Personal Narrative: Aviation Field Depot Service

With a dreamy, nostalgic grin lining his face, one filled with hard-won battle scars serving as an eternal reminder on how much both men and innumerable others had worked to protect the United States, my Grandpa extended both of his arms out as if welcoming a long-lost friend (such as Jay was) and waxed reminiscence—his clean but no longer pearly, shiny, or white teeth on display with prominence the entire time—with regard to how the two of them were now together in Sandia, which had a six thousand foot mountain outside the base filled with “tunnels and stuff” where top-secret technical work was getting done on special weapons, both “atomic and otherwise.” Taking into the scope of consideration what little knowledge I possessed on how America
dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki during World War II’s final stages, my curiosity got peaked to a negligible extent on whether either if not both men had any involvement when it came to this “top-secret technical work” Grandpa had just finished up mentioning. I also thought about Grandpa as he was during the 1950s filling in for Connery as 007, battling Dr. No in his underground lair deep in the heart of the fictional ‘Crab Key’ island, upon hearing mention of the “six thousand foot mountain.” But the element that caught my attention more than anything else he was discussing—he went on to mention how, after about three weeks, during which time both tried out and qualified for a recreational baseball team, they got transferred from the 8th A.F.D.S. to the 1st—was this mysterious “AFDS” acronym and the precise word combination for which it stood. My brain started to scan for possibilities, processing each acronym one can make from “A.F.D.S.” at a breakneck pace not even AMD’s fastest Athlon XP or Intel’s quickest Pentium 4 available back then could come close to matching. After coming up with many possible solutions to solving this acronym, most of which were ridiculous and not worth even mentioning now, I finally summoned up my juvenile cojones and decided it was time to find out what A.F.D.S. meant. “Sorry to interrupt, but I just wanted to ask you a question.” Without any hesitation or warning, Grandpa’s mouth became stiffer and more stationary than a Macy’s mannequin. His eyes, ears, mouth, nose, and head perked up like Argos’s did in Homer’s Odyssey, and he gave me a look conveying an air of mild happiness accompanied by genuine concern over what my question was.
“Go right ahead!” he said with his left and right hands resting upon his knees. “What is it?” Remembering each earlier possibility, the one that seemed to make more sense than any other prompted me to blurt out “Does A.F.D.S. stand for Air Force Directory Service?” Right then and there, Grandpa began smiling and encapsulated in his grin was a dignified pride like Don S-hula’s when he got carried off the Los Angeles Coliseum field after his Dolphins capped off a perfect season.
“Excellent guess, kid! I can see where you’re coming from, but what the letters A.F.D.S. stood for in our case was—and get ready to write this down—Aviation Field Depot Service.” Jay found himself unable to suppress his urge for setting the record straight. Having reached yet again with his right hand only seconds ago for his Dewar’s, he finished what remained of the delightful alcoholic taste sensation and propped his glass on its accompanying The Sound of Music beverage coaster with a brutal slam, the hardest achievable without shattering it into a million shards. “Close, Al, but you’re off by one word. It’s Aviation Field Depot
Squadron.” Realizing that he was, in point of fact, incorrect, Grandpa confirmed Jay’s impassioned correction with a polite if somewhat embarrassed nod and our conversation continued. They told me about how, when they got to the 1st A.F.D.S., the people who met them upon their arrival told them about how they were going overseas. They started basic training in January and completed it in the middle of April, at which time their superiors gave them ten days’ leave before their going overseas. So the two of them got a military flight back to New Jersey/New York, where they spent ten days and then had to get back to Albuquerque. They arranged to go to an air base in New York State, and got a ‘hop’ on a military plane back to Tucson, Arizona, where they then hopped a bus overnight back to Albuquerque. When I asked Grandpa for more details on this military flight they got, he said he’d tell me when I got older. Feeling his stomach acids “damn near eating away at [his] internal organs,” Grandpa ended the conversation there and drove us all to a nearby local tavern/grille called Clams-t-e-r-’s for a late lunch. But, my curiosity had definitely gotten piqued and it was hard not to ask more questions. Instinct, somehow, told me to just have patience and bide my time as I just knew that there was some juicy stuff coming and I didn’t want to ruin any chances for finding out what I envisioned as ‘the good stuff.’ Chapter Four: “2004” (Part Three) After we concluded an enjoyable—if somewhat brief—discussion about some of their experiences while stationed at the Sandia Air Force Base, it was wonderful to enjoy an early dinner with Grandpa and Jay Schwarz at Clams-t-e-r-’s, the finest tavern/grille in Deerfield Beach. Even better, though, was learning that both were happy to have me join them again the following morning to continue our conversation where it had left off.
Sure enough, there I was, sitting in Grandpa’s living room with them and trying to remember the last thing mentioned. “If I’m not mistaken,” I said to Grandpa, “you had said something yesterday about how the two of you got a military flight back to New Jersey and New York, where you and Jay spent…what was it? Ten days, I think?” “Yes,” he replied. “And then we had to get back to Albuquerque, so we arranged to go to an air base in New York State, and got what they call a ‘hop’ on a military plane back to Tucson, Arizona.” “Oh! I remember that now,” I said, brushing my hair with my fingertips. “What does ‘hop’ mean in this particular case? I know it usually refers to a kind of small jump, using one leg, if not two, but I didn’t know it had military connotations.” Jay proceeded to explain to me that military hops are airplanes that are already traveling to a certain destination and have space available on them, so they let other people fly on them as well.
“But, there are some prerequisites that you’ll need to keep in mind about the hops,” Grandpa interjected, smiling with his arms crossed. Having kept the ABC Transmissions legal pad and purple ballpoint pen Jay had given me the day before, I readied myself to account for each ‘prerequisite’ Grandpa was on the verge of telling me about. “For one thing,” Jay said, conveying a thoughtful air by way of clasped hands, “service members on active duty have first priority, followed by retired service members like Grandpa and I. Everyone who doesn’t fall into either group ends up coming last.” Grandpa followed up on this by explaining that on the day of the flight you have to travel to the base that the planes are leaving from, and then sit. “Most of the time, you will get on,” he said. “But, waiting times are as long as six hours.” “Believe me,” I responded, “you’d never catch this guy traveling on a plane without Pokémon in his pocket.” “What is a Pokémon?” Jay asked, looking puzzled. As an eleven-year-old, it seemed inconceivable to me that I’d run into people who lacked any familiarity with a cultural phenomenon of such international renown as Pokémon. I had little understanding of the generation gap between us back then, although it would become a lot clearer as time passed. “Anyways, there’s one more thing I’d like to mention as far as military hops go,” Grandpa said, keeping the conversation going as well as he could. “You need an identification card on hand to even get considered eligible to fly.” “Hmmm,” I responded. “Would the ID badge I wear at Lyons Creek Middle suffice at all?” I saw Jay’s arms drop down to his sides in a slumping motion. Immediately then he moved his arms up and, while looking at the popcorn ceiling with his eyes closed and his left hand making contact with his well-preserved white mane, exploded into a wild—bordering on derisive—laughing fit. “As I’m sure you were able to gather from Jay’s response just then,” Grandpa said to restore peace, “that won’t cut it. Your chances of boarding might improve with a standard state ID.” “So what occurred after you guys ‘hopped’ aboard the plane to Tucson?” I said. Jay explained in a slow, methodical way, recalling that they took a bus overnight back to Albuquerque. Once they had been in Albuquerque for a week, they got loaded on a plane with some other guys in the squadron and flown back to New Jersey, arriving just outside Fort Dix. Without any warning or subconscious awareness, I found myself attempting—and failing—to suppress juvenile giggling. Then again, now that I think about it, “giggling” may not be enough for describing my response. “Dix” lent itself to a rather obvious innuendo, and in my preadolescent immaturity I couldn’t help but find myself laughing. “What’s going on?” Grandpa said, baffled by my response. “All Jay said was that, once we had been in Albuquerque for a week, we got loaded on a plane with many other guys in the squadron and flown back to New Jersey—which was completely idiotic—just outside of Fort Dix. What on Earth has you laughing like that?” “Jay said Dix,” I responded, before breaking into laughter again. “Dix?” Jay said, while trying to figure out why I found the word so funny. “How is that funny? There’s nothing humorous about—oh, no. Good Lord, no.” His cheeks turned red, and he spoke up with a blend of embarrassment and frustration. “Make sure you use the bathroom later—your brain needs to get washed out with soap.”
“I guess I have to agree with you,” I conceded with a yawning sigh, proceeding to ask them what happened after they were flown back to New Jersey. Grandpa, using his best faux-British accent, replied “Indeed you may, young squire,” before returning to his authentic gravelly, rocky, Brooklyn-bred accent. They were in some sort of holding pattern for a few days, until they got taken by train to the Brooklyn Navy Yard, where there was a transport ship waiting for them known as the General Maurice Rose. Maurice Rose was a World War I veteran who also served as a United States Army general during World War II, and was the son of a rabbi and commander of the Third Armored Division. “Where did the Maurice Rose take you two?” I had to ask.
Grandpa, who got lost in thought and concentration, then proceeded to tell me about how they went overseas on the ship to Southampton, England.
Upon landing there, they got a train ride up to the RAF Sc-u-l-t-h-or-p-e base which was a military training facility for the United Kingdom's Ministry of Defense, situated about 3 miles west of Fake-n-ham in Norfolk, England. He clarified how the base was in a worse climate than any I had ever experienced in my lifetime, because there were only four miles of land between the base—which the Royal Air Force also used during World War II—and the North Pole, while the rest was open sea. I visualized them shaking hands with Mr. and Mrs. Claus, imagining how cold and damp it must have
been. “Anyways,” Grandpa continued as he rubbed the right side of his nose, “we were there for six months, and then transferred the outfit—oh. Back up. During the stay there at Sc-u-l-t-h-or-p-e, we shared a barracks with Army cooks, and when the service payday came around, they had a blackjack game in the barracks, playing for pretty big dough.” “Did you ever feel tempted to join in the action, or did you hold on to your paychecks?” I inquired. Jay jumped right in, telling me that most of the time Grandpa played it safe and stayed on the sidelines. Jay’s face shone with longing and nostalgia as he remembered. “But one night, he swallowed his pride and got in the game. I didn’t give him much of a shot, but he proved me wrong and won six hundred big ones!” “Yep,” Grandpa responded. “That took place fifty-three years ago. I was only twenty years old back then. Jay was a year older. You’ve got a good decade left to go before you reach that point.”
$600 in 1951 would equate to roughly $4,359.23 in 2004 cash. “Did that $600 change your life, Grandpa?” I said. “Not by a lot,” Grandpa responded, brought back to Earth by such an insight. “I just had more currency on hand to pay for expenses. Boy, did it ever come in handy. You’ll hear more about this later, because I want to discuss a few other items now.” Grandpa proceeded to explain how he and Jay got moved from Sc-u-l-t-h-or-p-e in a convoy of trucks carrying equipment and things like that, where they received training on loading A-bombs into bombers. No, that’s not a typo. He was talking about honest-to-God atomic bombs, the same kind America dropped on Japan’s Hiroshima and Nagasaki during World War II’s final stages. As he went on to talk about Upper Hey-ford (another Royal Air Force base during World War II) and how the United States came in, lengthening the runway to accommodate B-29 and B-50 super-bombers, my attention span was just enough whereby I could catch what he was saying, but for the most part had drifted away to a disquieting realization: that the two men with whom I was sitting had hands-on experience with the only nuclear weaponry ever used to attack any foreign land. “While we were waiting there for the barracks to get built,” Grandpa continued, “everything was under construction, so we slept in the post office. The post office got built years ago—it’s been over five decades, but you know what I mean—and the floor had these wooden blocks together, like tiles.” “Eh, that doesn’t sound like anything I couldn’t handle,” I responded while doing Bruce Lee’s classic ‘ready to strike’ pose. “Think you’re a tough guy, huh?” Jay said, imitating the ‘lat spread,’ another iconic Bruce Lee pose. “It was so dirty, they told us to get buckets and mops and clean the floor, which we did. And at night, when everybody was in a bunk in the post office, there were loud noises. Pop, pop, pop. We were almost pushed over the edge. Sheer insanity.” “On second thought, I think I’d like to stick with the living situation I’m in now,” I responded. “This whole ‘roughing it’ thing isn’t for me.” Grandpa then described how the blocks of wood were popping out of the ground because they had been wet for so long. This caused him and Jay to fall into a fit of laughter, remembering what they had gone through back there.
I had little understanding of what nuclear warfare was back then. My mind was still racing from learning how they had involvement with atomic bombs, and I couldn’t help but wonder how that had happened.
“Grandpa,” I said, “I’ve got a question. How is it that you and Jay got to work with atomic bombs?”