Chapter ONE
What the hell …?
November 1983.
A bomb scare. Culture shock. Sleep deprivation.
Thus began my 13-year-odyssey while working and living in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. The path to Saudi Arabia had been a long and convoluted one.
After graduating from University City Senior High School in St. Louis County, Missouri in the winter of 1958 I had enough credits and wanted out of high school and then spending one semester at Harris Teachers College, I talked my mother and stepfather into signing the paperwork for me to join the United States Naval Reserves. While my parents were talking with one recruiter about wanting me to remain in the reserves for a while, I was talking with another recruiter and telling him that I wanted immediate active duty. After just a few weeks, I received my orders and was sent to boot camp at the Naval Station, San Diego, California, which I much preferred to freezing my butt off at the Great Lakes Naval Station in Chicago, Illinois instead. When I graduated 13 weeks later, I was temporarily assigned to the Naval Air Station at Miramar, California, where the movie Top Gun would be filmed years later, as my permanent assigned squadron was on a Far East deployment and would be returning to the United States in a few weeks.
The trip to Saudi Arabia was my second overseas adventure, the first having been my two Far East deployments with Attack Squadron 146 (VA-146), the ͞Blue Diamonds, and the Seventh Fleet of the U.S. Navy in Hawaii, Japan, the Philippines and Hong Kong from 1959 to 1962. I served as a Personnelman, an enlisted administrative rating, during my three years of active duty.
During my active service, I had begun corresponding with my future wife, Sandy. Her mother and my mother would play weekly Canasta card games at my parent’s home, and once when Sandy’s mother saw my boot camp graduation photo in my dress blues (I was handsome, had lots of dark hair, and wasn’t wearing my glasses) she asked if her daughter could write to me. Sandy swears it was the other way around…that my mother asked her to write to me An exchange of letters, not to mention romance, ensued and when it came time for me to reenlist in March 1962, both families made it quite clear that I shouldn’t Taking their advice is one of many early mistakes I made, as I truly enjoyed the service, the people I served with, and living the single life in southern California.
Upon my return to civilian life, my stepfather recommended that I take court reporting or machine stenograph classes. Both my older stepsister and my younger half-sister took shorthand, my half-sister e