My Brother’s Story

Gonna need help with this one, since I wasn’t there for a lot of it. This is what I can remember and a little folklore. Anyone reading this who wants to add, please contact me at ninethstmancave.icloud.com.

Terra Bella St.

As far as I know I was born when we were living in Pacoima, CA. We lived in a house on Laurel Canyon Blvd one vacant lot from the intersection with Terra Bella St. That would be where we first met, when he was five and I had just come home from the hospital. I’d like to talk with him someday about how those times were for him.

I remember seeing pictures my folks had of me in footed pajamas and Ralph in grown up PJs playing with some toy on the floor when I was about 3 or 4. Being five years older, he was always the super cool big brother. I’m pretty sure I was the pain-in-the-ass little brother. When I was allowed to tag along with he and his friends, it was always doing the coolest things.

We’d ride our bikes down to the industrial area and go through their trash cans. You wouldn’t believe the gold they throw away. His closest friend, Garin, was a genius at electronics. He would salvage any thrown out electrical device, take them home and strip them down for parts. Once I got to go along and test tubes at the grocery. He had shopping bags full of tubes of all kinds and we used the Tube Tester to sort them into bags of good and bad tubes. The good tubes he used to build magical things. The bad tubes were magic too.

Garin showed me how to carefully twist off the base; then you hold the tube under water and snip off the protruding tip of the base. Kids, don’t try this at home, but you can still do this with incandescent light bulbs. If the tube hadn’t lost it’s vacuum, it would magically fill up with water. This was cool enough in itself, but then he explained how the smaller tubes would then be excellent sling shot ammo. Not usually fatal but really cool when they hit and splattered.

The Bircsak’s backyard

Garin lived behind our grandparents house on Montague St. His folks (the Bircsak’s) were old country German and had a fantastic back yard. The house was full of really neat old furniture and there was a cat every five feet. No space went unused; every bit of horizontal surface had a treasure. I remember they had the first feather bed I’d ever seen. Every time I heard John Denver sing about grandma’s feather bed it took me back to their house. The house was cool but the backyard was magical.

Mostly overgrown with the foliage barely kept at bay, it had a pen with sheep and goats, chickens and geese running everywhere and numerous small sheds housing Garin’s collections and workshops. You could navigate it using the many paths or if you were adept at climbing trees, get around by trees and rooftops. Very handy during rotten egg fights.

It was here where I learned about slaughtering livestock for food and various farm facts. They had one goat and several geese that you’d best not give a clear shot at your backside. We would collect rotten eggs and then use them for ammo in mock combat. Way more fun than laser tag or paintball. There was a much bigger incentive to be stealthy when the penalty was getting hit with a rotten goose egg.

Blow Guns

Another cool thing I learned from my brother was blow guns. A six to ten foot long section of thin walled electrical conduit makes an excellent blow gun; surprisingly accurate. But the best thing he showed me was the fire cracker dart. First you make a long slimly tapered cone out of a full sheet of notebook paper. Then you insert the cone into the blow gun and mark the place where it becomes too big for the tube. Remove the dart and tape it just below the mark, cut off the larger section and you have a dart ready to go. But the best part is what you do to the pointy end.

Cut it off far enough back to allow a firecracker to just fit inside. Insert said fire cracker into the dart with the fuse end sticking out about 1/4”. Then you tape a strike anywhere match to the side of the dart with the head of the match sticking out just ahead of the firecracker, wrap the fuse around the base of the head of the match and tape it all down. What could possibly go wrong.

I’ve tried it and can vouch for it’s coolness. You essentially have the ability to silently launch a firecracker over fifty yards and have it go off right after landing. The whole thing is sorta untraceable as long as you don’t walk around with the blow gun in your hand afterwards.

Forts

Another thing that Ralph and Garin excelled at was building forts. Forts were just spaces you could carve out of the environment that were yours alone. A good place for secret meetings. They could be visible as in tree forts or hidden. For hidden forts they would find a vacant piece of land and dig a pit deep enough to almost stand up. Then they would scrounge up whatever they could to cover it, usually old lumber and various sign boards. Usually, it was not the soundest of structures but they were always quite temporary anyway. They would cover them with dirt and plants from the immediate vicinity, make a trap door entry that was usually a piece of plywood with a few tumbleweeds tied to it for camouflage. How no one was seriously injured or killed is beyond me. One unaware real estate agent almost fell into one next door to our house when he was walking across the vacant lot. Seems they were using the ad sign for part of their roof.

Tree forts were harder to keep exclusive and the neighborhood kids kept getting in. On one they put pitch on the tops of the lower branches so that you couldn’t see it from below but would get it all over your hands if you tried to climb up to their fort. Then they found an old piece of pipe that would hold their weight and used it as a bridge from the fort to the next tree over in the higher branches. The neighbor kids didn’t figure out the trick of using the pipe like a monkey bar to get to the fort and got pitch all over their clothes trying to climb the tree. I remember Ralph caught hell from our parents for that one. We thought it was a pretty good example of how stupid the neighbor kids were.

I honestly don’t know how anyone could have grown up in my day without a big brother to teach you these things. Today I guess the online world fills that void nicely.

Cars

Ralph went through a lot of cars. He always seemed to have a new one, usually a project car. One of my favorites was a 1950 ford. It was classic; black with chrome reverse rims or spinner hubcaps (I can’t remember which, maybe both as he was always working on it), fuzzy dice hanging from the rear view mirror and tuck and roll upholstery done in Tijuana.

I remember one car had “cut outs”. Cut outs were a modification of the exhaust system. You installed a Y in the exhaust right after the front wheels and in front of the muffler; then put a cap on the end of the branch that wasn’t muffled and stuck out from under the car between the front and rear wheels. When you removed the caps, you had unmuffled exhaust and lots of noise. This helped improve both your power and testosterone levels. Unfortunately, it also attracted the police.

He and his buddies would buy junkers and take them “mud wamping”. That was driving them through muddy fields (rare in Southern California) until they finally got it thoroughly stuck. Then they would jump up and down on the roof and hood, break out all the windows and leave it there. Many of them were cars that would be considered classics today; but if you think about it most every car from that period is a classic today. One day it didn’t work out well.

I don’t know what kind of car it was but it had wind wings, remember those? When it became time to break the windows, Ralph insisted on breaking out the last wind wing; I envision a “here, hold my beer and watch this” moment. Anyway, he managed a heel kick that did the trick. Only problem was, after his foot broke out the wind wing, it came down on the broken glass nearly severing his Achilles tendon. I was not there as this was not a “little brother can come along” event, so all I remember is he came home in a body cast that covered everything from his foot to the bottom of his rib cage.

Model Airplanes

We were always building model airplanes. Ralph built mostly U control planes that flew around you in a circle, connected to the “pilot” by two strings that controlled the elevator. He would spend hours to build beautiful models that would crash on the first flight. We both got pretty good at repairing crashed models. It was good training in structural engineering.

One model I remember vividly; not the plane so much but its two flights. I think it was a P51 but I do remember it was pretty nice. On it’s maiden flight Ralph kept it straight and level and did pretty well. He did break the prop on landing but after replacing the prop it was ready to go again. We were all very encouraging and asked for some aerobatics.

Ralph refueled the plane and took off for some aerobatics. He made a few level laps and finally got his nerve up to try a loop. He pulled up and the plane went straight up, straight overhead and straight down. It built up a nice head of steam during a perfect vertical dive into the asphalt. The plane more or less exploded; I think the only salvageable part left was the U-control string. Maybe the wheels.

He built a beautiful free flight glider that had a small motor to take it up to altitude. The motor would quickly run out of gas and the plane would then glide back down. Even this free flight mode had it’s development problems.

Built from a kit, it looked quite airworthy with the wing mounted on a pylon about 3” above the fuselage. He took it out for it’s first glide test which were always necessary to get the proper balance. We had a flat field next door with thick grass/wheat about two feet high; perfect for a gentle landing on these test flights. I remember that first flight; the balance was perfect and it gently settled into the tall grass. The fuselage slowly came to a stop and the wings broke off, continuing on another few feet.

Thus the detachable wing was born. From then on we built models with wings that were held onto the fuselage with rubber bands that would release on landing. This reduced the need for major repair after each flight. Reduced, not eliminated.

I was no better than he at U-control, so I stuck to free flight gliders; usually launched by a towline. I would make a disastrous foray into radio controls while in flight school, convincing me that I should stick to free flight. But that is another story.

High School

High school academics were easier for me than Ralph. For some dumb ass reason, I figured that this meant that all things would come easier for me. Watching his high school exploits from the safety of the 10 year old little brother gave me lots of pointers. Mostly examples of what not to do. I didn’t really enjoy seeing him get into trouble but it sure took the pressure off of me. I was the kid that excelled in school and didn’t get into trouble. By the time I was 16 I had taken all the pressure off him. It was my turn to screw up and he was a model citizen. He was married and doing well in college; Mom and Dad could breath a sigh of relief.

The one legacy he established for me was high school football. This was the 60’s; high school football coaches were all marine boot camp drill instructor wannabes. Ralph made first string varsity running guard and was good at it. The achilles tendon injury kept him from considering college ball, probably a good thing, but that’s just me talking.

When I got to high school and went out for football I was too small for varsity. There was a formula based on height, weight and I think, age that determined whether you played varsity or “B” football. Our school had a B team that never lost and was coached by the same two coaches my brother had played for. I was hoping that they wouldn’t connect us because I didn’t want to be in Ralph’s shadow.

On the first day of practice Coach McCaffery calls roll. I got a bad feeling when he didn’t call my name. Earlier in the roll call he had called out the name Rose and no one answered.

Now he says, “Anyone here whose name I didn’t call”. I meekly raised my hand and he says, “What’s your name son”.

I said, “Wise, Troy Wise.”

He looks down at the roster and says, “Rose, yeah, I called you; pay attention.”

And that is how high school nicknames are born. He was on my ass for the rest of high school. It didn’t help that he also taught my geometry class.

It was during his high school years that Ralph earned a nickname from our Dad. Ralph had a habit of absent mindedly twirling his 1/4 full glass of milk on the table when he was basically through with dinner and was talking about something. It never failed; he would eventually dump the glass over and spill the remaining milk. This was always accompanied by his remark, “oops” . This always happened after repeated warnings by my parents that he was going to spill his milk if he kept that up.

After noticing that Ralph would often say “Oops” after something broke or spilled due to his inattention or carelessness, Dad finally pinned the nickname “Oops” on him. Like most nicknames that turn out to be appropriate; It stuck.

Ralph had a knack for being slightly ahead of his time. Long before “Gidget” started the surfing craze, he was building surfboards and trying to kill himself in the California surf. His first board was built from paddle board plans, a wooden box construction that was able to catch waves but not very maneuverable. I remember one trip to the north end of Zuma Beach during the learning phase.

We would sit on the beach and watch one of us try to catch waves on Ralph’s board. We would shout to the would be surfer giving him warning of approaching waves. We would shout “paddle” if he had a chance to catch the wave, or “outside” if a big wave was coming and he needed to paddle out to escape being caught too far in, resulting in the wave breaking on top of him. Ralph had unsuccessfully tried to catch several waves and we were determined to make sure he caught the next big one.

Zuma’s break is not a point break where you can outrun the breaking part of the wave, it was a straight beach break where the whole wave broke at once for hundreds of yards along the beach. We were just learning and didn’t want to embarrass ourselves in front of an audience, so that was why we selected this particular empty stretch of beach.

Anyway, we were tired of watching him try and miss wave after wave. The next time we saw him paddling out to get over the next big wave, we all shouted “paddle, paddle”. He turned around and started to build up enough speed to catch the wave. Turns out he didn’t need much speed, the wave overtook him right at it’s peak height, crashing as it overtook him. It was the perfect execution of the classic “over the falls” maneuver. Paddling towards the beach, he found himself being sucked backwards up the wave wall then propelled, upside down, over the top of the wave to free fall backwards into the shallow water in front of the wave. Luckily, the water was deep enough and the bottom sandy enough that neither he nor the board were broken.

He did get a raucous round of applause. After all, we were there to help. He actually thought that we had deliberately sabotaged him.

Ralph also pioneered surfboard construction; not very successfully, however. He evolved into making boards out of balsa wood with fiberglass coating. These were still too heavy and tended to soak up water when the fiberglass covering was violated through contact with rocks or other boards. Which happened quite a lot as the tether wasn’t to come along until the boards got much smaller and lighter. Our boards were from 9’-6” up to 11’ and finally got manageable when we transitioned to foam.

Ralph had purchased a name brand board and determined that it had a great shape, worth replicating. The plan was to make a mold using the board as a model. He built a box about 10’ long by 30” wide and 6” deep, filled it with concrete and pushed the board (with the skag removed) into the wet concrete up to the middle of the edges. Then, after proper time to cure and a thorough waxing as a parting agent, he placed another box on top to house the other half of the mold, which he filled with more concrete.

I wasn’t there for the opening but Ralph later told me he almost didn’t get the board out. The bottom line was the mold had to be destroyed to get the board out intact. Making surf boards was our introduction to working with fiberglass. We both continue to use the material but advances in the technology have opened up the possibilities.

Flying

Ralph gets his FAA private pilots license in July 1964. In April 1966 he took me out to the desert in a Cessna 152. We landed at Agua Dulce which has the famous Vasquez Rocks and climbed around the rock formations used in countless scifi moves.

After lunch we went out to the Mojave desert near Rosamond and landed. I was a bit concerned about landing in virgin desert but Ralph assured me it would be safe after a low pass to check out the landing area. Before landing we had tried to bomb one particular cactus with baggies of flour we had prepared for the occasion. After landing I remember shooting my Mossberg target rifle at jackrabbits more that a quarter of a mile away, hitting only the ground.

On the ground we verified that we were pretty bad at flour bombing, so Ralph took off solo to see if he could hit me with a flour bomb. I took several pictures of his attempts but he always missed and I didn’t get anything good in the way of pictures. To my surprise, he actually landed and picked me up. Saving me a long walk to Mojave.

In December of 1970 I returned from Vietnam and got out of the Army. At that time Ralph was living the bachelor life in Yuma. He was stationed at the Naval Air Station there and instructing in the A4. He was also building a formula 1 air racer to compete at the Reno air races. I was living at our parents in Calabasas and at loose ends when he invited me to come live with him and help with the construction. I jumped at the idea and me and my dog (also named Ralph) headed for Yuma.

I got a job driving the gas truck for the FBO on the civilian side of the airport and moved in. We lived rather simply; I had two piles of clothes, one dirty and the other clean. We consisted on a diet of Tab, hamburger and cantaloupe (they were 20 for $1.00 at the roadside stands). We would always make happy hour at a local Mexican restaurant where they served nachos, something I’d never heard of. They were dollar sized tortilla chips roasted with two chunks of cheese and a slice of yellow chili pepper on each and they sold by the dozen. The Marines loved the place and there was a running competition for the record for eating the most at one sitting. We never tried for that one because it was ridiculously high.

The plane Ralph was building was the Owl Racer, designed by George Owl. Ralph worked closely with George to modify the wings. The standard design for the Formula One racers was the Cassutt Special It had short wings with a long cord length to adhere to the formula restrictions (66 sq ft) and reduce frontal area to a minimum to reduce drag.

Ralph decided that the best way to reduce drag was fanatical attention to maintaining laminar flow as much as possible and switch to a higher aspect ratio wing which would reduce induced drag during high G turns. The Formula One course was an oval with a short straightaway run and three pylons at each end to delineate the course. The tighter you could turn 180 degrees without cutting inside the pylons, the shorter and faster the lap. The low aspect wings of the Cassutt made it lose more airspeed in the many high G turns in a race than the higher aspect winged racers. Ralph modified the wing design to a higher aspect ratio (18:1rather than the Cassett’s 12:1) and used a airfoil designed to maintain laminar flow as long as possible. Staying within the mandated 66 sq ft of wing area required a wing span of 18’.

Ralph decided to use unidirectional fiberglass cloth with epoxy resin to make skins for the wings. Since the wings were under construction in the living room of the house and consumed all of the living room, we had to move outside to the carport to make the skins. We laid two sheets of Masonite on the ground to make a 4’x16’ smooth surface. We waxed it several times to act as a parting agent and fill up the seam. Then we laid the unidirectional cloth down on the bias with alternating layers at 90 degrees to each other. The result is a structure with the same strand orientation as woven cloth but with more strength because the strands are straight rather than weaving up and down.

Then we applied the epoxy as sparingly as possible. You need to saturate all the fibers but have no excess which only serves to add weight. The result was a bullet proof sheet, very smooth on the side that was down and slightly textured on top. This would make a perfect super strong skin for the wings.

The wing framing was made of wood and the method of attaching the skins was epoxy glue. The plan was to apply the glue to the ribs and underside of the skin; then lay the skin on the horizontal wing. We planned to nail through strips of wood placed over each rib to temporally hold the skin down until the glue dried. The only problem was we couldn’t get the nails to penetrate the skin (our first clue as to the bullet proof properties of the skin panels). We finally developed a procedure of pre-drilling the skins.

Ralph introduced several other drag reducing details. One of the biggest deviations from the normal Formula One aircraft was the exhaust. Most in the class were just dumping the exhaust out short stacks on the side of the engine cowling. This messed up any laminar flow all the way back on the sides of the fuselage. He made a custom set of headers that piped the exhaust to a collection chamber on the bottom of the cowling. This portion of the cowling, shaped like a teardrop had an intake at the front and an exhaust out the back. The exhaust was kept about 4-6 inches away from the fuselage so that it wouldn’t create turbulence and mess up the flow along the fuselage.

He also borrowed an innovation of Burt Rutan’s that Jim Bede used in his designs. Normal aileron design used ailerons that were just like a section of the wing trailing edge.

The airflow over the wing loses laminar flow when it encounters the gap between the wing skin and the leading edge of the aileron. No matter how small you try to make the gap the airflow separates at the gap and turbulence results in increased drag from that point back.

Burt’s idea was to make the aileron leading edge slightly larger than shown above and still keep the gap between wing skin and aileron as small as possible. This made the airflow along the wing skin strike the aileron leading edge and “reattach” laminar flow to the aileron.

Somewhere along the way Ralph took a welding class and got certified as a welder. His primary reason to learn welding skills was because he planned to weld up the fuselage and various components of the formula one racer. The resulting structure was critical to the airworthiness of the plane and would require perfect welds, hence the need for formal training.

I remember it was a rush to get the plane ready for the Reno air races in September and we were working on it every minute we got, even in the pits at the races. The plane was dubbed the “Wise Owl” and did fairly well for a newcomer. Ralph had good qualifying lap times and made it into the Silver race finals.

The only reason he didn’t do better was our slow start. The Formula One races start from a standstill with the planes revved up to the max and the pit crew holding it back by the rudder. When the green flag dropped we let go of the rudder and the “race horse start” was underway.

CLOSE CALLS

Ralph’s plane weighed in at 600 lbs; light for a plane but way heavier than the rest of the field. So he was last once everyone got airborne. Once they all got established on the oval race course, the “fun” began. Ralph’s higher lap speed meant he would be passing everyone if the race lasted long enough. It made for exciting racing. Once, a little too exciting. I can still picture it as vividly as yesterday.

Ralph was doing his usual thing and moving up the pack as they passed the grandstands and swung past the first of three pylons depicting the course on the South end of the oval. They all snapped into 90 degree banks and pulled into max G turns as they headed for the middle pylon. Just then Ralph dove for the ground and you could hear a collective gasp from the stands. The terrain drops away on the south end of the course so he dove out of sight behind the jagged rocks. I figured I had just witnessed the last seconds of my brothers life and the next thing we would see would be a small dust and smoke plume as he hit the ground at over 200 miles per hour. Thankfully, I was wrong.

The next thing we saw was Ralph shooting up about 200 feet above the pack in a 60 degree climb then nose over and dive back into the race. It was a miracle that there wasn’t a midair collision. He had lost ground on the pack but he got right back to it and finished respectively but not winning.

After the race he explained what had happened. He had gotten caught in the wing tip vortices of a Cassutt ahead of him and went into a slow roll to the left and down. He was fighting to counteract with as much stick and rudder input as he could muscle when he came out of the mini horizontal tornado. The result was the wrenching climbing turn to the right that we all saw. The rest was, as they say, history. And perhaps a laundry issue, but if it was, he hid it well. After all, he was an ex F4 fighter pilot.

Silversmithing

Sometime around 1955 we moved into a small apartment attached to our Blanchard grandparent’s house on Montague St in Pacoima. It was just temporary while our new house/shop was being built in Calabasas. Dad had been working for Porter at his Burbank shop and it was time for him to take over the flatware side of the business. We moved into the new house that summer. I wish I had a picture of the place; I’ll do my best to describe it.

There were two rectangular buildings arranged parallel and offset with a three foot gap between two corners. Imagine two long rectangles with their long sides touching, then slide one of them along the long axis until they separate with a three food gap. One was our house and the other the shop and retail showroom.

I was eight and Ralph thirteen. There were deer and pheasants all over. It was about 1/4 mile off the Ventura freeway at a development called Craftsman Center. Right next door was the LA Pet Cemetery, Where Leo, the original MGM lion, was buried. He had a huge headstone with his picture on it.

I remember visiting the house under construction. It was an all day event. A 20 mile drive up Ventura Blvd through the San Fernando Valley to the extreme west end at Calabasas. We were really out in the country, even past all the orange orchards. Ralph would eventually get a job with our contractor, Clyde Siggens. He would work for Clyde and one of the silversmiths (and good friend of our parents) Jim Flynn, building houses. Eventually getting his contractors license in 1973.

As we grew up right next to the shop we both learned silversmithing. It was very much like apprenticing. You started at the polishing lathe and worked your way back up the process to forging. The theory was that at each stage of the process you learned the consequences of less than perfect craftsmanship at the preceding step. Then, when you learned that preceding skill you knew what you were trying to do.

The stages for a spoon were:

Forging the basic shape of the spoon as close to a flat copper pattern as possible.

Grinding off the excess silver to attain the exact shape of the pattern.

Using a custom sanding machine to smooth the edges.

Using the drop hammer to shape the spoon bowl.

Polishing and hammer-marking the back of the bowl then restriking with the drop hammer.

Bending the handle to the proper profile.

Polishing and hammer-marking the front of the handle.

Stamping the back of the handle with the company name and your mark.

Filing the top of the bowl and the sides of the whole spoon then finish sanding same.

Sand bobbing.

Polishing.

Scratch brushing and washing.

The first step took the most skill and Sand bobbing/Polishing were the easiest places to ruin it.

Ralph and I both learned how to make flatware. Ralph also went to work for Porter and learn to make hollowware. Making flatware was hard on the body but most people could learn it. Dad had taught several apprentices but it was hard to find people that would make it a career. Hollowware was a different story. That was where you needed artistry. Ralph made many beautiful pieces that will remain heirlooms. It is one of the truly durable art forms.

Welcome To The Real World

I’ve always said that life begins after high school. You spend all the time before that building the adult person that will take on the real world. It seems that the rest of your life is spent unlearning the narcissistic world view of your youth and learning the harsh reality of that real world.

As I research this narrative I find that three lives were interwoven and shaped by a mutual love of flying and the impact of a war half a world away. Ralph and I grew up building, flying and crashing model airplanes of all sorts. I remember Roger planning to be an airline pilot since early high school. He was always the sensible one. I had a woodie and surfed every possible moment. Roger had a Ford Falcon (a very sensible car) and worked to earn money for flight lessons. Ralph was going to be a rich contractor and be able to afford his own plane. I was going to fly for the Navy.

We all flew as professional pilots; our paths to that end was hardly anything we could have imagined. All because of a little war on the other side of the world that we would learn to call “The Southeast Asia War Games”.

The draft loomed over all young men of that age. If you didn’t stay in school you had maybe two years after high school before you could count on getting drafted. As the war progressed you had to be married and have a kid to avoid the draft after college. As he was five years older than me, Ralph got to deal with the draft first. Roger and I caught up with him though and we all were in Vietnam flying for the military at the same time.

Ralph graduated high school in 1959 and began college working on a business degree. He married his high school sweetheart, Karen in 1962. The draft board kept a close eye on those with student deferments and Ralph received his draft notice while he was in college and married. As you might imagine, this development was somewhat disconcerting. The only way he could get a deferment was to be in grad school, have a child or be signed up with a military program. Like all of us he went shopping for the best deal he could enlist for.

The Navy and Marines offered the same program of direct enlistment into OCS and flight school afterwards. Both recruiters said, “Oh, you’ll be able to fly whatever you want after flight school”. Turns out he was only slightly less naive than I was. After you get into the military and talk to those around you in the same boat, you learn one simple fact; recruiters are lying bastards. Worse than used car salesmen who only cost you money, they at best rob you of years of your life, at worst they get you killed. And people wonder why some of us think that they shouldn’t be allowed to recruit on high school campuses. Most of the kids they sign up really believe that a responsible person in a position of authority wouldn’t lie to them.

This may sound a bit anti military but it is not. The military can be a great experience, providing structure and maturity like no other institution. But it is not for everyone. We inflict a horrible injustice on young people with incomplete brain development by lying to them and coercing them into what could be a disastrous decision. This still holds with an all volunteer military; very few 17 year olds are mature enough to deal with military indoctrination. This has been the basis of military training since we invented war. Consider the challenge facing the military; they must develop the best possible fighting unit to prevail on the battlefield. How do you get to that goal given the raw material available?

The US Marines have perfected the process. First take away their identity. That’s easy; remove any individuality by shaving their heads and putting them in identical clothing with no markings but who they belong to (the US Marines) and their last name. Then add in physical abuse, exhaustion and sleep deprivation. Then teach them that the only way they will survive is to support the team above all else and give them a new family, the Marines. “Leave no one behind” and “once a Marine, always a Marine” replaces the recruit’s family gives them the confidence and security that was so recently stripped away. It is a form of brain washing and it doesn’t work very well on older, more mature recruits unless they are highly motivated in the first place.

The best way to provide a highly motivated pool of recruits is to have a very scary enemy threatening to destroy our way of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. This works whether the threat is real or imagined.

Semper Fi

Ralph eventually gets to finish college then he enlists with the Marines. The reasons he picked the Marines over the Navy was:

He figured that if he got shot down the Marine training might be better to get him through to a rescue. And……

2. The Marine recruiter told him the Marines would pay for his uniforms after OCS.

Ralph finishes OCS, buys his own uniforms and reports to Pensacola, FL for flight school. Somewhere along the line, I believe it was during ground school, he was selected for jets. At the time that was reserved for the top 3% of his class, so he joined a unique group of Marine pilots. The rest got choppers. Then to top it off, he ends up getting assigned to fighters.

The Marines teach their officers that bullets will bounce off their (and all who follow them into battle) chests. Then in flight school they learn that thems what makes fighter pilots cannot be bothered by bullets. I figure whoever wrote the Matrix series was a former Marine fighter pilot.

So, Ralph finishes OCS in time for two weeks leave to go home for Christmas, then he reports for flight training in Pensacola, FL. When he checks in there, he finds out that there is a backlog of officers waiting for training and he’ll have a three month wait with nothing to do. If he had been enlisted in the same status they would have had plenty of work to occupy their time. Officers however, just had to phone in every morning and let them know they were still there and available. This was not good.

You just don’t take young men fresh out of college and send them off to Marine OCS, strip off their identities and rebuild them as cream of the crop elite fighting machines (in training to be gods) and then plop them down in Pensacola with nothing to do. They occupied their mornings playing golf or boating (both free) and then it was off to happy hour at the base Officers Club.

The military’s idea of the role of the Base Officers Club is to provide a country club environment equal to any in the area. Pensacola’s O Club and golf course was no exception; the facilities were beautiful. One Friday night a few of them drove into town after happy hour for more drinking at the local establishments. Returning late that night, Ralph’s new good buddy, Jim King, was at the wheel of his new Mustang and ran the entry gate at the base at 60 MPH flipping the guard the bird.

In those days there were no barricades at the gate; you were expected to slow down until the guard waved you through and return his salute. Everyone on base had a bumper or windshield sticker ID and the color blue was for officers. The guard could see the sticker when you approached and would always wave you right through with a salute. So the high speed one finger salute undoubtedly launched a pursuit. Somehow, Jim eluded the pursuit and then drove onto the golf course at the ninth hole green. As always seemed to happen with these guys, they didn’t get stuck and managed to make it back to the BOQ.

Ralph said he woke up the next day, looked out the window of his room and saw the CID (military criminal investigation unit) making plaster casts of tire tracks on the ninth green. Then he noticed Jim’s Mustang in the parking lot. It was covered with chunks of grass from the course and there were tire tracks on the pavement that ran from the parked car back to the point where they had left the course. He and his buds quickly moved and cleaned up the Mustang and they never got caught. This would not be the last time he made work for the CID. I can attest to at least one more time where I participated in Hawaii. But that is getting a little ahead in our story line.

So Ralph starts ground school in April and that helps to clean up everyones act with more to do. His wife, Karen, joins him in May which should help to further clean up his act, but I suspect not. He leaves the BOQ and rents them a small house in a secluded area sharing a driveway with other houses. I remember him telling me about one morning when he was awakened by one of his neighbors honking his horn at him. Seems that he had passed out in his car on the way home right in the middle of a small bridge in the driveway serving the houses and was effectively blocking everyone from leaving.

I’m not sure if Karen was with him at that time , but she didn’t fit into the new Ralph’s life style, and she leaves to go live with her parents back in the San Fernando Valley after two weeks. I think that was the beginning of the end of their marriage but not before their son Eric was conceived. Ralph wouldn’t really connect with Eric until much later, in his adult life.

Ralph and I were both in flight training at the same time and our paths even crossed a couple of times. While he was flying the F9J Cougar for advanced training in Beeville, Texas, I was in holdover status at Ft Wolters, Texas. My flight physical expired in the middle of ground school, so I had to wait for a new physical to be processed. This gave me time to visit him in Beeville on a three day pass. By then I’d heard many stories of their drunken escapades. What I got was an introduction to Marine fighter pilots and the drinking culture in their units. This was before drinking was not cool; it was the era that produced Foster Brooks’s comedy routine. On of their favorite “jokes” they would pull on their friends was to call them in the wee hours of the morning. They would call collect and tell the operator that the caller was the mother of the sap receiving the call. This worked best when the recipient was several time zones east of them. Anyway, if the guy didn’t figure out who was really calling and accepted the call, he would be connected to several of his very drunk buddies who were also very pleased at pulling one over on their pal. They were most pleased if they had interrupted an intimate moment or awakened his wife at three in the morning.

Ralph was sharing a rented house with three other pilots. When I walked in the front door I was face to face with a mannequin dressed in a black neoprene wet suit pointing a speargun at my stomach, he was also wearing an arctic steel pot (military steel helmet) with ear flaps pointing straight up. The walls were covered with posters. The two I remember were LBJ sitting on a Harley and a naked Burt Reynolds. They had furnished the place with rented furniture and the store had the mannequin so they thought it would look good as a greeter. The refrigerator was nearly covered with quotes that visitors had written in black magic marker. The wall phone’s cradle was broken and the handset was hanging by it’s cord looped over the broken stub that was left of the cradle. It was definitely a bachelor pad, completely lacking a women’s touch.

There were several fist sized holes in the interior walls. When questioned Ralph explained that they would punch holes in the wall when they had been drinking and it seemed like fun. The fun part ended when he tried to punch through both sides of a wall with one punch and hit a stud. They next day he had to tape his right hand to the control stick and reach all the switches and levers with his left. Of course this was one of those flights he had to cut short because he ran out of oxygen. He ran out because he would strap on the oxygen mask and turn it on the moment he got in the cockpit to help with the hangover. The next day he went to the doctor and found out he had a “boxers fracture” in a few of the right metacarpals.

Another of their favorite “jokes” was to hide something very smelly inside someone’s car. I was able to participate in their fun before I left. While everyone was out flying I spent my time fishing in the Beeville area. I got some nice bass which I prepared that night for dinner. I also got one smallish catfish which I left in the outside air duct in one of their cars foolishly left unlocked in the driveway. Ralph said the guy didn’t notice the smell so much but he did remark that there were an awful lot of flies in his car. I was able to push the catfish far enough down the duct so that it was not visible from either end, so it was a long time before he figured it out and got rid of it.

Before I left I got to write one of my favorite lines from “Catch 22” on the refrigerator. “Clevinger was dead, that was the basic flaw in his philosophy”.

Sometime between August 1968, when Ralph got his wings and reported to his first duty assignment to a F4 Squadron (VMFA 531) at El Toro and June 1969, when I left for my second tour, I visited he and his buddies at a house they were renting. It was a nice place right on the beach between two huge estates. There was a huge hedge separating the house from the neighboring mansions and they had their own cove all to themselves. It was a perfect chick magnet.

I managed to find a girl that was willing to go along and we spent the day at the beach and the night in the walk out basement that served as the beach house. His buddies said that they were going to entertain some hot babes upstairs. I remember hearing the phrase, “We are finally going to clean up our act”. The evening started out well enough, there was good Bar-B-Q and of course, plenty of booze. It started to fall apart when two of their buddies showed up totally tanked with what appeared to be hookers on one hand and a gallon of vegetable oil in the other. When they answered the door they just walked in and said, “Where’s the bathroom”. That was the last they saw of them for quite a while. Somehow, that turned the mood to some serious drinking.

My date and I decided it was a good time to exit to the beach house unnoticed. It didn’t take them long to figure out where we had gone, so they decided to drop in and invite us back upstairs. When they figured out that we weren’t going to open the door, they started to set off pen flares. These are small survival flares that are about the size of a ball point pen. Only thing was, they forgot that they were under the main deck off of the living room. The first two flares went about two feet up and slammed into the wood decking and stuck. Bathing all in an eerily flickering red light. Luckily, these flares burn out fairly quickly and the deck didn’t continue burning.

Eventually they lost interest and went back upstairs. Shortly, there was a lot of shouting and we could hear furniture getting kicked around. Soon the shouting turned into sort of a cheering chant and there was a tremendous crash accompanied by what sounded like a 200 pound wrecking ball slamming to the floor. This was repeated several times. I don’t know when their dates left but if not earlier, certainly now. Finally it got quiet, probably because everyone passed out. That was when we decided to leave, before the police arrived.

I got the story from Ralph a few days later. The girls left when it became apparent that the acts were not going to be cleaned up any time soon. The shouting, cheering and crashing was just some friendly wrestling. Which apparently ended with several attempts at airplane spins terminating with slamming the spinee down on the rattan furniture. The cops were not called until the next morning after they decided to get rid of the ruined furniture by throwing it over the hedge into the neighbors yard. It doesn’t surprise me that we lost the war.

Ralph, Roger and I were all flying in Vietnam at the same time. We attempted to get together once. At the time he was assigned to VMFA115 at Chu Lai. Roger and I got a few days away from our units and we both hitched rides to his unit. According to Ralph that would have been just after the 5th of Jan, 1970. I know the date because he says that was the day he went out on his FAC tour with the grunts. When we showed up his buddies said that he just left for FAC duty and wouldn’t be back for a month.

The story they told was that two days earlier he got drunk at a USO show and tackled some brass that was dancing with a donut dolly. Guess he got pissed when she wouldn’t dance with him or let him cut in. The next morning he was called into the CO’s office for a little rug dance – their term for an ass chewing – and was told to pack his gear for the field because he was leaving the next day.

So Roger and I joined his buddies at their O club. It was already well into the night and the crowd was already half in the bag so we hurried to catch up; after all, it was only an hour or so util closing. Luckily, they had a tradition that if any of the squadron commanders on the base would hang by their heels from the rafters of the club, the club would stay open another hour. I don’t remember how many CO’s they had to hoist up and throw their legs over the rafters that night but if was more than two. Anyway, we caught up; we even passed more than a few.

I was the only Army puke there but I remember getting treated pretty well. I don’t think I impressed anyone with my ability to hold my liquor.

Seems like there was a common thread connecting all my visits with my brother when he was in the marines. They would always say they were going to “clean up their act and get laid”. I’ve yet to see it happen. For them, anyway; I actually went on to father children. An accomplishment for which the bar is set pretty low.

In my two and one half years in Vietnam I got four R&Rs. One to Japan, one to Australia and two to Hawaii. The last one was to Hawaii and I spent it at the Marine air base in Kaneohe Bay. Ralph had been transferred to an F4 squadron that was returning to the states and they all flew their F4s to their new base at Kaneohe. I remember shopping for shorts at the base exchange and noticing that size 44 Bermuda shorts were wider that they were tall. That was when I decided to see the flight surgeon about a serious weight loss program when I got back to Nam.

I remember we bought some cheap U control model planes and flew them around the parking lot and then hit the O club for happy hour. Booze was cheap there; drinks were $.25 a shot and Mai Tais were $.50, since they had two shots in them. We ordered drinks and snacks and started to roll dice for the next round. For some dumb-assed reason I started with Mai Tais and stuck with them. We were rolling five dice for poker hands with up to three rolls for your best hand. Everybody in the game would roll to eliminate one guy per round. When there was only one guy left, he bought the next round and we started over.

I thought I was doing pretty well until I noticed that there were three Mai Tais on the bar in front of me. There I was again, drinking with Marines and falling behind. I have no idea when we left the club but the night was apparently still young.

We went back to the BOQ to visit the slackers that hadn’t come to happy hour. I mentioned how a favorite game of theirs was to call someone collect at zero dark thirty when they were completely tanked. Well, being able to pound on the door of someone trying to sleep because they have an early crank time, priceless!

One of his buddies was actually dumb enough to open his door and see what we wanted. We filed in, sat on the bed and proceeded to demand a good reason for not making happy hour. He mumbled something about having to get up in a few hours so Ralph offered to help him out. He snatched up his wind up alarm clock and threw it out the window. Unfortunately, the window wasn’t open. That was when we decided to leave before he could find his survival kit and the .38 special carried therein. But the night was still young.

Ralph decided it would be fun to pull a prank on one of his buddies that was away on a cross country flight. We were able to get into his room by going out onto the brick ledge just below the windows in Ralph’s room and carefully sliding over to his buddy’s room where the window was not locked. Once we got inside and closed the window behind us it was easy to set a red smoke survival kit flare on a table inside the room. Then we lit the flare and let ourselves out, locking the door behind us.

We all thought this was hilarious. If you hadn’t noticed, drunks have a warped sense of humor. I did feel a little bad when, later on, Ralph told me that the smoke permeated all of the fabric in the room as effectively as red dye. His “buddy” had to buy all new uniforms. I felt a little worse when, even later on, he told me that some friends of his saw the CID team dusting the windows for prints.

By then I was back in Nam and getting short. The flight surgeon grounded me while he put me on diet pills so the company made me the night duty officer on a permanent basis. I never heard any more of the smoke flare raid; except for the times when I would find myself, once again, drinking with Marines and reminiscing.

My Brother’s Story – 9,358 words