A few nice kids table chairs images I found:
Self Portrait with Two Other Drunk GIs
Image by ursusdave
That’s me old bunk in my two-man barracks room on at the 30th Artillery Brigade nuclear missile unit on Okinawa. Left to right: it’s Bob, me, then, my best friend from photography school, Bruce Randal. The fifth of Smirnoff Vodka in the crook of Bob’s arm cost a buck-twenty-five at the PX and the fifth of Gilbey’s Gin was only 80 cents. We had finished the gin, but they had staggered on home and I zonked out with about 1/4 of the vodka left. We were smashed.
Army barracks on Okinawa had Day Rooms, a common area, where all could relax, that generally had a TV, a stereo, a Ping-Pong Table, you know they had to have a Pool Table, a reading room stocked with a few books and magazines, plus there were board games and decks of cards for all to share. There was always at least one soft sofa and several soft, comfortable chairs in the TV viewing area.
Bob and Bruce were assigned to an Army Intelligence unit, and lived on the top floor, the third floor of their barracks. The men who lived on that top floor down at the Army Intelligence Command barracks did the most outstanding job of all following official orders from an island-wide Army directive that all day rooms be completely redecorated. For some reason, they had a small day room for their squad bay, instead of just the one large day room on the first floor like other barracks. It must have had something to do with the top secret nature of the different jobs that the men who were stationed in that barracks had to do.
Those guys, up on that third floor, built a wooden wall across the back third of their day room, made from 2 x 4s and plywood. It was about 2 ½ feet thick and hollow in the center. They cut out rectangular holes, put shelves in them and made a recessed component stereo entertainment center. Their TV viewing area was set up in the back third of the day room, behind the stereo system in the wooden wall, and accessed by a doorway sized opening built into the wall, so that the music would not override the sound of the TV. The Pool and Ping-Pong Tables were set up in the front two-thirds of the room where the music ruled the scene.
Now, here’s the coolest part:
Have you ever seen the cover art on the Moody Blues album named In Search Of The Lost Chord?
It has a beautiful piece of art work on it, I’m looking at my CD copy of it now. It’s a soft, mellow, flowing painting of an ancient, wizened man sitting down wearing a robe with its hood up over his head, a human skull is on one side of him and a human fetus floating in its mother’s womb is on the other side. The man’s meditations, dreams, deepest human feelings, the sum of his life experiences all seem to flow upward and outward across the album cover.
One of the guys who lived there on the third floor of that army intelligence barracks painted a perfect mural of that album cover on one of their day room walls where the Pool and Ping-Pong Tables were located. When they showed it off to me, I looked up at it and darn near fell over backwards.
Bruce, from Pennsylvania, was the Public Information Office Photographer for that intelligence unit. He was a gentle, humorous fellow, and was ¼ Gypsy. His grandfather had ‘kidnapped’ and married his non-Gypsy grandmother. The kids at Bruce’s elementary school did not believe their little classmate Bruce, when he told them about his full blooded Gypsy Granddad one day on the playground at recess. The other kids teased Bruce something terrible about claiming that his grandfather was anything as mysterious and interesting as a Gypsy. So, one day, Granddad dressed up in full Gypsy regalia, and went down to visit the kids at recess. Way back then, he was one of the only men in America who could get away with wearing a big, round, golden earring in each pierced ear like some famous pirates used to. Bruce was real popular amongst the other kids after that.
The other men who lived on the third floor there, where Bruce lived, had all spent eighteen months going to the U.S. Army Intelligence School at Ft. Holabird, Maryland. I grew up about two miles from Ft. Holabird, it was in my neighborhood. The fact that they had all spent a year and a half in my childhood neighborhood helped us bond as army buddies just a bit easier than usual. And then of course, we had similar record album collections to listen to together.
An American GI On Okinawa In 1970-71
A popular saying and bit of graffiti amongst us GIs in those days was "F.T.A."
okinawa1970-71.blogspot.com
email: ursusdave at yahoo dot com
© David Robert Crews {a.k.a. ursusdave}
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