My Veterans' Day Story: A Vegas Trip & Desert Adventure

My only trip to Las Vegas was on an Army bus headed to the National Training Center (NTC) in the Mojave Desert in California.

A Blackhawk helicopter over the welcome sign at the National Training Center, Fort Irwin, CA.Photo bythe author PowerPoint Design Creations.

When I got to Fort Carson, Colorado, in June of 1987, my wife was seven months pregnant with our daughter.

Although our scheduled field training exercise at NTC was still four months away, preparation was in full swing. Everywhere you looked in the motor pool, people had camouflage nets and tents out making repairs.

Inventories were ongoing to ensure every piece of equipment was present or accounted for. Missing pieces from tool sets were ordered. Supplies and requisitions were checked and re-checked.

Despite many Soldiers not wanting to deploy to the desert for thirty days, there was a lot of excitement.

At my interview with my new First Sergeant, the top enlisted person in the company, I told him my wife was expecting the first week of October.

He said, “No worries, we won’t send you to the desert while your wife’s pregnant. But after the baby’s born, you’ll have five days to get ready. So, you probably should arrange for some family to come stay with her while you’re gone.”

My parents flew in on 29 September, my birthday, with plans to stay for two months.

My daughter was born on 2 October, and I was off to NTC on the 8th.

We were supposed to catch a bus to Fort Irwin, CA, to meet with our battalion. Well, as fate would have it, the HUMVEE I was in hit a patch of ice early in the morning in the mountains north of Colorado Springs.

I woke up in the hospital, my First Sergeant standing over my bed and a bandage on my head.

He said, “Well, Dalton, looks like you’ll do just about anything to keep from going to the desert, huh?”

I didn’t make it to the desert that year.

But when they started planning the trip to NTC for the next year, the First Sergeant said, “Dalton, you’re going this time. In fact, you are going to be the noncommissioned officer in charge (NCOIC) of our provisional railhead. That means, you’ll go out two weeks early to pull all our vehicles off the train and you’ll stay to put them back on the train.”

I said, “Thanks First Sergeant, I’m looking forward to it.”

He said, “You won’t be thanking me once you get down there. By midday, it’s 110 degrees and there isn’t any shade anywhere. The heat coming off those vehicles could cook an egg. You better stock up on sunscreen and Gatorade, Sergeant.”

The day arrived for us to get on the bus to Cali at 0300, in civilian time, that’s 3 a.m. In 28 years, I never figured out why we did everything so darn early in the morning.

A recruiting ad back then said, “We do more before 9 am than most people do all day.”

We’d arrive at O-dark-thirty and wait four hours for the civilians to show up with transportation. We always called it “Hurry up and wait.”

We had a big charter bus for the 24 people we would need to “marshal” all those vehicles off the trains, so we pretty much had two seats for every passenger.

I was charged with ensuring everyone got back on the bus after every stop, and the bus couldn’t leave until I did a head count.

The trip was pretty uneventful, except for the loud snoring, various music playing loudly, and others singing “cadence.”

According to Merriam-Webster, “The meaning of CADENCE is the beat, time, or measure of rhythmical motion or activity.”

In the Army, it’s the songs we sang while marching or running that kept us in step, such as:

They say that in the Army, the coffee’s mighty fine, it looks like muddy water, and tastes like turpentine. Oh Lord, I wanna go, but they won’t let me go…home, ho-o-o-o-home.

The bus driver told me we were about 30 minutes out of Vegas, and I started handing out the food vouchers and rolls of quarters.

Welcome to Vegas sign.Photo byPexels Photo #415999.

We’d have a $10 roll of quarters, a voucher for a Prime Rib dinner, and two hours to eat and play before we had to get back on the bus. To give you an idea of how cheap it was to eat in Vegas, the Prime Rib was $5.99 in 1988.

Tony Roma's Prime Rib at the Fremont Casino.Photo bythe author using PowerPoint Design Creations.

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Tony_roma%27s_prime_rib.jpg

I played the first slot machine I saw. I won $75, ate with a smile on my face, and got back on the bus with a full belly and a little more jingle in my pocket.

Of course, I lost everything but the uniform I wore when a sandstorm blew my tent and everything I owned across the desert. I had to wash my uniform every night while everyone else was sleeping. Quite a camping trip.

But I’ll get to that story in a minute.

The pressing issue at the time was Private Jones was not on the bus when we were ready to leave. I had a headcount of 23, and that was not good.

His battle buddy, Private First Class (PFC) Smith, said Jones told him he was going to find a hooker and get laid. Even though they were supposed to stay together, Smith let him go off alone.

When I asked why he didn’t tell me sooner, he said, “I ain’t no rat. That boy’s grown, he can take care of himself.”

I said, “Well, evidently, he can’t. Now let’s go find him, and me and you are gonna have a ‘come to Jesus meeting’ after we do.”

Dang, I had no idea where to look for a Soldier who was looking for a hooker, but if I didn’t find him and quick, the First Sergeant would have my ass and my stripes.

I told the bus driver to hold tight, and we’d be back in twenty minutes.

He said, “No worries. This ain’t the first time this has happened and it won’t be the last, I reckon.”

Luckily, we didn’t have to look very hard or very long.

When we walked back inside, Jones was walking toward us with a big shit-eating grin on his face.

He started apologizing to me immediately.

I said, “Just get on the bus, Jones. You can explain it to the First Sergeant later. We gotta roll.”

When we got on the bus, I pulled Jones up close and whispered in his ear, “You ever do something like that when I’m in charge, I’ll rip off your head and take a crap down your throat. Now, take your seat.”

I had no intention of telling the First Sergeant unless I had to, but I figured it would do him good to sweat it out for a couple of weeks.

The view out the window was about as exciting as watching grass grow, so most of us went to sleep. Having a belly full of Prime Rib made that a whole lot easier.

About four hours later, as the sun was coming up behind us, the final leg to the front gate of Fort Irwin lay ahead of us.

The bus pulled up in front of what they called the “Dust Bowl.” It was a holding area for units coming into Fort Irwin for training exercises and not too far from the trains that would bring our vehicles.

We got everything off the bus, piled up the duffle bags, stacked the weapons, and left two personnel guarding them. The rest of us started setting up our two-person tents.

After my partner and I got our tent set up, we relieved the guards so they could set up theirs.

The heat was atrocious, and we soon figured out why they called it the Dust Bowl. Every breeze carried with it a mouthful of dust.

After we set everything up, a local Sergeant First Class (SFC) came over and gave us a briefing. We would start pulling vehicles off the train at 0300.

He said, “Believe me, you’ll be glad we started early because by noon it will be too hot to do much after that.”

He told us, “If you get lost, the mountains are to the East.”

How the heck does that help you in the middle of the night?

Hint: It doesn’t.

It was hard work and damn hot, but after a week, we were done off-loading the vehicles, and the unit came to pick up most of the crew, but me and three others were left there to clean up and file a closure report in the morning.

As we were cleaning up, a massive cloud was visible on the horizon. The civilian in charge of the railhead said to get into one of the boxcars because a sandstorm was headed our way.

After the storm was over, our tents and everything we brought with us, except what we had on our backs, were gone.

We waited all day for someone from our unit to pick us up. As it was getting dark, the civilian said, “I know where your unit is; I’ll drive you out there.”

By the time he dropped us off, it was pitch black, and we were tired as hell. We went up to the big tent and went inside but didn’t know anyone there. He had dropped us off at the wrong unit.

It was early morning before our unit came to pick us up, and almost eight before we got to our unit’s location. We were tired as dogshit but still had to set up our tents and act like we weren’t when they gave us a new mission.

That two months in the desert seemed like a year and a half!

Happy Veterans Day, Joe!

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About the author

Stephen Dalton is a native of Old Town, ME, and a retired US Army First Sergeant with a degree in journalism from the University of Maryland. He is a Certified US English Chicago Manual of Style Editor. Top Writer in Travel, Food, Fiction, Transportation, VR, NFL, Design, Creativity, Short Story, and a NewsBreak Community Voice Pro.