract. Thus, my time with RAM had come to an end.