Navy Senior Chief Petty Officer

I had been attached to VC-10 located on Leeward Point, Guantanamo Bay, Cuba from August 1963 through November 1966.  I was then ordered to VT-9 at Naval Auxiliary Air Station (NAAS) Meridian, Mississippi.  In November 1963, while at Gitmo, I had been initiated as a Chief Petty Officer, and it was as such that my orders read “for duties of AMSC,” my rating at that time.  My family and I left Gitmo on November 4, 1966, flew to Norfolk, Virginia via Military Air Transport Service (MATS), and then caught a commercial flight to our parents’ homes in Northern New York.

While there on a 30-day-leave period, I spent a lot of time with my brother Bert at his hunting camp, which consisted of a tent in a remote area of the Adirondack Mountains.  On one occasion we were at camp for a six or seven day period.  Although we spent a lot of time in the woods peering around trees, we saw few deer, and shot at only one which we both missed.  While there my brother Fred drove into our campsite one evening with his four-wheel-drive vehicle, which it took to get there.

He had hardly arrived before he said to me, “I’ve got what as far as I know is very good news for you.”  He went on to relate that not only was I between duty stations, but so also was my brother Dell who was in the North Country having been ordered from Brunswick, Maine to Pensacola, Florida for duty.  Dell had read, before leaving Maine, in a civilian newspaper called the Navy Times, a list of all selections for Chief Petty Officers throughout the Navy.  This included Senior and Master levels of the Navy Chiefs.  Dell had told family members that he had seen my name listed as a newly appointed Senior Chief Petty Officer due to a Navy-wide examination I had taken while in Gitmo.  My mother knew this would be highly important to me, although she didn’t fully understand the real significance of it, so she asked Fred to drive the 75 miles to camp to inform me.  Therefore it was in a remote hunting camp in the Adirondack Mountains that I first learned I was soon to be a Senior Chief Petty Officer with just over eleven years of service in the United States Navy.