James Robert Young Sr, CTI2 USN, 1966-1970 I never thought I'd have the opportunity to tell this story...but here it is!! So, after going away from my hometown to college, on two scholarships, no less...I had a great time the first semester.... and came home with a 1.27 GPA!! So I stayed in my hometown and moved back with my folks, expecting that they would make me 'toe the mark', as it were. Nope.... They'd decided it was time for ME to come to grips with my own responsibilities. Which, of course, I didn't. So when I flunked out again, this time at the local junior college, I could feel the heat of the 1966 southeast Texas draft board.... I knew they would get me and send me to Vietnam sooner or later if I didn't outsmart them. That outsmarting came in the form of enlisting in the Navy. Summer, '66, boot camp in San Diego. Hottest summer I ever spent in my life. Since I did have a few college hours, I managed to get named Squad Leader of Squad 3, company 335. I spent that summer crafting the most spectacular sunburn scabs on my nose and the tops of my ears from the torching San Diego sun slamming down around our covers, which, of course, provide no shade at all. Those scabs were born in June, '66 and I don't think I was able to finally get rid of them until around September. But, by that time, I was excitedly headed to DLI to become a LINGUIST, having aced the 59 question FLAT (foreign language aptitude test) with a score of 59. The multiple choice test consisted of questions based on a made-up language that was briefly explained at the start of the test. The pseudo-language, it turns out, had sentence structures and verb conjugations so similar to Spanish that I laughed out loud when I first saw it. You see, I'd had two years of Spanish in high school. It was one of my favorite courses. Hence, my ability to ace the FLAT test. That made me a shoo-in for language school, and I drooled at the thought that I'd be doing highly-classified, spooky-type work that nobody else could know about. How cool was that??!! Anyway, that's how I got onto the CT train. Met some of the greatest people I've ever know during my CT days...got to feed Fred, the pet Iguana who lived behind the Leeward Point, Guantanamo, Cuba snack bar. Fred would wait until all the tables at the snack shack were full of sailors drinking beer and eating french fries, then waddle out, rear up and put his front paws on the edge of the table and beg for fries!!! That's only one of my many memories of my CT duty, for which I'm eternally grateful. Hope you has as much fun as I did. Jim Young, Sr. (better known to my CT buddies as "Jaime Joven") James Robert Young Sr, CTI2 USN, 1966-1970