Comments:
After bouncing around for a while I finally decided that it was time to "settle down" and my wife and I found a great place in Murrieta. I'm still serving in the Navy but I work with the Marines. (FMF Corpsman = USMC Medic) I'm going to be doing some mountain warfare training the week of the reunion so I won't be able to make it. This really bums me out since I was actually looking forward to going and its within walking distance from my house! 25 or 30 year maybe?
The who, what, when, where and why of it all is a long story... I pretty much partied and screwed off for the first couple years after graduation and then started to pull things together when Harley's dad offered to get me on at Edison for a couple outages. After doing a couple of those I moved up to Washington to do another outage at another power plant up there. Ended up getting married and went back to school thinking that I'd pursue something in an engineering field. I was pulling rotating shifts at a mill, it was really crappy but the pay was good and it was easy to trade day shifts off so I could go to class during the day. I can't remember what year it was but my dad asked me to come back down and help out with the winery. He was having a guy retire and needed help with things. There had been cutbacks and lay-offs at the mill I was working at. and I had just decided that I wanted to change majors in school since I was more interested in what my wife was studying (pre-med) then what I was and figured it was time for a change. We moved back down and I became a cellar slave at the family winery. I worked long hours during and after harvest and it was pretty tough trying to squeeze more in classes, balance things at home, and other stuff. I won't go into everything but essentially I hit the >RESET< button and made some major changes in things. I decided that it was more important to be happy doing something I liked then something I really didn't care to do even if it paid well, so I quit my job. Along those same lines I'd realized that there were some serious flaws in the family financial dynamics and divorced my wife. I'd been getting into cycling pretty heavily and some how found myself running the bike shop at the local Sport Challet, it was fun and I enjoyed it. The pay sucked, the hours sucked, but the perks were pretty nice. I still wanted to go to school and wouldn't be able to afford it working for Sport Challet, especially when it came to grad school and advancement in the company really wasn't the career I wanted. I'd had a few friends that had some pretty good things to say about the Navy so I looked into it and decided that I'd give it a shot. The bonus I got made the decision a little easier and school they offered me took me back towards the engineering field which I felt pretty comfortable. Not exactly a short cut into the medical field but I knew that I'd still be able to maybe pick up some of the classes I'd need along the way and I'd have the GI Bill once I got out. Boot Camp at 29 what the hell was I thinking? (Actually anyone that says its hard is lying) Piece of cake, advanced electronics computer field core classes (circa 1968 kind of stuff) not so easy. September 11... after this I was pretty sure that maybe I should have looked into student loan programs, scary stuff! But in the whole Navy vs Army or Marine Corps, I figured that I should be pretty safe, and at this point it was a little late to change my mind, I owed Uncle Sam a few years still. After finishing the "A" school I went on to my "C" school for the Mk 86 NGFSS (Naval Gun Fire Support System). This was a pretty difficult system since I had to know how to operate, maintain, troubleshoot and repair something that should have belonged to NASA during the moon shot missions. I'm sure that the stuff was state of the art then but by today's standards a troubleshooting nightmare. Old components on an old ship add the motion of the ocean and water to electricity and you get the idea, a needle in a haystack would have been easier to find. The system's actually being phased out now but it could still put a 78lb projectile on target more then 10 miles away with a 50' kill radius, or with good tech's get direct contact with an inbound missile at about 5 miles out (very impressive). My 1st duty station, Yokosuka Japan on the USS Cushing (de-commissioned now). I was there for about 2 years but I spent less then 150 days in port due to chasing Chinese subs or guarding oil terminals off the coast of Iraq. Due to some hic-up involving the X-wife and some financial crap I ended up losing my clearance and had to choose a new job if I wanted to stay in the Navy. This was actually kind of a good thing since the stuff I worked on was getting phased out anyways and I wanted to get back into the medical field. I cross trained as a corpsman to make a rate (job) change before going back to the states for school again. During our Iraq deployment I worked both as a Mk86 tech and as a corpsman along with some of the other weapons systems. It made for a lot of lost sleep. I ended up having to be a medical escort for a guy that had some problems and bounced around the middle east for almost a month trying to get him to the care he needed. There was quite a bit of craziness in between our flight off the ship and the flight into Germany from Iraq making the decision to become a corpsman that much easier. Soon after we got back from Iraq I was in for a short but very cold winter by Chicago for school. I got stationed out at NAWS China Lake (Ridgecrest California where parts of Top Gun was filmed) in the clinic on base after school. Not a bad place if you're into outdoor activities but pretty isolated. By some strange fluke of whatever someone I was friends with while I was in Japan introduced me to a a Canadian medic that I'd kept in touch with over the year(s?) that was coming down to visit the happiest place on earth and asked if I'd mind acting as tour guide. Being a big kid at heart and not having gone in a while I took a couple days off for some time at the Mouse House and other craziness in LA. We ended up hitting things off more then just a little bit and over the next year took turns every few months flying up to or down from Canada. We ended up getting married TWICE in a weeks time. Once up in Canada with the family and then again Las Vegas style (so it would be recognized in both the US and Canada) I finished the rest of my time at China Lake while Candy did the same till her contract expired. I decided that since I'd seen ship life, and done some cushy shore duty it was time to get dirty with the grunts and opted to go to the "Green Side" and work with the Marines. Candy had finished up what little was left on her contract and moved down to the states with me when I transfered to Camp Pendleton. After some more school and getting pushed out to one of the units we ended up finding a great place in Murrieta and closed escrow on it less then a month before I shipped off with the 31st Marine Expeditionary Unit (MEU) for 6 months in Okinawa Japan. Right now I'm still with the Marines and I've decided that I'm going stick with them for their next push into where ever that may be next (I know but I'm not saying). After that, who knows but I really feel like I need to head back to school again and finish at least a BSN or something so that when the time does come for me to hang up my combat boots I've got something to fall back on.
