Last Saturday marked the fifty-first anniversary of the commissioning of Aviation Officer Candidate Class 27-70 at NAS Pensacola, Florida. Like many military milestones it was celebrated with the appropriate ruffles and flourishes that make such events stirring for both the participants and the spectators. I have included below my testimonial to my class and classmates who arrived in Pensacola on a humid June day in 1970.
Class 27-70
Our orders read that we were to report on 30 June 1970. Following a flight from Newark to Atlanta and then on to Pensacola and a night sharing a room in the San Carlos Hotel with two others, I found myself standing before a low brick building with a long gallery either side of the main door. (I would soon learn to call it a hatch.)
It was a sunny day and a kindly-looking officer candidate in crisply pressed khakis was checking off our names against the list he had on his clipboard. All the while he shared a benign smile with us as he cheerfully explained that we were in the right place. Yes, this was Indoc Battalion and yes, we only had to step through the main entrance and one of the drill instructors would show us where we were to go.
“Just give me the copy of your orders and go on in.” The smile never left his face. Perhaps he was bemused by our naivete, or sadistically aware of what was going to befall us once we stepped inside.
I was carrying just a gym bag with some toiletries and a change of underwear. Looking around me I saw other candidates with golf clubs, tennis rackets and even one man with Scuba gear. Obviously, some wag of a recruiting officer had told them of the myriad extracurricular activities that abound along Florida’s panhandle coast.
I had just crossed the threshold of the building when a meaty hand slammed me against the bulkhead, (I used to call such a structure a wall, but now that I was aboard and not just inside the battalion headquarters, I was rapidly altering my vocabulary.)
In front of me were a pair of reflective sunglasses that rested below the sharp edge of a brown campaign hat bearing the eagle, globe, and anchor of the US Marines.
There was a mouth moving below the nose that supported the sunglasses and I felt as much heard the words firing from its lips.
“Get out of my way you, horrible fucking beast!”
That was an action for which I would have been happy to oblige the speaker except his one hand had me pinned to said bulkhead while I noticed his other held a shillelagh capped a grenade. Nothing in my nearly twenty-two years had prepared me as to how to handle this kind of situation.
I thought that I had joined the navy, but I seldom saw a sailor. We were in the custody of Parris Island trained Marine Drill Instructors. For the next two weeks things certainly did not get any better. As a bunch of college graduates, we soon found out that we knew absolutely nothing. The idea was to break us down so that we could be rebuilt in a form useful to the navy. It seemed that we could not even walk correctly. But then, the DIs had a means to teach us.
We quickly learned to sleep in our gym clothes on top of our sheets so that we did not have to remake our beds each morning. Sneakers were left unlaced at night so when at 0430 the call came to fall out for PT, we could make it to the battalion street in minutes. We learned how to fold t-shirts and skivvies into nine-inch and six-inch squares. How to spit shined shoes and make brass gleam were quickly mastered. Drilling and marching on the blazing concrete “grinder” became second nature and to this day I always step off with my left foot first. Exhaustion dogged us and while we sweated and strained each day in the Florida heat, I gained twenty-five pounds of muscle.
We would soon learn that the attrition rate for Aviation Officer Candidates was 70%. There were one hundred ten of us who walked through the portal to Indoc Battalion and within hours the DORs – Drop on Requests – began.
If it all seemed too much all a beleaguered candidate had to do was to raise a hand and tell the Drill Instructor, “I DOR.” There was no going back. Once the words were out of his mouth the man was whisked away from the rest of us lest his fears and misgivings spill over to the rest of us. We never saw them again except to glimpse one of them washing pots in the kitchen.
The thing was, though, just by saying I quit didn’t mean the military was through with you. The DOR could opt for an enlisted career, the training for navy enlistees did not involve Marine Dis. The other route was to keep the DOR at Pensacola just long enough for their hometown draft board to be notified that they were available for military service. The DOR would travel home gleeful at his near escape only to find a letter from Uncle Sam waiting for him with orders to report for duty at some Army recruiting station. Worse still, once you DORed, you were ineligible for any other service’s officer program.
But the quitters weren’t the only ones who left us. There were candidates for whom some previously undiscovered medical issue arose. I saw several collegiate athletes tossed from the program because of injuries sustained on the field. They may or may not have been sent to the Army, but even the Navy didn’t seem to have it in for men so disqualified.
There were a few who fell by the wayside because of academic problems. Almost everyone was put on “sub” something during the first week of academics. In my case, I was having a bout of heat exhaustion. Once that was over, I got off everything including SUB PT. Since I had been a runner I could handle the Cross-country course, despite the deep sand, and overcoming the Obstacle Course required knowing just how to throw one’s body up two climbing walls. If you can get an elbow over, you are half-way home. Of course, everything was run against the watch, so you had to be quick, even in the deep heat of a Gulf Coast summer.
The one equalizer for most of us was the training tank. I had never really learned to swim before I got to Pensacola, but within a few weeks I had mastered the four strokes that were required, learned to jump off the twenty-foot tower and swim fifty-feet submerged (this was to teach us how to survive burning oil on the water’s surface), and to survive the Dilbert Dunker.
The term Dilbert is applied to just about any Navy flier at some point in his career. In this case the “dunker” consists of an airplane cockpit mounted on a set of rails at the far end of the training tank. (By the way, the training tank is simply an overlarge swimming pool filled with salt water and kept at an uncomfortable cool temperature. Had they simply emulated the warm ocean just outside the doors of the place we might have enjoyed our time there a bit more.
However, the point of the Dilbert Dunker was for the candidate to strap on a parachute, climb into the cockpit and secure a safety belt. Then, with one hand on the control stick and his feet on the inert rudder pedals, the candidate gave a thumbs up. What followed was a controlled crash into the pool with the cockpit inverting so that one’s head was pointed toward the bottom. Egress was made by holding one’s breath as you waited for the bubbles to clear, release the safety belt and swim downward and away from the device.
Once you were clear, then you swam to the surface where a rescue swimmer would help you to the side of the pool. Of course, this was done while wearing a sodden parachute weighing twice its original weight.
During our qualification run through everything went, shall I say swimmingly, until one of our class members panicked underwater, lost his breath, and began fighting with the rescue swimmer such that he had to be cut out of the device. Needless to say, the instructors were more than pissed off and this candidate was washed out.
Still, the thirteen weeks that we completed the program before commissioning had some lighter moments. There were the races we ran trying to be the fastest to donate blood. I ended up collapsing into the snack table when I tried to get up too fast.
Then there were the comic antics of being singled out during a Room, Locker and Personnel inspection for having the rear flap of a raincoat unbuttoned and being forced by the DI to run the corridors of the battalion stopping at each room and shouting, “I will button every unbuttoned button in the world. Sir!”
After being discovered with a dirty M-1 during an inspection in which we were wearing dress whites with swords, one of my classmates was forced to run the Cross-Country course with rifle at port arms and his sword banging his leg at his side. It did not help that the Cross-country course ran around the CPO Club swimming pool, and we were treated to bikini-clad nubile young women taunting us as we slogged past.
After ten weeks of military drill, it was time to begin the aviation side of our training. That meant that we were now in the hands of real aviation types who would teach us meteorology, navigation, and flight rules. We would even begin a few flights. We were relocated to rooms away from the recent arrivals and the DIs left us alone. After all, we were now burdened with keeping flight gear and school bags filled with charts, plotters, Jeppesen computers and a myriad of other stuff needed for class. Most of this did not fit neatly into lockers, and since we were taken to class in buildings with vending machines, the acquisition of candy bars, aka poggie-bait made life suddenly tolerable.
When we reported to Pensacola, we did so knowing that the Vietnam War was not to be won. After all, it had been two years since Walter Cronkite, fresh back from the Tet offensive had pronounced the war unwinnable on TV.
Why were we there, vying for commissions? For us it was all about the flying. Even the DIs, some of which had endured hell in Vietnam knew the war was bullshit. No, we wanted to become Navy fliers, the best of the best, able to land on and take off from pitching decks in any weather. It wouldn’t have mattered to us if the war was in Peru. We came to win our wings of gold. Nothing less was acceptable.
Commissioned Graduates of 27-70
- David Allen
- Richard Bishop
- John Bushby
- John Callahan
- Robert Clark
- John Davis
- Jerome Degruise
- Gene Del Vecchio
- Donald Denny
- Carl Dodd
- Kendal Durkee
- Joseph Fischer
- William Forrest
- James Ketter
- Ernest Leard
- Malcolm LeCompte
- Kevin Lover
- Edward Marcotte
- Dale Mullin
- Joseph Preston
- Raymond Gandolfi
