Billy and the AC, an EOD Adventure

Billy was his name. Come to think of it, Billy is still his name. A couple of years ago we reconnected on Facebook and I was shocked that he was still alive. He was a few years older than me and made partying a lifestyle. In an Army full of people one bubble off center, he was bat shit crazy. He was a musician, an orthodontic technician and several other things that I can't discuss due to statute of limitations.  I'd hoped he was still alive, but considered it a low probability with prison being a strong second to organ failure.

Billy Hays started sometime around 1986 at the 6oth EOD at Ft. Dix, NJ. We were told he was our clerk. He was a bit more, but that is a much longer and different story. He was also one of the most unique individuals I have ever met in all my days.

I haven't seen him except in photos since 1988, so my description may be a bit off. That's okay, because this blog is about memories, not exact facts. I remember Billy as being about 5'6", thin and wiry. He chain smoked as if he needed them to survive and drank beer like it was water. Billy was and still is from Mobile, Alabama.

Before I reconnected with him, my strongest memory was his laugh. It was infectious. He truly loved life and wanted to share the joy as often as possible. We hit it right off.

The 60^th EOD had a maximum number of 14 members, and I think we often had only 12. There were only 3-4 of us single guys and we were all on the first floor of the same building. Army barracks are Spartan. These were brick cinder block, painted some baby puke yellow and had no light fixtures. The only light in those rooms came from lamps plugged into outlets. There were bunk beds and two lockers per room, though over time, I ended up being the only one with a roommate, despite the fact that I was a sergeant. Of course Specialist Billy fucking Hayes had a private room across the hall.

The Army is a strange place. They have rules that defy logic and in some cases seem to be created intentionally to contradict logic. One such rule dealt with heating. There was no air conditioning in the barracks, but there were heaters. Regardless of what the weather conditions were, the Army in its infinite wisdom decided they would set dates for when the heat came on in the winter and when it turned off in the summer. It didn't matter to the officers in charge that it often got extremely cold before the start date, any more than it mattered that often times in the spring, it would get too hot outside for boiler operated heaters to continue to run. The dates were the dates, period.

The lack of air conditioning was especially cruel in the months of July and August. One of Billy's favorite stories of me was when he found me one day, sitting in front of a computer in my underwear, dripping sweat into an increasingly large pool on the floor. I was playing one of the first PC computer games and I was hooked. I had the window wide open and a fan going full tilt, but 95 degrees with 90% humidity is going to just plain suck.

One day that first summer, I heard from another soldier that he'd been to a place about an hour away that sold used air conditioners for less than fifty bucks. I asked Billy if he wanted to come along. He said sure and off we went. About ten minutes into our trip and I heard the very distinct sounds of a bottle being opened. My head spun hard to my right and there was Billy, drinking an ice cold bottle of beer. He looked at me and smiled.

"What the fuck are you doing?"

"Drinking a beer, Gus, want one."

"No, I don’t fucking want one. I don’t drink and even if I did, I wouldn’t do it in a moving vehicle in the state of New Jersey."

We then got into a debate over the legalities and I informed him that not only would I lose my license, but I would then get busted down to slick sleeve private.  He considered the people that made such laws "savages". At that time, drivers in Alabama and Texas could have beer in their hand as they drove, with a rifle on the rack behind them.

He finished it fast and chucked the empty out the window.

"What am I supposed to do with the rest of them?" He asked, displaying three more bottles, the amount he estimated needed for the one hour round trip.

I told him to hold on to them and we would put them in the trunk when we got to our destination. He then proceeded to take out a cigarette and a lighter.

"Nope. Not in my car you don't."

"Jesus Christ, Scott. First I can't drink, now I can’t smoke? What the FUCK?!"

He only called me Scott when he was pissed, all other times, I was "Gus". I gave him the stink eye, and he rolled down the window. I wasn't sure what he was going to do, but I wasn't prepared for him to lean out at over 60 miles per hour and smoke. Sure, it took him awhile to light it, but he managed. I wasn't sure if he was really that angry, or if it was just the wind disporting his features, but either way, he didn't look happy. From that day on, if we went somewhere we took his car.

We got to the place just as a column of vehicles was leaving. All the drivers had Ft. Dix stickers on their windshields and they had picked over the less expensive inventory. Only two larger and more expensive units remained. I looked them over and asked the man how much they were. $65 bucks for either unit was the answer. I had exactly $50 dollars left until payday, which was only a two days away.

"Billy, do you suppose I could borrow $15 dollars from you."

"Sorry Gus, no can do."

I told the man I'd have to pass and without skipping a beat, Billy said, "I'll take one!"

He broke out a wad of cash and paid the man. The window unit was almost as big as Billy.

"Do me a favor, Gus and help me load this big mother into your trunk."

I was too stunned to react, so I picked up the other end and loaded up the unit. We couldn’t close the trunk and had to tie it down. We got back to the barracks and he needed help getting in the room and into HIS window. I went back to my room that was even hotter than when I left and stripped back down to my undies, sweat dripping into an ever growing pool.

About two hours later, there was a knock on my door.

"Jesus Christ, Gus, it's cold in there. Can I borrow some long johns from you? You could hang beef in there. I don't even need to ice my beer."

It was times like that that allowed me to live with the guilt of duct taping him a foot off the ground to a pole in the boiler room that was situated facing the street out from of the 60^th EOD. What are friends for?

Frisbee Fun, an EOD adventure

This is another tale from my time as an EOD tech at Ft Dix, New Jersey.

It was summer and we had to perform range clearances. There were many different kinds of ranges, each set up for firing a different kind of ordnance, from 40 Millimeter grenades that are fired from a tube under some M16's called an M203, to 155 Millimeter Howitzer shells. On that day, we had to clear the LAWS rocket practice range. Instead of shooting actual rockets, for training purposes, they shot these little blue tipped rockets to save money and reduce the amount of damage done to the range equipment. The equipment was an armored vehicle that was towed back and forth on a set of railroad tracks.

They were small, but still had a small explosive tip and need to be handled with respect. The Render Safe Procedure allowed them to be moved, so we spread out in a line and picked up the duds as we went, collecting them in a pile. After a few hours of this, we'd scoured the entire range. I won’t name names, but in the end there were two others there with me. An officer that was new to the company, and another sergeant.

I don’t recall who came up with the idea. I only remember talking to the other sergeant and thinking it was a fine idea if we stacked all of the practice rounds inside the armored vehicle, along with the entire case of C-4 we'd brought to ensure total destruction. We had some Flex-X as well to maintain explosive continuity. We strolled up to the new officer and asked him if it was okay. He didn’t even hesitate, just told us to get it done. We giggled like school boys all the way back to the armored vehicle.

Once we were done setting everything up, we pulled the two initiators and shut the back doors. We'd set the charge for fifteen minutes, plenty of time to stroll back to the burm at the front of the range and then climb up the fifty-foot ladder to the observation tower. We sat there with or new officer trying to look nonchalant.

The charge went off right on time, blowing one of the back doors open and throwing the other at least sixty feet into the air. It hung there like a bloated kite, then fell back to the ground and sliced through the two rail lines like a hot knife through butter. The sound was muted from distance and being partially contained which made it seem less real. We'd just registered the damage to the vehicle and tracks that we would have a tough time explaining, when we heard the sounds of something cutting through the air. The noise was getting closer, and we all spotted it at the same time. It was the six in thick, armored hatch from the top of the vehicle, and it was coming directly for us as if it were nothing more than a Frisbee, tossed by some child.

A 400 pound Frisbee traveling at about thirty miles an hour.

There was nothing to do but watch it come. We were fifty feet up in a range tower that sat on a berm that was thirty feel above the level ground. When it was less than three hundred yards away, it started to cant to our right. I still thought it would cut through the tower's support and we would all be going on Mr. Toad's wild ride, but it canted even further until it passed us and shot into the trees next to the entrance road. There was a crashing noise, louder than the initial explosion and two pine trees were cut clean through before the damned thing imbedded itself into the New Jersey sand.

The expression on the young officer's face can best be described as a combination of surprise, relief and the haunted look of one that knows his ass will be grass. It was time to leave, and we broke speed records for ladder climbing, berm running and sand sprinting. We hopped in our truck and flew out of there without so much as a glance back for fear we would see someone witness our escape.

The next day, calls were made, asses were chewed and a new officer had been broken in right.

VIP Cookies, an EOD Adventure

Not all of my time as an Explosive Ordnance Disposal technician was spent blowing stuff up. We also had a mission to support the Secret Service with bomb search and if necessary response services. We did this for the UN when it was in session and for the President or Vice President whenever they were traveling in our area. During the Presidential campaigns, we also supported all of the candidates and spent weeks on the road starting with the primaries all the way through to the election.

We were given $400 dollars to purchase suites. Even in 1986, you couldn't get much for $400, but we were expected to have at least two suites a nice pair of shoes and as many shirts and ties as were needed. If you ever attended one of these functions, it was easy to distinguish between the Secret Service and us. Our suites were cheap and our hair was a lot shorter. We also didn’t have a giant stick up our ass.

I'm not sure why most of the Secret Service agents were such pricks to us. Maybe it was the fact that we got to move around, while they mostly had to stand in front of doors for hours at a time. Or maybe they just felt superior. Who knows, but after a few weeks, I gave up trying to be nice and get along. Especially after the fourth time they made sure to order enough food for all of their agents, but conveniently forgot us. It was common to go without a meal break for eight hours during the Primaries in 1987-88. We were always short staffed and had to drive from function to function without a break. There were also periods of time we didn’t get paged for three days and kicked back at a hotel, but we made up for it running solid for the next forty eight hours.

Since we didn’t have time to stop and eat and weren't given a plate at 99% of all the functions we supported, we scrounged any chance we could. As luck would have it, the VIPs were usually brought into the events via the kitchen. We were responsible for searching the VIPs route in and out and if he/she stayed at the hotel, their room as well. We found it very convenient that there were large rolls of saran wrap in the walk-in coolers. I would search the entire cooler, then scarf down a half a pound of cold cuts. Once I was no longer dizzy with hunger, I would wrap up another half pound for whoever I was teamed up with.

Sometimes, there is no event. Sometimes, the VIP is just staying at a hotel and they roll in through the front door. In those cases, we primarily search the room and the rooms on either side, above and below. It was during one of these times that we were supporting Vice President Bush. I know there are a lot of people that don’t care for the Bush family, especially George Junior, but let me tell you a couple of reason why I liked the Bush Senior.

First of all, he served in WWII as a dive bomb pilot. Regular pilots were crazy enough, but dive bombers did just what it sounds like. They were launch off a carrier, flew toward the enemy's battle ships and carriers, gained a bunch of altitude, and dove at the big ships. At the last minute, they would pull up, often pulling enough G forces to black out, and then they would fly back and reload a new bomb and do it all over again. Bush senior was shot during one of those missions. After the war, he entered government service and spent the rest of his working life in service to his country.

http://www.history.navy.mil/faqs/faq10-1.htm

That's was enough for me to warm up to him, but in the two times I was within ten feet of him, he noticed and took the time to talk to me. The first time, he was at some hotel giving a speech, and he'd been around long enough to know I was EOD. I was 19, but looked about 17. He shook my hand, thanked me for my service and made small talk. I was impressed and happy, but didn’t think much of it. Three months later, I saw him before his speech at the dedication of Ellis Island. They were finally cleaning the place up and we'd spent a full day crawling through a buildings coated in a hundred years of pigeon poop. We cleaned up for the big show, and he shook my hand and said, "Minnesota right?" He'd remembered where I was from. That impressed me. We chatted for about five minutes and then it was time for his speech. Say what you want about the man, he had class.

And now back to the story currently in progress.

I wasn't starving, but I was a bit peckish. We usually had a lot of time to search, but we were called in last minute and the Vice President was ten minutes away. It was then that my sergeant taught me how to search a room expediently. You see the reason we were there was to make sure no one blew up whichever VIP we were protecting. Back in the 80's, they didn’t have a bunch of micro circuit boards and tiny power supplies. Hiding a bomb that could be remotely controlled was hard to do and left signs. Or, it was wired into existing power supplies. So, while my sergeant hit the bathroom and turned on and off all of the switches and gizmos, I jumped up and down on the bed and chairs. Yeah, you guessed it. If there was something there, it would go off one us instead of the Vice President. But hey, we got an extra $150 a month hazardous duty pay!

It was while I was bouncing on the bed, that I noticed the plate of cookies on the bedside table. It was a big plate and they were big cookies.

Chocolate chip.

Six of them.

I knew I didn’t have much time. My sergeant would never approve, but it occurred to me that six just didn't look right on the plate. Five, if arranged properly would not only look better, but seriously, how many big ass cookies did one Vice President need?

It was so big it wouldn't fit in my jacket pocket so I had to break it into four pieces. I rearranged the cookies that were left and brushed the crumb evidence off my hands and suit. We were in and out of that room in less than five minutes. A Secret Service agent, with requisite stick in his ass, was waiting to guard the room. I smiled and waved at him and we walked away. My sergeant suggested we go up to the roof, so I followed. We were in Boston, and it was a warm spring day and the view was magnificent. I was feeling pretty good, until my sergeant said, "Okay, hand over the cookie."

Apparently he'd done the math and noticed six had become five. I figured my ass was grass. I pulled out the four pieces and he studied them and then me. Then he took two of the pieces and quickly gobbled them down. "This never happened," he said and walked back to the elevator.

It was a damned good cookie. Too bad there hadn't been any milk.

Pocket Change, an EOD Adventure

Getting old and reminiscing about our youth is a common theme in popular culture, whether it's a song or a movie. I have no desire to go back and relieve those days, but they are worth remembering. I was fortunate to have some experiences that were powerful enough that I was able to lock in the time and place clearly in my mind. To remember how it felt to be in that younger body, and to clearly remember the smells and sounds and feelings. Some of the most vivid memories I have, are from the four years stretch of active duty that I served in the US Army. Friendships seemed to develop faster and events seemed to be more important.

I've never served in combat, and it is simultaneously the source of my greatest relief and greatest regret. I was a Cold War soldier. The Soviet Union was the enemy and it seemed very likely that during my tour from 1984-88, we would meet them on the battlefield, likely in Europe. During that time, there were still many Vietnam Era vets on active duty, and many young soldiers like me, were in awe of their stories. People did not support the troops and soldiers were looked down on.

I had a bumpy ride getting to my permanent duty station and even when I found my home, it was not smooth sailing. But those are stories for a different day. This story is about a time when I had brass balls the size of church bells and felt that if I wasn't exactly immortal, I was certainly invincible.

I was 19, and stationed at the 60^th EOD, Ft Dix New Jersey. EOD stands for Explosive Ordnance Disposal. Our job was to render safe unexploded ordnance, and we were damned good at it. On that sweltering summer day, I still had marks to show where the two prongs of the badge, affectionately known as a "Crab", were shoved into my chest by my loving and supportive unit members. Thank god that an EOD detachment consisted of no more than fourteen people.

On the day in question, we were out at the grenade range. Ft. Dix was a training post, and many basic trainees went through there over the years. One of the required parts of training was throwing a live grenade. Thousands of trainees went through every year, and with all of those thousands of grenades, some were bound to fail to function as designed. Every post is different, and at Ft Dix, we dealt with a wide variety of ordnance and even had our share of IED's(Improvised Explosive Devices). But what we had the most of, was grenades. The lot were dealing with that summer had a larger than normal percentage of springs that were broken. For those of you that don’t know, the "spoon" on a grenade holds back a striker with a spring. When the pin is removed and the spoon is released, the spring slams the striker into a fuse that in turn burns for a few seconds before detonating and setting off the explosive. The batch we were dealing with had a lot of broken springs, so the striker never flipped over and the fuse wasn't initiated. The render safe procedure for a grenade was the blow it in place. We did this with a block of C-4. We always put two blasting caps in it to make sure it went off, redundancy in all things.

A tech's biggest enemy in those days was complacency. I'm sure it is still a danger for the EOD techs today, but they also face a greater threat in Afghanistan and Iraq. The bad guys figured out that these guys were rendering safe all of their nasty roadside bombs, so the started specifically targeting EOD. The school is about 8 months long and it takes years of real world experience to get really good at the job. I barely scratched the surface in my short stint and don’t claim to have achieved the expertise of a ten or twenty year vet. By targeting the techs, they slow down the process, spread the rest of the guys thin and in turn killed more people with their IED's.

We didn’t have to deal with any of that. Hell, back then we didn’t even have bomb suits. They were introduced just as I was getting out and I never wore one on an incident. Our uniform, especially in the summer, was boots, pants and a t-shirt. A hat could fall at an inopportune time and the uniform blouse could get in the way. The only thing we had on us beside the stripped down uniform was our Hero Kit. It was a leather tool belt that held a dive knife, a demo pocket knife, a blasting cap crimper, a Leatherman tool and a roll of electrical tape hanging by a short chain.

When we had so many dud grenades, thanks to faulty springs, it made sense to go out first thing in the morning with a bunch of supplies and camp out at the range instead of driving back and forth each time. We did that for a couple of weeks and I will admit that I had become complacent. On this particular day, I remember sitting in the air condition van and arguing over whose turn it was to walk down range it the blazing sun. We all liked to blow stuff up, but it was like Africa hot that summer. There was no sense in arguing either, since I was low man, but it was matter of pride to be able to come up with the best excuse for why I shouldn’t go next. It also helped pass the one hour wait time. When a grenade fails to function as designed, there was a mandatory one hour wait time. It used to be 15 minutes, then 30, then 45 and but at that time it was an hour. The time would be increased each time there was a grenade somewhere that decided to wait until longer the current limit to go off. I sometimes wondered while walking down range if I would be the reason the new wait time was 75 minutes.

I stepped out of the van after 55 minutes, went to the back of the van and prepared my C-4 charge. Then, with 200 basic trainees and a cadre of mostly Vietnam era veterans watching, I walked around the large brick wall and onto the range to find the grenade. Did I saw walked? It was more of a strut. No quite a full out pimp walk, but it those big brass balls made it hard to walk like a normal person.

I knew that it was another broken spring. I knew it to the point where I didn’t even question it. I strolled down range, my gigantic balls clanking in the rhythm of my pace, sure of my invulnerability. The Drill Sergeant had said that the female trainee had "really chucked it", so I headed for the middle of the hard packed dirt range that was pitted with holes from all of the blasts. It resembled a prairie dog habitat. When the holes got too deep, they were supposed to close down and grade it, but that slowed down training, so they always pushed it as far as they could.

During a rainstorm a few weeks before, I'd had to reach down into several holes, some up to my shoulder before I found the grenade. Even with gigantic brass balls and a strong believe in my invulnerability, I questioned my intelligence after the 3^rd hole. But there was no rain in sight as I made my search on that day. The heat index was on the ratty edge of being unsafe for outside training and after fifteen minutes of checking holes, I was getting frustrated and thirsty. I looked up at the blast resistant glass for some help, but the Drill Sergeant only shrugged. I headed for the wall, resigned to perform a foot by foot grid search of the entire range. When I was ten feet from the wall, I saw a bulge in the sand at its base the size of a ball, or in this case, a grenade. The private that had "really chucked it", had done so straight down into the ground. I figured that the range sergeants were going to be pissed that I blew a hole in their brick wall, but rules were rules and I set my charge down to blow it in place.

As I bent over to place the charge a strong wind came through and uncovered the grenade. I expected to see another broken spring, but instead, I saw a very healthy spring straining against the sand, attempting to complete its mission. More wind blew and the spring twitched in anticipation.

There are many times in stories where the author will describe a segment of time slowing down for the intrepid hero. I have to tell you that while there is an illusion of time slowing; the reality is that the adrenaline that hits your system speeds up your brain function into overdrive. In less than a second, I disregarded the idea of running, or throwing the grenade. I remembered the change I had in my pocket. At EOD School, a crusty old sergeant had told me to always carry two dimes and a quarter. The two dimes were for a bomb fuse I never saw outside of training, but the quarter was for this very moment. For many years after I got out, even after my brass balls shrunk to almost normal size and I no longer believed in my invulnerability, I carried two dimes and a quarter with me everywhere I went.

I pulled the quarter out of my pocket and slid it between the striker and the fuse just as the spring overcame the sand. There was a loud click as it snapped shut, holding the quarter in place. Now in auto pilot mode, I used a strip of electric tape to secure the quarter, and since I had already picked it up, moved out fifty feet before I set it and the C-4 charge down. I pulled both igniters and walked slowly back to the van.

I was greeted with a scowl from my sergeant. "What took you so long?"

I told him and he shrugged. We went back to waiting for the next dud as more trainees threw grenades and the sun sagged down toward the horizon. It was just another day on the job, and even at the time I didn't find it very remarkable. It was my most interesting grenade, but at the time, that was like your most memorable glass of water. Compared to the other beverages, it was still pretty bland.