Birth of the Blue Missile

Here is the next installment of Life at the Academy I know these are small chunks but between the CM job and GOOOH and actually working on the car time is short for such things.

The first year I was there I was put in the southern barracks in “D” company this was a newer building than the rest of the campus without some of the wonderful quirks of the older ones. It was a two-story building with the hallways open to the outside like a cheap motel. The rooms were a little larger than the north barracks and the rooms joined in front to comprise the suite, rather than the rear.
My roommate was from the Bahamas and quite a character, small but feistier than hell; he was a freshman and as with most of the other guys, sent there by his parents to get focused. One of my suite mates was “Ted” Neugent, whom I have written about previously. One of the first things I had to do in order to be social was to get permission to smoke cigarettes in the room, from my father. This had to be a written consent, and mother was not going to ever give me that. Now I didn’t smoke but the rest of the suite did, and in order for the suite to get the special red room tag on the doors every body in the suite had to get that permission. Once presented with that explanation Dad sent in the paperwork for me, and so opened the door to the world of being WELL ADJUSTED ;-) of course smoking cigarettes was not the only pursuit on the menu. All of the smoke was brought in from the nearest big city by cadets that lived near by and went home on weekend leave. It was relatively cheap and of pretty good grade. We amused ourselves with stereo systems and vinyl discs called albums (ancient technology) I remember listening to a lot of Yes and Zepplin. We would construct spinning “light” show things made out of a soda can and a candle. You cut a propeller affair in the top and various shaped holes in the sides. You would suspend the can on a sharpened piece of wire coat hanger so when the candle, which was placed inside the can, was lit the heat would spin the can as it escaped. The light shining through the side holes and the top would project patterns around the room for our entertainment WOW MAN. Then there was the practice of hanging a knotted up plastic dry cleaning bag from the center light fixture by a wire coat hanger. You then put a piece of aluminum foil or a pie plate underneath the bag. Now I must mention here that the floors were painted concrete so a fire was not likely. You then lit the bottom of the bag and sat back and enjoyed, you see when the plastic melted there was a ball of liquid fire that fell to the floor and on its way made the most incredible sound. It was like the sound of a screaming MIMI round coming in and then it hit the ground with a “BOOF” type sound. When the thing got going it did this a couple times a second and this lasted for a couple of minutes. After that you had to air out the room, as a matter of fact you had to air out the entire suite. I look back fondly on the times of getting ripped and sitting there with your cleaning kit and rodding your M1A1 rifle. I can still smell the gun cleaning fluid if I try hard enough. I will say though that as a company when it came to the military stuff we were together. Being a “good soldier”, with all the spit and polish, became routine.
The first quarter ended without incident, and I do for all of you ‘Global Warming’ nuts remember that it snowed the day we were to leave for the Christmas break, which was unusual for the area. That year my roommate Michael went home with me for the first week of break to New York City. We had brought a goodly stash with us from the academy and had a ball running around the city seeing the sites and going down to the Village.
I thought he would be intimidated by the big city, but I was wrong about that. Even to the point he showed me a few things, one of which was his way to cross the street and get around traffic. He would Jay walk across the street by going up to flowing traffic and stopping just short of the cars running over his toes, I mean REALLY close. He then would lean over the car as if he was going to fall forward. He then would throw his arms behind him and straighten up. Of course the car would screech to a halt and he would walk around the front of it. The first time he did this he scared the **** out of me. He then of course proceeded to laugh his *** off and walk through traffic that way. He said the traffic in the Bahamas was just as bad and the drivers there didn’t really pay a lot of attention to traffic signals. I do remember us hanging out at a bar called Maxwell’s Plum and listening to the sound track to ‘Easy Rider’ back at the apartment. Other than that the details are a little fuzzy. A week later we drove him to the airport so he could spend the second week in the Bahamas with his family.