Postcards from my post

As my California safari wound down last August and I was Jonesing to get back home I crammed three legs of my long look back into a single day.  That’s not what I would recommend but, hey, Oakland, San Leandro and another trip to Fort Ord were left and we do what we have to do.

Fort Ord, you may recall, is where I spent the summer of 1960 in the deprivations of Basic Training in this man’s Army.  It’s also the location at which I took several hundred photographs in April about half of which I erased in a fit of, shall we say, stupidity. So Fort Ord would have to be the last event in my photo triathlon. I am, if nothing else, a highly trained triathlete.

All of the basic training barracks were located on a slight hill looking down on the rest of the base with a glimmer of the Pacific visible behind them.  Frankly, I didn't remember the sea of two story housing units or that they covered the entire hillside. C company of which I was a proud member is really the only one that I recall. Such was the single mindedness of my warriorly efforts. Either that or copious quantities of 3.2 percent beer.

This shot of the sneakers, the empty IPA and the military handout entitled "Starting a new job on the right foot" is darkly ironic.