Big Lobster Story by Glenn Meigel

      While I was Battery Commander at Bristol, a SSG Hill (who was an excess Launcher Section Chief awaiting PCS and, therefore, temporarily in charge of vehicles/ Motor Pool working up in the IFC area) took leave to see family up in Maine and brought back a huge lobster.  I’m told recently by two sources that it was at least 25 pounds and I remember it being even bigger.  Nevertheless and far too much food for him alone, he donated it to the Battery and we decided to raffle it off with the proceeds going to charity.  The participation was outstanding and some even bought blocks of tickets to increase their chances of winning.  To avoid conflict of interest and since he was allergic to shellfish, our Training Clerk Charles Venezia was picked to draw the winning ticket.  Since he worked for me in the Orderly Room, he faced more than a little skepticism from the troops about his own impartiality.  Of all embarrassments, I won.  (Technically, my IFC Warrant CW2 Paul Lynch should have had that winning ticket; but when he didn’t come through with the money to buy his reserved block of tickets, I bought them up myself so we could get the drawing started on this perishable food, and wound up winning on what should have been Lynch’s ticket.)  To avoid further embarrassment and prevent Charles from taking more heat, I kept only a portion of one claw (which my then girlfriend now wife Regina cooked for dinner at her house) and then donated the remainder of the lobster to the Mess Hall which served up some great chow with it—hot baked stuffed lobster and cold lobster salad sandwiches for the noon meal.  (Our Mess Hall was absolute tops under Mess Sergeant SFC Bob Warner and won the Army’s Philip A. Connelly Awards competition for all of ARADCOM’s small unit messes during my year there; the fact that we drew rations at Newport RI Naval Base as opposed to some Army post ration break-down point certainly helped out and our daily chow reflected that, enhanced by the efforts of our fine Mess Hall crew.)  The finale to this story is that the very day of the feast, LTG Richard Cassidy, CG ARADCOM was touring our site.  (The linked picture at the bottom of web page http://www.frontiernet.net/~w2hyn36/page13y.html puts the date at 26 Oct 72.)  I escorted him through the chow line where he was duly impressed with such high-speed cuisine for a Nike site and we sat down to eat at the Officers’ table in back of the Mess Hall.  All of a sudden, the General jumped up and I followed suit thinking we just went to “Blazing Skies!”  He said he simply wanted to look around to see that everyone was enjoying the lobster for lunch… and of course, they were!
 Charles adds:  The guys really did enjoy that lunch— and I think that lobster showed up for more than one meal!  We really did have excellent chow—a little TOO excellent, I'm sad  to say, since I gained back some of the seven inches I'd lost off my waist in Basic and AIT (and Korea finished the job).  I especially remember the steaks they used to barbecue over grills made from 55 gallon drums.  Since leaving Bristol, I've eaten in some of the finest steak houses in the world, but I don't think I've ever had better steak than at Bristol.  Even the SOS was good!

      The guys on KP always kept the mess hall floor waxed and shined so you could almost see your face in it. They had an old floor buffer that the lever off-on switch didn’t work well most the time. So someone replaced that spring loaded switch with a regular wall type light switch that was either off or on. No spring load going to off. Worked great PROVIDED you remembered to make sure it was turned off before plugging it in. Well as you have probably guessed by now someone didn’t do that and had the buffer in the middle of the mess hall with the long cord strung out to the side where a wall socket was. He went to plug it in and …. Mr Murphy’s laws struck again!  He tried to grab the buffer with no success, then finally decided to pull the plug back out of the wall but not before that floor buffer had wiped out a good share of the tables and chairs like a helicopter blade spinning and the mess hall looked like a war zone. If my memory is correct we scrounged another floor buffer from the Navy very soon after that happened. If you ever have run one of those floor buffers you know how crazy they can get especially for someone not used to them.

      One afternoon we were told that we would have a surprise op check that night and we would all be in fatigues. This was from Sgt. Cary. Since we weren't on hot btry, Bob Levesque and I decided to go to Providence. Later that night we received the call and made it back to the Site. When we got there we were in civvies and beat feet for the hill. We ran through the ops check and were standing in the hallway when Sgt. Cary started going up one side and down the other of Levesque and I about being in civvies when someone called attention. Col. Smith walked over to us and congratulated Sgt. Cary for The Job he did in not telling the crew about the surprise op check as Bob and I were not in uniform as all the other sites had been that night. He then left with his crew. Sgt. Cary looked at us and remarked that we were the luckiest guys in the world, turned and left. It was always fun to get under Cary's skin when he couldn't do anything about it.

      We had a big inspection coming and somebody in the Motor Pool decided that all the truck engines would look like new and spray painted them all. One of the pick-up trucks had to be used before the paint was dry and as soon as it was started the entire engine caught fire. The fire was put out in short order but the wiring harnesses were burned up and the truck was unusable so it was towed to town and hidden somewhere just in time before the inspection. After the inspection the IFC techs were "volunteered" to build a new main harness and some smaller ones for the truck. Also pay day there was a table set up at the end of the pay line for "donations" to have a local town mechanic put it all back together and running again.

      There was to be a championship fight on TV and Sgt. Cary had a TV set in his room. We were on site either because we were broke or we were hot btry. We asked him if we could watch the fight with him and he refused. He had a guest  and I can't remember his name I think it was House or something like that. Possibly a cook. We retired to the tech's room in the barracks a little miffed to say the least. We were talking about paybacks when one of the techs talked about if only we could turn a radar on him and jam the signal. My comment was that if we had an old FM receiver we could jam any TV set. One of the techs had an old receiver, it didn't have a cabinet on it and the speaker was torn. Just what we needed. The window in Carey's room was frosted glass so we could get right to the back of the TV set. For power we went to the vans and got every extension cord we could find along with a shop vac that had a recpt on it. It just reached! We set up the radio and test it by scanning the band until we could hear the TV going nuts and Carey cussing. We detuned and went back to the room to wait for the fight to start. time for the fight and half a dozen of us were out side the window. The bell rang for the first round and we started jamming. Three minutes later we stopped nearly dying from keeping our laughter in. Sgt. Carey was having a fit pounding on the TV and moving the rabbit ears. He sat down when we quit jamming. The bell rang for the second round and we jammed for three minutes. I guess that it was about the fifth round when there was a knockout. Boy, the cussing!  We picked up and put things away and laughed most of the night.  PAYBACKS ARE HELL!

      One night Sgt Chapman and this author spent a little too much time at the little NCO club we had on base and got discussing climbing telephone poles with pole spikes. Well now, Chapman was not to be outdid and neither was I. I had an old set of pole spikes and a safety belt and the two of us walked over behind the BOQ where there was a telephone pole with a light on the end of a short  arm about 20 feet up or so. He went up first with no problem but was just climbing up on the arm when he slipped and down he went. Only his pride was hurt but then it was my turn. I got up there to the light arm fine but got laughing at Chapman and not paying attention and hugged the pole with my knees. That's a definite no-no because it kicks the spikes out and down I slid with the safety belt still attached and around the pole. Creosote slivers are not nice to remove!

      Another big inspection on the way and one of the IFC techs soldered a roofing nail onto a half dollar and nailed the whole thing down in a doorway in the connecting corridor. The inspection went well until the inspecting officer tried to pick up the half dollar along with several of the inspection staff following him. Of course if they ever found who did it your author might have had a slight problem. We had a good crew and those in on it "knew nothing".

      We use to go over to the Quonset or Davisville Navy base quite a bit and "scrounge" different items for our Nike base. Fridays were the best days to go especially right around noon time when chow was being served. Reason being they always had a super selection of two kinds of fish usually to include some of the biggest fried shrimp I ever saw and three different kinds of meat. We had great chow at our mess hall but  the Navy always had much more selections.

      One time when the site was being converted to Improved Hercules, a contractor was blasting holes in the rock on the hill to lay a foundation for the new generator building. He was using small amounts of dynamite perhaps half sticks or less and was laying old mattresses over the blast hole to prevent damage to the surrounding buildings and radars. Each time the dynamite would explode with a small WHUMP and the mattress would pick up a foot or less and just settle back down in a little cloud of dust. I watched him for awhile and jokingly made the comment I would lay on one of those mattresses for $100. He promptly reached in his wallet and pulled out $100. Thankfully this "not-so-brave" body thought about it a second time and just watched the next hole go. The mattress went about 10 feet in the air! The contractor explained this sometimes happens if it blows upwards in a crack in the rock instead of splitting it.

      Another story.---- We were at McGregor Range when we picked up our Nike Hercules set and fired it. I switched from the MTR to the TTR on range just to break the momentary. The mother aircraft came in, dropped the target and we made a seamless transfer to the target aircraft. The Range officer standing behind me started to yell that I was on the mother aircraft and to unlock. I didn't so he reached for the switch and I batted his hand away. He looked again and said that I was on the target after all. When he went into the BC Van he complained to LT. Baldwin that I had hit him when he tried to unlock. LT. Baldwin's only comment was that he was lucky that I hadn't broken his arm. A good officer, always.

      It was the Fourth of July and we were in formation in front of the orderly room when the first Sgt. came out. He stated that he needed two volunteers. I thought to myself anything was better than marching. I looked at Levesque and we both stepped forward. We were the only two to do so. The first Sgt. then said we could take off as he had two too many people in the formation. As we walked away I heard someone say that the two of us always lucked out.

      Got to thinking about the time of our seventy-two hour ECM mission. I think that it was in 1960. All civilian aircraft were grounded and the air force had some of their new jamming gear on board. They had chaff and that was easy to avoid. The ECM was something new and since we were bored we decided to see if we could track them. I turned the MTR into a tracking radar and with the acq radar giving us an approximate location of the jamming we would search in the jamming with the two tracking radars.Then we would start slewing the frequencies up and down until we could get a positive on the aircraft. Once we got the info to the track radar I would put the MTR on the missile by flipping the two red handles down. We would then run a fire mission on the target. HQ would always deny that there was a plane in the area.
   At one point LT Baldwin told HQ that we had run out of missiles and could we stand down. Of course they said no and that we were resupplied.
   The morning after the mission was over the Capt. was told to report to BAB. (Boston Army Base) Later Levesque and I were called in to explain what we had done during the mission as we were the only site to run a fire mission on every jamming aircraft in the area. Of course the Capt. had no idea at all. We wrote it and it was forwarded to HQ.
   A couple of weeks later a new procedure came down for tracking jamming aircraft. It was all screwed up of course. About a week later an OPS team arrived and had us run a drill on the new procedure. Believe it or not we flunked. We got all over the OPS team and set them straight. The next procedure came down was much better.

      We had in one corner of the day room a small PX that we could buy hamburgers, pop, film and small items from. I remember one of the guys that opened it up was from the launcher area and took care of it after duty hours. I believe his name was Sgt Orasco. He was from New Mexico and his mother in Old Mexico used to send him a gallon of hot chili peppers once in a while and he would put them on the counter for anyone who would eat them. They were about 1 inch long, green and must have had a Scoville heat rating of at least 200,000!  Best I could do was 2 or 3 on a hamburger at most but he would eat them one right after another and not even break a sweat.