June 1966

             I graduated from college and was commissioned a lieutenant in the Army one weekend in June, married the next weekend, and reported to my first duty station alone the next. I got a suitcase for graduation. My new bride had a car so I didn’t need one.

How I got there and did all of that I just mentioned, well I’ll get to that later. Suffice it to say, the next stage of my life began with an assignment to Indiantown Gap Military Reservation, a United States Army post since pre-WWII. Located in the center of the state near Hershey, which is near Harrisburg, I was assigned to the SROTC Summer Camp going on that summer; just like the one I went to the previous year.

My wife drove me to IGMR and dropped me off. I would not need a car as I said since I would be working as a cadre for the ROTC and everything would be within walking distance. As it happened, I was assigned to the Food Service Section of the camp logistics section. My working title was Ration (yes, as in food) Breakdown Officer. I was assigned a military jeep, M-151 to be exact, with a corporal as a driver. My main responsibility was to ensure that the daily allotment of food made it safely to the sixteen dining facilities that fed the nearly 2,000 cadets at camp.

I got this plumb job simply because I did not have any fatigue OD green uniforms. I couldn’t be assigned to anything having to do with field duty or working directly with the cadets because they wore fatigues almost constantly. So I was on the camp staff who all wore khaki Class B uniforms (I’ll explain the uniforms more (later).

Seriously, though, it was an important job in that ripping off of the reefer truck with serious steaks, fruit, vegetables, bread, milk, and other foodstuffs was a lucrative occupation for anyone with some motivation. The big downside for me was as I followed the truck around to its sixteen sites each morning if I did run into anyone who looked like a thief, I had neither radio nor gun.