Page 47 - Winterling's Chasing the Wind

One night I was assigned to guard the Officers Club between 10 PM and 2 AM. The
night was pitch-black, and the air was filled with the eerie distant sound of the song
“Harbor Lights”. Those were four long hours, and we were eager to get back to our
barracks around 3 AM. We were only asleep about 2 hours when the lights came on in
the barracks and we were told to get dressed in our fatigues to pull “KP”. That’s
Kitchen Police where we worked in the Mess Hall, setting up the food line, the
condiments on the tables, and a lot of other things like mopping the floors, emptying
garbage cans, and then peeling potatoes for the next meal. If we were lucky, we got to
eat an ice cream bar between meals. It seemed like an endless day until we could finally
mop the floors and turn out the lights around 8 PM.

We had inspections when an officer
entered the barracks and we had to
stand at attention. Our beds had to be
tightly made, so tight that a quarter
would bounce if it was tossed on the
blanket. Our clothes had to be orderly
hung on hangers behind our bed, and
our towels and underwear had to be
“rolled securely” in our footlockers at
the foot of the bed. We went 8 weeks
before we got a pass to go into San
Antonio. I got a picture of myself for 25
cents in a photo booth that frightened
my mother. Because of my military
training, I posed rigidly with a stern
stare at the camera for the picture.

As the end of my basic training drew near, I was given an aptitude test to determine
what trade school I would be assigned to. On a scale of one to 10, I scored a 9 on all but
two categories. I was then shown a list of career paths. The one that attracted me most
was Weather. There was much I wanted to learn about weather because meteorology
and weather were not taught in the ‘40s when I was in school. All I knew about weather
forecasts was the word on the front page of the newspaper, the weather report on the
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