Photo: USARMYGERMANY.com. The
original caption, written by
Jim Riebe
says "Jerry Dawson. By the smirk on his face I'm assuming that he is a short
timer at the time this was snapped, probably 1963." Well, maybe, but in my
experience short timers always carried a clipboard with their exit
checklist; that way if some NCO or Lieutenant wanted to hassle them, they
could always say they were on their way to such-and-such office to get the
next thing initialed. But really they were going somewhere to goof off
or sleep. Well Jerry is holding
something in his right hand, it
might be a clipboard, hard to say. Anyway, this is in the motor
pool; he's standing by some 1955-model Jeeps*. I spent lots of time there
doing useful things like painting batteries black. I guess that was not
quite as silly as when, a couple years before when Elvis was filming parts
of
GI Blues on
Army bases in Frankfurt, they had the soldiers painting the
tires
black... and the grass green! Seriously, I saw it myself.
_____________________
*
| If you look closely, you can see the telltale horizontal grille. The
far superior (less tippy) 1938 vertical-grille models that were used in WWII
were also still plentiful. So, for that matter, were C-Rations from 1948;
once a week they were served in the mess hall instead of fresh-cooked food.
We'd also take them with us on "field trips". Some of them were pretty
good, perhaps the most prized was the Scrambled Eggs and Lima Beans. We'd
heat them up in the Jeep motors while using the Jeep exhaust to inflate our
air mattresses, and then open them with our P-38s. Crackers and Cheese
was another coveted C-Ration.
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