Miracle at Charlottesville - Chapter 2

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                              MIRACLE AT CHARLOTTESVILLE

                                            CHAPTER 2

My orders stated to report to the Navy Postgraduate School in Monterey for later transfer to the language school.  (NPS emphasizes study and research programs relevant to the Navy’s interests, as well as other service branches.  The student body consists of officers from all branches of the military; we lowly enlisted men while there – like me – would be performing the tasks officers are exempt from, such as KP, policing and maintaining the grounds, etc.)  But the cabdriver, apparently familiar with military language students, instead took me directly to the Army-run language school and deposited me near the Company B Orderly Room.  (There were three companies at DLIWC at that time – A, B, and C, each specializing in their own cultural groups of languages.  DLIWC was laid out on a hill, Company B at the lower end, with newer Companies A and C further up the hill.)  The following events then transpired in quick order that morning:

• Another "squid" arrived at the Orderly Room shortly after I did, having flown in from Kansas City the night before, and also mistakenly deposited at DLI instead of NPS.  Ironically, this fellow - Ron - and I shared all the same duty stations thereafter through the end of our hitches.  Unfortunately, he was no railfan.
• The Orderly Room personnel were a bit befuddled to find two sailors suddenly dropped in their laps who were not due in for several weeks (our class didn't start till a few days after New Year's, 1966.)  Contacting the NPS, they finally decided the Army might as well keep us at DLI since we were already there.         
• After assigning us barracks, we were instructed to report back to the Orderly Room and they'd try to find something for us to do.  The barracks were 2-story wooden buildings; I ended up in barracks B-2, but don't remember where Ron ended up.
• Reporting back to the Orderly Room, its personnel, after debating about what duties to assign us to for several weeks, somewhat in desperation asked if we could perform clerical duties.  We both said we could, and WA-LA!  Ron and I spent the balance of the time before class-start helping process in other personnel!

How’s that for irony?  I enlisted in the Navy intending to be a yeoman.  Now, here I was performing yeoman-type duties on an Army base!  (The Lord does indeed work in mysterious ways.)  Better yet, as our pre-class stint was coming to a close, the Army Specialist in charge of the day-to-day Orderly Room functions called me into his office, and made me an offer I couldn’t refuse.  He was impressed with my clerical abilities and asked if I’d be interested in being placed on a select and limited list of personnel on-call for after-hours Orderly Room duties.  Admission to said list exempted anyone thereon from all the other “chicken-s_ _ _” duties students were subject to during classes, such as KP, Day Room Orderly, etc.  Naturally I said yes.  The result: during the nine months of classes that followed, I worked in the Orderly Room only one evening that whole time, and never had to pull KP or any of that other nonsense even once.

And so, we come to the start of classes…

As mentioned above, our class started shortly after New Year’s Day 1966 (and ran through the end of September 1966.)  I seem to recall our starting class size was about 85 - 14 in our Navy contingent, a larger number of Marines, and the largest contingent was Army.  There were no Russian billets for Air Force personnel at that time apparently.  (My records from that period indicate our class had 61 graduates at the end of September.)  During the first six weeks of class, we were assigned sections (6-8 students per) alphabetically by last name.  After that we were assigned sections based on class performance during the previous six weeks (scholastically, from Section A down.)  I usually ended up in Section C, though once I wound up in Section B for one grading period.  (As an aside, the language instructors at DLIWC were mostly civilians and all were native speakers of the language they instructed.  Some had even defected to the U.S.  We actually had one instructor who had been a colonel in the Red Army in WW II. Another instructor was a railfan; he liked the California Zephyr.)

The classrooms were housed in 1-story wooden buildings.  These buildings had a porch on one side that ran the full length of that side of the building.  A street ran perpendicular to one end of the classroom buildings.  Some civilians also attended DLIWC, apparently those majoring in languages.  There was one such student who played a pivotal role in this story.  She was a young woman who was enrolled at the U.C. campus at Berkeley.  Now, she had a nice enough figure – and we randy young servicemen would have been sure to notice that – but the poor woman had a face that would almost stop a clock!  Therefore, naturally, we dubbed her, “The Berkeley Beauty.”

So now you have the background essentials as well as the players - save one - for this phase of the story, an occurrence I call “The Grand Coincidence.”

(To be continued…)