My Final Photo Assignment

Several months after learning that some of our 30th Arty Bgde missiles were obsolete, I did the last 30th Arty photo assignment that I can remember doing.

That final photo assignment was shot at the officers club. The 30th Brigade’s officers’ wives had a fashion show up there, on a weekday afternoon. The best part about it was that I spent the afternoon surrounded by curvaceous female anatomy. I was twenty years old at the time, and the youngest officers wives were a year or two older than me, because most officers had a college education and many of their wives had met them while they were both in college. There were plenty of pretty college graduates all around me. I was the only man in the room.

The next to the worst part of the afternoon was when I had to have the duty driver, who rode me to the officers club, stop at the PX so I could buy some film to shoot the assignment.

The very worst part was when one young, pretty, slender, but shapely officer’s wife leaned in close to another sweet young thang' standing near me, touched the other woman’s arm gently with her fingertips, and she said to the other wife, in a hushed, giggly tone, "You know of course? that the missiles are obsolete."

It was obvious that those two young women did not care that their husbands’ jobs, in the Army, were not very important to the free world’s defense against Communist world aggression. Then it hit me that they didn’t mind about the taxpayers not getting their money’s worth out of any of us 30th Arty personnel. I became instantly aware that the reason that they didn’t care was, most likely, because all that mattered to them was that their husbands were not in Vietnam.

Due to me being worn down to a frazzle by the entire 30th Arty photographer situation at the time, you could'a knocked me down with the false pony tail that one of them pretty young wives was wearing.

Not only did I already know the stunning fact that some of our missiles were obsolete, I also knew that many of our 'birds' were not in operable condition - thanks to a sergeant buddy of mine from one of our missile sites who had told me, one sad day, that some of his section’s missiles didn’t have all of the parts that they needed to be able to fire. Add to all of that the experience of witnessing those two wives giggling about it, and you end up with one fully frazzled soldier.