Army 1963-66 - Photo #32 - Other 3rd ACR pictures that I didn't take

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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.
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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.