War No More
As we cruised down the 76 Expressway dodging stalled vehicles, the smell of the sea and glimpses of its shining waters egged us on. Charlie started chanting between coughs, "To the sea… To the sea… To the shores of Tripoli," as his memory of his time training as a Marine at Camp Pendleton returned to him.
"It was tough, wet and cold on the beach here. I got pneumonia. Almost died. Was afraid to tell my parents back in Wyoming. I told 'em that I was on a special detail for a month and was not allowed to call or write. They believed the lie. Probably why my lungs are so bad now…" He almost choked on those last words, hacking and bending over against his chest belt.
"I'm glad you know the place. I hope we can find something besides the beach and sea. The roadside devastation didn't look promising. Looked like an alien force had destroyed nearly everything. Remainders of mudslides were everywhere. Some took some digging to get through. Others were dried hard but a rough drive to drive over. Boulders and smaller rocks made it even more difficult and had to be pushed or winched out of the way.
Charlie regained his composure. "These here were the good times, even in winter. Although Iraq was hot and dry, going through those burning oil wells in Kuwait on the way to Baghdad was another hellhole altogether. Another assault on my lungs. I'll never forget the death and destruction of those Iraqi forces. We sure gave 'em hell! But, I gagged on the stench of their burned and dismembered bodies for miles where our aircraft had wiped out their convoys before they could even engage us. I guess that's why I got PTSD. Thinking of this place brings back those bad memories, too.“
"It's almost noon and I see the outside temperature is around 100°. Let's go right to the beach, have lunch and get in a little surf time. I need a bath, don't you?"
"A lot warmer than I remember it. But I'm with you. Let's hit the beach first." Charlie's bad thoughts receded with a big gap tooth smile followed by a sputtering cough.
As I recall, when we reached I-5, we pulled into Del Mar Beach and passed some swank resorts and condos that were all burned and vandalized like abandoned inner-city ghetto housing. Everywhere there was no sign of anyone. No life at all except a couple of coyotes that crossed the road and some buzzards drifting above, shorebirds and gulls along the beach and flying above the surf.
Charlie was surprised at what he saw. "Don't recognize the place. Most of these hotels weren't here back then. And the beach. The beach was much wider then… See, those tennis courts and that swimming pool have waves running over them. Beach was much wider in my day!"
Yet the beach was wide open to us. It was also littered with debris from storms. Huge logs from the Northwest, pieces of ships washed ashore and plastic of all kinds. Not the beach that Charlie remembered. Not the beach that a resort could sell. But it was all ours and we took joy in that and ran down to the water. Charlie was far behind when I stripped down naked and ran into the surf, finding it to be bathtub warm and refreshing.
Soon, Charlie joined me and we played in the waves like kids. Fully refreshed and cooled off in the churning water, we returned to a big log we could sit on and built a smoky fire from plastic and driftwood. With seabirds flying about, we knew there would be food to be found.
We quickly found crabs and grabbed them. Roasted over the fire, those crabs, along with the fruit and nuts we had gathered in the Central Valley--almonds, walnuts, figs and prunes, made for a feast for our lunch that I never forgot after all these years. As we lounged by the fire and eventually had to bring a tarp from the truck to keep off the hot sun, we could see dolphins cavorting in the waves and seals and sea lions feeding offshore and on the beach in the distance. We weren't alone. There just weren't any beachgoers like us there to spoil things.
In no hurry to go anywhere, we just took in the sights and sounds all afternoon and we both dozed off a bit in the heat. Grateful to be alive. Later, Charlie showed me how to find sand crabs for fish bait. There was a large fishing boat run aground and a tangle of driftwood up against it that made for a rather treacherous pier jutting out into the surf. I gingerly navigated the wreck out to the overturned bow where I could reach deeper water as the waves came rolling in. I baited my fishing gear and tried a few casts.
On almost every cast I caught a fish. According to Charlie, who knew what they were, I caught a corbina, two surf perch, and a large shovelnose guitarfish. I wasn't familiar with saltwater fish, but after cleaning them and roasting them over the fire that night as the sun set over the Pacific, I must admit we gorged on the fish and found them all tasty.
After that, we built a huge bonfire to drive off the chill and slept on the beach. I was sure glad to have Charlie with me during that experience. It would have been very lonely without him. My dreams included bikini clad blonde California girls that unfortunately, were long gone.
By morning, Charlie was starting to show some meat on his ribs and eager to see what Camp Pendleton had to offer. He was particularly interested in the motor pool. And, so was I. We drove through the main gate meeting no resistance because there was no one there. The whole place looked like it had been abandoned much more than only three years before, more like, 10 or 20. But then, Pendleton was an old place to start with. Pretty much mothballed except for training recently because there was no hot war going on before everything fell apart.
All I could surmise was that many recruits here abandoned their allegiance to the country and went AWOL to help their families when things got tough, knowing that being part of trying to force things to happen in their own country wouldn't work. Facing ordinary citizens with military weapons didn't make a lot of sense. Why there had never been a military coup; only states seceding from the union. Family was deeper than loyalty when it came to family versus country.
Whatever the reason, the place was an ancient looking ghost town. From Charlie's memory, we easily found the motor pool. It was a disappointment. Everything was gone except some tanks, half tracks and other heavy armament that was so in disrepair that it hadn't been shipped off to somewhere else to support trying to keep the peace.
But in the repair shops we found a prize. An Oshkosh MTVR medium tactical truck. When he saw it, Charlie fell in love. "That's my baby, " he declared.
I was more cautious. "Let's see if it works, first."
The left front wheel was off and it was on jack stands, apparently having the brakes worked on when everyone split. Charlie took a look at what was to be done and said, "I can fix that. I worked here way back when."
I was glad for that because I had little experience with mechanics and another truck would be a big help for us. But there was one thing that I did know. "Charlie, let's get to those batteries first. We won't get this truck running unless its batteries are charged."
I got out my solar charger while Charlie took the batteries out of the truck. I set the solar array to provide the 24 volts that the military batteries required. Placed it in the sun just outside the garage. We left it there for the sun to do its work, charging one battery at a time.
Fortunately, all the tools needed were still there except for air pressure for power tools. Charlie set to work right away, stopping occasionally to catch his breath, finding it a lot harder to do the work he did easily as a young Marine trainee. When it came to tightening bolts with big wrenches, I helped him out. By lunch, we had that brake back together, all the other brakes checked and the other side front brake rebuilt as well. I was beginning to appreciate Charlie's skill. I didn't know the half of it.
While we were eating lunch he made a suggestion. "I think we should fortify these trucks so that we can push things out of the way with them. I would suggest a snowplow but we don't have any here at this beachside base. Maybe later, inland, we can find some snowplows to mount. But in the meantime, I would like to provide both trucks with some bumpers that could allow us to push away big boulders, trees and vehicles that are going to get in our way. Also would like to mount winches that will help us get out of any situation we run into."
I was surprised, but I shouldn't have been. "Sounds great, but how can we do that?"
"We make 'em… weld 'em."
"I don't know how to weld and I'm not sure we can get the power."
"There's a field generator over in the corner I spotted. Should have enough power to get the arc welder going."
"You're the man, Charlie. I'm just here to help out and learn." I was embarrassed for having not seen it.
"While the battery charged, we spent the afternoon removing old fuel from the fuel delivery system, finding fuel that we could treat for use and getting ready to get that big Cummings diesel running again. After all the filters were replaced, the fuel lines drained and the fuel injectors cleaned, the old truck was ready to crank up just as the sun was going down.
Charlie had done a better job than I did with the Peterbilt, so the metallic sound of the diesel rang out as soon as the recharged battery turned the engine over enough to get fuel into the injectors. Black smoke filled the garage for a moment, and then the truck settled into a high idle just like it should. Charlie couldn't wait to take a drive, so we did. We drove around the base for about 15 minutes and then returned to the garage so that he could do a few more jobs that he had lined up to get the truck road ready.
I made routine runs down to the beach to get food. Gull eggs, quail eggs and pigeon eggs became a breakfast favorite. I found oranges, lemons and grapefruit in the surviving yards of communities around the base. I even shot a black tail buck so we had venison to go with all the fish I caught. We tried a little seaweed for greens and although they were slimy, turned out to be quite tasty. I found dandelion greens on many neglected lawns. Among the few things that would grow without irrigation.
In the meantime, we worked on the trucks. Using tubular steel, Charlie cut and welded a bumper like framework on the front of each truck that was angled so that it would push boulders and vehicles off to one side like a snowplow would. And then, I helped him mount heavy duty winches on both the front and back of both trucks, so that we could pull ourselves out of any predicament we ran into.
To top things off, we found four working AN/PRC-148 MBITR military radios and two chargers that I converted to provide direct DC power to the batteries from my solar arrays. It was a joy to find them working when we tried them out a day later after charging the batteries.
The last, and most time-consuming project, had Charlie creating a power takeoff unit that ran off a raised rear wheel on a jack stand. While he did that, I busied myself providing him with a bunk in the back of the truck and other niceties for a living area. And then, we filled the rest of the truck bed with spare parts, fuel and equipment. Time flew while we were doing all this work, and before we knew it, it was September and things got really hot. Except on the beach, they rose to 110° nearly every day. We could only work in the mornings and evenings after dark with light provided by the generator.
By that time we had experienced the tail end of three Pacific hurricanes that came up from Mexico and not only provided us with fresh water, but demonstrated with flash floods why we didn't need to stay there during the winter storm season. Charlie's lungs weren't getting any better and from what he had remembered of his time at Pendleton during winter it wasn't pleasant. He was as eager as I was to leave before winter came.
Finally, around the first of October, we headed out in convoy, retracing our route coming in, taking the 76 Expressway to Interstate 15 and north. Our destination, Palm Springs.
