Saturday, August 05, 2006

Glorious Results of a Misspent Youth

My classmates and I shortly before graduation from DLI on the Presidio of San Francisco, May 1987. The Army must have been truly desperate at the time. Anyway I felt bad about leaving on such a downer note with yesterdays obit so I dug out the photo albums and was playing with a copier/scanner. Shortly after this photo was taken most of us went to West Texas for the summer.


Sometime in Summer or Fall of 1987 after a brief field exercise at Goodfellow AFB. (There is a slight chance this scene is from later in the same year at Ft Devens, MA but I don't think so. I wish I had clearly labeled my photos.) We were doing some military language instruction here for a couple months after DLI. It was quite a change of pace after a year of civilian instructors in San Francisco back to drill sergeants in San Angelo, TX.

It seems that brief periods of my life are photographed in detail while there are also complete years that go undocumented. Skip ahead to the Spring of 1993 and the annual Oozeball Tournament at UConn. Around 200 teams signed up to play volleyball in about six inches of mud. As I recall we did pretty well making it to the sweet sixteen or so before being eliminated in sudden death. With so many teams there was a lot of lag time between games where we could do a rough clean up and down some beers. Good times. (The identities of those pictured will be kept secret unless they step forward on their own.) Note the saranwrapped library in the background to prevent students from being hit by falling bricks from the recently completed construction. El Duderino has mentioned this building previously.

3 comments:

scruffylooking said...

Oh, how I love old pics. You should do more of this. And next time, can you make sure that the theme song from St Elmo's Fire is playing in the background?

Anonymous said...

To be fair Dexter, your class at DLI was hand-picked to be the most goofy looking unit in the army. Some kind of top secret black ops program to get dorks to look like linguists...or linguists to look like dorks. I was fortunately choosen for the sister program using reverse tactics and making a group of pretty boys mean, hard core fighting machines. Fate Dexter. A lifelong battle.

Unknown said...

The operative words for your class being "Sister Program"...as in Boggs and the Sistahs at Shawshank. I will now start looking for pics of Juche in the field. Yakima wasn't it?