CAX 7 was the last cax I had the extreme pleasure of attending and that one went over a whole lot better than I was anticipating. I was expecting the same rigmarole as I had gone through the year before and I was right. Lot's of stupid garbage was done all throughout the CAX, stupid people made nearsighted plans, and I was worked to death. (Not really but it sounds good.) On the down side I wasn't able to go to the Museum of Secret Warfare. It's a military museum that you have to have at least a Secret clearance to get in and it is full of all sorts of cool things. (Like Russian airplanes the Russians don't know we have. Whoops.)
Thee were many more technicians this time around and that made the entire situation extremely palatable. I am assuming that we got so many this CAX was simply because it was the first one of that year and everyone wanted to get it over with. In any case we were able to work in shifts, one day on, one day off. Which resulted in a whole lot more liberty time that I was expected. I had half a day of every other day and I had only packed to changes of civilian clothes with me so I was hurting for a change of clothes. (I had enough underwear though. Just in case my mom is reading this.) :)
The most remarkable thing about the whole CAX was that all of our radios worked almost without any failures. Now if this was an active duty unit then any failures would be a big thing but it's a reserve unit. That means that all the radios that have been beat up in the active units for the last five years are handed down to us to play with. There are problems all over the system that are almost inherent. Therefore having everything work fine for two weeks was completely unnerving. We kept waiting for 'The Big Crash.' I was sure it was only a matter of time and I waited patiently but it never came. I would would periodically offer a sacrifice of stale MRE food to the gods hoping to buy their kindness for another day. It seems to have worked too.
Recipe for sacrifice:
- Ingredients. Tobasco sauce. Coffee. Cream of an artificial cow. Fire. Plenty of ventilation. Chicken mask.
- Mix the contents of the non-dairy cream packet into the instant coffee packet. Slowly pour in tobasco sauce. Let stand for an hour in the sun.
- Ensuring that the chicken mask is firmly on your head use wet-weather matches to set the coffee packet on fire.
- Dive out of the way of the resulting fireball and begin the ritual dance.
- Gyrate for five minutes and allow yourself to cool for another five before proceeding with your work.
I managed to get out to main side a number of times and I was reminded of just how little there is to do out in 29 Palms. I mean unless you are a raging alcoholic or an exercise fiend there is not a whole lot to do. I managed to read the same magazine four times. played the same arcade game for about fifteen dollars, read three of the bestselling books on the bookrack, and sat around waiting to get back to camp.
There was a big mishap that marooned me out in Yuma for a night. We had one of our radio boxes in the belly of a C-130 and it would fly around the simulated war zone and coordinate with the ground. As a technician I would have to go up on it a few times to be there in case something went wrong. In any case the first day that the bird was in the air I was in it too. Except that I wasn't told that I was going up for the day until that morning when I was in the head shaving.
"Hey Oester!"
"Yeah?"
"I was told that you are going up in the C-130 today. You need to get into the flying formation."
"What?!?!?!" I had never heard of going up prior to this moment. "When's the formation?"
"Uh, it's right now. They are leaving in 5 minutes."
"Aaargh!" (I accidentally cut myself shaving.)
This is not an altogether untrue depiction of how things usually ran during CAX. In any event I finished shaving as fast I could and ran out to get into the formation. I had only what I had in my pockets to last me through the day. One pen, One marker. A notebook. Lint. And a quarter. Later that day I was told that I was going to be returning with the C-130 to Yuma where I was going to work late into the night working on HF problems. It was a good thing I had all the stuff they had told me to bring.
"What stuff?!?!?!?"
"Oh, uh. . . . ."
Well I was in Yuma and it was hot. I mean it was HOT! Especially out on the flight deck. And I worked late into the night trying to fix in and in the end it was working. (But not the next day as things turned out.) I got off and was checked into billeting for the night. It was a good thing I had my ID card with me.
"What?!?!?!?"
"I just need to see your ID card."
After a while it got sorted out and I managed to get a room but boy was that room something else. The building that this set of barracks were in was officially condemned but they still houses in transit units in them. I was on the fourth floor and the far end next to a fire escape door that wouldn't open inside a room that had two large bunk beds in them without any mattresses in them. The doors were hanging off of the closets and the windows didn't shut all the way. Dead serious. I didn't care much though I was too tired. Slept on the wooden board and three and a half hours later I got up so I could get back to the C-130 in time to catch it back. The bathroom was dark and had those flickering fluorescent lights like you see in the movies. The water barely worked and the pipes yelled and screamed unless the water was off. The whole building was pretty cool I thought in a post-apocalyptic sort of way. The one saving grace was that the breakfast chow was real good. Good thing I had my ID card.
"Alright, let me explain this again. . . ."
I made it back just fine and the rest of the flying operations went just fine. The days went by until we had only three days to go and it was time to leave the barren, desolate patch of desert we were at and move it all out ten miles to an even more desolate, barren, rocky, hot place out in the middle of the desert. We set up the radio vans and for the rest of Fin Ex (Final Excercise) I was working shifts at the top of OP Sally (Observation Point) The benefits of this were that I was far removed from the operators van where all the stupid officers would be hanging out and it was much windier at the top of the hill. The downside of it was that I had to periodically trek to the bottom of the hill and back up which is about a mile round trip and about 1000 feet change in elevation. (It was bad whatever it was.) Oh and the other downside was that if this was an actual combat environment I would have been the one of the first ones to be blown up cause the enemy tracks the radio signals and sends little missiles to their source. But you can't have it all then can you?
Then it was done. It was over and were danced for joy in the sand. We piled all of our smelly, sweat-stained, sand encrusted, ripped up belongings onto the bus and we were off. (I still had clean underwear though, are you reading mom?) It was only a four hour drive and I was back in sunny San Diego. After filling out paperwork for another hour it was only a three hour drive back to Northridge. Home, sweet home.
And that was that.
Oh boy, this Summer I embarked on my first CAX exercise. It was, to say the least, interesting. A little information before I continue:
With all that in mind let me tell you how it was for me. I volunteered to go on the advance part which went out a week earlier. That put me out in the middle of nowhere where my primary job was to sit in the tent and make sure no one took our gear. I did get to set up the radio units into each of the MRC vehicles (Hum-vees) and set up the radios and antennas in the three main vans we used though. I had wanted to go on the advance party so I would have plenty of time to re-acquaint myself with all the equipment. It turns out I had more than enough time to do that, that and more. The more part would consist of me sitting in the stifling heat reading a book. Over the course of the CAX managed to finish four books. They were big ones too. I was actually having a good time, until the CAX actually started.
Saturday rolled around, the day the CAX was supposed to start. Most of the Marines from the East and West coast arrived and got settled in. The next day, though, we started our operations. My day would typically start out like this:
From that schedule it might look like I am not doing much. If I have done my job correctly I have almost nothing to do. Most of the days I would spend sitting in the operator's van waiting for something to go wrong. If nothing did, well, I would sit there trying to stay awake. Reading mostly. Don't misunderstand me. Plenty of things went wrong, more than our fair share. In the first two days the generators that powered up all the vans shut down on us at least eight times. That is really bad news for our radios. We have to power everything down, restore power, re-check all the radios and pray nothing got fried when the power went. If things went smoothly we could get everything back up in twenty to thirty minutes. As soon as we got it back up, the power would shut down again. On top of all of this our operators were usually controlling the airspace. Which means that we were telling the FA-18s and all the Helicopters where to go and what to do. The officers in that van were running around like dying chickens trying to cope with the situation. heh-heh. Unfortunately they had the annoying habit of thinking that I was personally turning of the power and destroying their work.
"Hey, you there!"
"Sir?"
"Why did you turn the power off?!"
"I didn't turn the power off sir. If I did you would have seen me walk over to that breaker box behind you and turn all the switches off. . .sir."
"Oh. . .then fix it."
Any way stupid stuff like that plagued us for most of the CAX. Just about the most exciting thing was that the unit that was operating our of Lava lake got attacked by bees. They [the bees] came for the water and overran the camp. We had to medivac a bunch of people out and abandon the camp. Just goes to show you never to take bees lightly, after all they managed to take out a unit of Marines.
As you can probably tell the whole excursion was not terribly exciting. I had a lot of fun but I can definitely wait another year to do it again. The highlight of the time out there came in the last few days of the exercise when we simulated a full blown war scenario. We packed up all our gear and relocated to OP Crampton. A mountain top even further out in the middle of nowhere, just past forever. Any way we set up a mobile unit and were operating on top of this mountain, controlling all the aircraft that were doing whatever it is that they do. You could see for miles and miles. That is one of the things I always miss about leaving 29 Palms, the air is clear there and you can see as far as you can physically see. It was even better from that mountain top. Did you know that one of those mountains, if you were on top of, you could see all the way to Mexico. At night it was absolutely amazing, an entire tapestry of stars filled the skies. That is the second thing I miss, the stars, not the wretched display of the few stars bright enough to burn through the smog layer that you get in cities. You could see the Milky Way stretch across the entire sky, with billions and billions of motes of light all in between.
But I was glad when the whole thing was over. I had the distinct honor of riding home in the vehicle that had it's differential all messed up, it's brakes were only theoretically functional, and was carrying three 55 gallon drums of diesel fuel in the back. Oh yeah, did I mention that it had no doors either. Oh well, I am back now.