I arrived at my first duty station after 1600 hours on a friday. The guy on duty said the whole shop was down at the EM club and he would take me by to meet them on the way to check in at the transit barraks. We arrived at the EM club, he handed me off to one of the guys from the shop. This guy walked me over near the bar and said: "Wait right here and I'll go get the guys". As he left he pinched a guy standing at the bar on the rear. When the guy turned around I was the only one behind him. Lucky for me he was not drunk enough to just haul off and throw a punch. We had a lively discussion while all my "new shipmates" looked on.
I couldn't check in until monday and my newfound friends didn't want me to sit around the transit barraks all weekend. So, saturday evening, my second day at my 1st duty station in a foreign country, they said "we are going off base, come on along". "Don't worry about not having an ID card or not being checked in to the base, the Marines never check IDs at the gate." I got in the car and went with them. We had a great time. We were almost back to the base, when all of a sudden there were BIG Bright flashes in the sky followed by BIG Booms.
Everyone in the car was excited! Had WWIII started witout us? Nobody new. They let us in the gate without checking IDs. We found out monday that a reserve unit was doing areal photography at night and the BIG flashes were 'flash' for the pictures. It scared everybody on the base and all the locals too and it was never done again!
RESERVES, you know what I'm talking about.So, the first two days were real exciting! The remaining 3 years went by pretty slow and uneventful.
Regrds, OE