The Army is big on training. My personal favorite was assault training. When you assault a fixed position, you walk up to within 15 yards taking an aimed shot every few steps to keep the enemy heads down. When you get to 15 yards, you load a fresh magazine and fire from the hip as you trot the rest of way, one shot every two steps. After the DI had carefully explained the technique, he asked if there were questions. I asked, “Sergeant, the guys are hunkered down in their foxholes as we approach and they can hear the change in rate of fire when we get 15 yards away. What’s to stop them each from lobbing a grenade out at us?” His reply was, “There are always casualties in combat.” Terrific.

One day they sent us off to Quantico for amphibious training. The course was taught by a very gung ho Marine drill instructor. He emphasized that we needed to scare the hell out of the enemy (as they sat behind their machine guns!) by running down the ramp of the landing craft screaming as loud as we could. The first time through the drill we didn’t yell loud enough for him so we had to do it again. (It doesn’t matter what branch of service you are in; you never do it right the first time.) The second time around, two hundred guys roared out of the landing craft screaming, completely unrehearsed, “Fuck The Army!” as loudly as they could. Even the Marine DI cracked up. Most of my company were draftees.

After basic I was assigned to a map making company. (All geologists get assigned to map making companies because they know how to survey. It didn’t matter that I hated surveying and was incompetent at it.) One day I am out in the boonies on a field exercise. (At Ft. Bragg you do a lot of 1-2 week field exercises. The cat houses in Readsville, the town next to Ft Bragg, do a booming business because somebody is always just getting back from a couple of weeks in the bushes.) Three of us were digging a sump for the field kitchen. We were down about 6 feet when it occurred to us that between us we had 18 years of college. Your tax dollars at work.

A secret that almost nobody in the Army will admit: Though they loudly proclaim their dislike for SOS (Shit On a Shingle, aka chipped beef on toast), most grunts like it more than any other breakfast.

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Only geologists regard a rainy day as good working weather because it keeps the mosquitoes and deer flies off.

Unless you live in Yosemite Park, the best places to find rock outcrops are road cuts and streams. So, field geologists spend a lot of time walking up and down the middle of streams, hopping from one slippery, moss-covered rock to the next. It is a really good day when you make it to lunch without falling into the stream.

Only geologists will routinely walk twenty-miles into the boonies all alone without telling anyone where they are going. There is an unwritten law that says if you slip off a wet rock in a stream and break your leg, you deserve to die of starvation for being clumsy.

If you look at the list of people killed during every volcanic eruption, there will usually be a couple of volcanologists. This is because the best time to get up close and personal in researching a volcano is when an eruption is imminent. Given the number of volcanic eruptions annually, I am amazed that there are any volcanologists left.

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We didn’t think much of it at the time. But when we took the elevator up to exit the mine we hit the same snag going up. In that moment the three of us realized several things. Mines tend to close up, so they need to be periodically re-timbered. (Wood is used because it will start splintering long before it breaks from stress, but steel will show no symptoms before it breaks.) When the mine shut down, the elevator shaft was in the process of being re-timbered and the new timbers were slightly out of line with the old timbers where they had stopped, which produced the snag. Another thing that occurred to us was that US law requires that the elevator cables must be replaced every six months, but the cables on our elevator had not been replaced for over a decade.

Going down the snag was not a problem because the cage just bounced off. Going up, though, the cage caught on the snag and the cable continued trying to haul the cage up, stretching the cable until the cage tilted enough to slide off the snag — hopefully before the cable snapped. The expressions on our faces in that eerie yellow glow with the rain thundering on the tin roof was something to behold when we hit the snag going up and realized what was happening. I can still picture the expressions clearly. Now here’s the crazy part: We made many trips down into that and several other mines in the area.

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A couple of days after that and they were down to their last few ounces of water. Nonetheless, Jack insisted on serving it for tea at 3 PM. One of the crew members demanded to know how he could be serving tea when they were a few hours from dying of thirst. Jack’s response was, “Stiff upper lip, Mate. We’re the last outpost of civilization.” Australians may be a bit rough around the edges, but you have to admit that they have a strong sense of the proper way to do things. (Fortunately, a bush chopper dropped off several jerry cans of water later that day to hold them until the water truck was repaired.)

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Our instruments used mercury cell batteries. The problem with mercury cells is that they don’t work when the temperature is much below freezing. So, I put the battery pack in my crotch, since that was the warmest place around, and ran a cable to the instrument. An advantage of this was that I knew it was time to get inside when the instrument began to go flaky.

Our plywood shacks were heated by a pot-bellied stove. The stove pipe went out through a large hole in the roof. There were double bunks, and the temperature differential was amazing. Snow tracked in on the floor never melted. The guy in the bottom bunk was in an arctic sleeping bag while the guy in the top bunk often had no covers at all. My first doubts about whether I was in the right profession came as I was standing naked, my feet freezing, as I did a sponge bath, using snow melted on the stove, while snow was drifting through the hole in the roof onto my head.

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He determined it needed to be re-ground before the rod could be replaced. He decided to save a trip and carry the crankshaft out when he went to get a new rod. The crankshaft is heavy, so he decided to travel light. (Trust me, going any distance on snow shoes is a lot of work. The most efficient way to move is trotting with a waddling gait so the tips of the shoes don’t sink too deeply into the snow.) Thus, he left his rifle behind to save weight. It would take three days to walk back to the highway to pick up a ride. About half a day into the trip a pack of wolves started to follow him. Did he go back for his rifle? Of course not! He assumed they were just curious. There was enough scrub wood to make a fire each night and he could see the firelight reflecting off their eyes, as they circled in the darkness around his camp site. They stuck with him for two days. I would have left the crankshaft and taken the rifle.

Field crews worked three weeks on and one week off. I spent the week off in the lounge of the Hay River Hotel. I hung out with a couple of bush helicopter pilots there. One was very proud that he had walked away from thirteen (13) helicopter crashes. One job they had while I was there was to pick up a ski plane whose ski had caught on the ice on a lake and had broken. They had a big Huey cargo chopper and went down to pick it up. They hooked a cable on the plane, picked it up, and started to fly home. There was a small problem. The plane was hanging below them from a cable and once it was in the air, it was a big airfoil that wanted to fly itself. So it was swinging around gracefully below them pulling the chopper hither and yon.

The most stable position for a helicopter is upside down. As a result, a chopper pilot must keep both hands and both feet on the controls at all times. Otherwise, very bad things can happen — and that’s when things are going well. Given that sort of meta stability, a prudent pilot might have put the plane back on the lake and flown in a repair crew to fix the ski. Not these guys; they flew it 100 miles back to Hay River. I suggested to them that doing such things might have had something to do with having thirteen crashes, but they saw no connection.

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Running field crews in the bush was fairly straightforward. There were only three rules: No guns; no booze; and no broads. (The party chief would sometimes have a rifle when there were belligerent critters in the neighborhood.) In fact, when working 12 hours a day on snowshoes, seven days a week, everyone was too tired to get into trouble, so it wasn’t a big problem. However, when we got into town for the week off, I headed for the lounge while the crew headed for the beer hall.

When I became Operations Manager for Geoscience, Inc. we had a problem with a crew in British Columbia. The client made some allegations about the crew and I went up to take a look. The second day there one of the crew suddenly runs off into the woods screaming. It took half a day to find him an bring him back, blubbering. It turns out some of the crew were dropping acid at night, and this was just a spontaneous bad trip. The real problem, though, was that the Party Chief was young and was too buddy-buddy with the crew. He never should have allowed it to get that far. Besides the three rules above, there is a fourth rule for working under hardship conditions: the Party Chief needs to remain aloof from the crew. So the Party Chief and I went into town and had a few beers while I explained the facts of field crew life to him. He fired a couple of guys and the crew had no more problems. I defy you to find a case study at the Sloan School (MIT’s B-School) that deals with that kind of problem.

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In the Northern Rockies one morning I was walking across a meadow from our camp to get water at a nearby stream and I heard a snuffling sound. I looked up and there was a wolverine staring at me about twenty yards away. Wolverines have been known to claw through 2” oak doors to get at food and they are also known for being remarkably ill-tempered with no inherent fear of Man. We looked at each other awhile until he decided he wasn’t hungry and moved off.

My most amusing encounter was on the job in Venezuela. There was an old pit where somebody had tried to find an ore vein. It was basically a cylinder about 10 feet deep and six feet in diameter. One of the other gringo geologists managed to drop his prospector’s pick into the hole. He didn’t want to leave it, so we put a couple of logs across the pit and used two of our belts to lower him down into the pit. The belts left him about 2’ short of the bottom. So he dropped the last two feet. When he hit the floor, which was covered with plant debris, the whole floor came alive with dozens of frogs, which had fallen into the pit, that started jumping up and down. These particular frogs were vibrant green and yellow, which identified them as quite poisonous; they exuded a neurotoxin from their skin that could be absorbed by your skin. The neurotoxin was popular with the local headhunters. It probably also occurred to the guy that a fer de lance, a popular South American viper, may have fallen into the pit as well.

The guy still leaned over and grabbed his pick from among the bouncing frogs, because he was a crazy gringo geologist. Then he sprang up the hole to grab the belt with a leap that probably would have set an Olympic record. He was so quick, he almost pulled us into the pit with him. However, he only grabbed the belt with one hand because he had the pick in the other and was trying to put it back in his belt holster as we pulled him up. As I mentioned, geologists are crazy.

I had another encounter with local fauna, but it wasn’t wild. I don’t get on well with dogs; I’ve been bitten three times. So when a dog comes running up in a threatening manner, I will go for him if he gets too close. One day I was walking down the side of a rural road somewhere down South. This large mutt comes running out of the yard at me growling. I was carrying a hard-rock pick, which has a hammer on one side and a tetragonal point on the other side. When the dog got too close, I popped him on the top of the head with the pointy end. He dropped like one of those critters in a cartoon with his legs spread out to the sides. The owner runs out of the house and starts yelling at me for killing his dog. I pointed out that I was on the road and the damn dog should have been on a leash or fenced. The discussion went on a bit until the guy suddenly realized I was still holding a bloody prospector’s pick in my hand. So he picked up his dog and went back inside while I went on my way before he could find his gun.

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We routinely stripped wire with our teeth. One day it was raining and there was a wire break that I had to splice. I was standing in a muddy ditch when I put the end of the wire in my mouth to strip it. I ended up getting my teeth loosened. Afterwards, I measured it with a voltmeter and there were 60 volts of 60 Hz pickup from power lines on the dipole.

I also had a fun night doing a magnetotelluric survey in the Oklahoma Panhandle. Those surveys measure very low frequency changes in the earth’s natural electric and magnetic fields. 1 Hz is UHF so it takes at least twelve hours to complete a measurement. I was sitting alone in the instrument truck when a thunder storm rolled through around midnight. The Oklahoma Panhandle is really, really flat, so the truck was the highest thing for a couple of miles. I was sitting in the truck as lightening hit about every ten seconds. I was timing the flash and the crack to know how far away it was (sound traveling 1100 ft/sec). Soon the flash and crack were at exactly the same time. The truck was well grounded so I was probably in the safest place I could be — in theory. At the time, though, I had my doubts, especially when I had to duck a St. Elmo’s fireball inside the truck. The lightning flowing over the truck’s surface popped some of the paint off the metal.

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I encountered another interesting world view in Boone’s Tavern, PA. I was having a few beers and playing pool in Boone’s Tavern. (I’m not sure which was named after the other, but the Tavern owner’s name was Boone, too.) I was most of the business that night when two ladies came in. They looked and dressed a lot alike, and I suspected they were older and younger sisters. After a half dozen beers I was pretty charming and we began to chat it up. Soon I was dancing to the juke box and necking with both of them. After a few more beers the ladies invited me to come finish the party at their place. That seemed like a pretty good idea at the time, but, as I settled up my tab, Boone told me that they are mother and daughter. I was drunk, but not quite drunk enough for that scene and I begged off. I’ve always kind of regretted that.

My cohort in crime in the Northwest Territories happened to be Jewish. None of the local crew knew that. One day one of them referred to “jewing him down”, which my partner pushed back about. We finally told that guy that my partner was Jewish. The guy adamantly would not believe us. He got rather angry that we would take him for a fool and try to scam him like that. We finally asked him how he could be so certain that my partner was not Jewish. His answer was, “Because he doesn’t have horns.” Encountering people like that on a regular basis is one of the reasons I left field geophysics.

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This was brought home to me one night in the Hay River Hotel lounge. I was talking to a guy working for a major oil company. He was exploration manager for Northwestern Canada and Alaska (prior to finding the Prudhoe Bay bonanza). He had about a hundred people working for him and had a budget into seven figures. It turned out I was getting paid more than he was because I was getting a $16/day hardship bonus. Oops. Time to go back to school and shift gears. While I was not a big fan of deer flies, poisonous frogs, and sunshine, I did have my regrets because I still feel geology is the most challenging of the sciences.

In ‘69 I went back to school. I was at the right place at the right time. The Naval Architecture Department was trying to change its warmonger image, so it renamed itself the Ocean Engineering Department. There was one small problem, though: Nobody on the faculty knew anything about oceans. Two of my friends were on the faculty and they approached me to design a course, teach it, and write a book. In return, I got a research job and could register in the degree program. Since I had GI Bill benefits coming, that was a good deal. I took all business, operations research, and computer courses, which created a problem. Since I only took one course in the Ocean Engineering Department, taught by one of my friends, the Dean baulked at issuing the degree from the Department. So my MS reads “Without Specification.”

Thus I cast aside my geology career to become a Software Guy. (I had done a program in ‘57 on a plug board, but that was such a character building experience that I didn’t go back to software until FORTRAN was mainstream in the late ‘60s, when I did my dog track handicapping program. But that’s another story…)

However, those years did provide me with some valuable experience. One was public speaking. Geoscience sent me off to the international meeting of the Society of Exploration Geophysicists to deliver a paper in the late ‘60s (‘68 I think). When I was in the wings getting introduced, I couldn’t see the audience. When I walked out on that stage I got one of the major shocks of my life. The auditorium was huge with two balconies and it was SRO. I had no idea there were that many geophysicists in the entire world! I managed to stammer through the presentation and since that baptism by fire, I’ve never had a problem with public speaking.

An interesting sidebar to that paper was that the SEG asked us to provide a written version for their journal. When I delivered the paper, there were three authors: Keeva Vozoff, the technical guru; Arnold Orange, the project manager; and myself, the field guy. Keeva said he would do the write-up. However, shortly after that Keeva got laid off. He was apparently annoyed about that and when the paper appeared in the journal, only his name was on it. Keeva went to Australia, which was a good thing because I probably would have popped the SOB with my prospector’s pick.

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