where you were on the list and i was scheduled to go in in october so i enlisted in august i served in mystery three places i was in the navy and more specifically the and s g the next naval security group so my  station was in pensacola florida where i went to school there for communications then from there long story but i went to midway island in the middle of the pacific which is an isolated tora duty for eleven and a half months and then i went to the best place japan for two years and thoroughly enjoyed the early time of training obviously is the boot camp that we have to go through and that was in chicago in great lakes in the wintertime it was very cold there but that was for eight weeks and then i joined because i wanted to get into a schooling get more schooling and at that time of studying counting so i was told i could get go to accounting school or i got in they said there was no accounting school so i had to pick another choice and it was communications and they said they could give me communications school in pensacola florida that's where i joined up was interesting enough they had the buddy system then i had some school friends are also going in so we thought we're goin the united states navy and get into the buddy system all go together and so there was three other men that i went in with and we all went to the great lakes we started there and they ended up st getting up because i was out for a medical condition for a week and so i have stayed behind and they continued going on but i met one of them down to call florida later on you know when i got out of pensacola florida  midway island i should say i had choices to go to and i wanted to travel and see something and so the st choice i put in was for london england i figured well if i could go out of the united states i'd go to i was only certain areas i could go to certain ports that i could go to so my nd choice was washington d c and i couldn't stay in the states and i was going to go to the pacific and i selected japan and that's what i got so being in japan was unbelievable it was really a great country to see a big country to see and so i did take time off and with friends we did travel japan that i heard you talking earlier about the vietnam era and that's the arrow that i was then in while i was in japan i figured that believe it or not for years in the navy or forty five months to be exact i never was on a ship so because it was all in duty for communications at the time so i several times i put in for various tours of duty and it was great for thirty days or sixty days you could put in for tour duty and i did put in a couple of times for saigon i was well protected there and could do my job that i had to do there but each time that i put in they rejected it for operational necessity and i had to stay and do my job there in japan well there was it was a communication center there and we  communicated all over the united states all over the world to various other locations and passing messages back and forth and and that was the main duty i mean you either technical equipment you operated or you were in a message center and you did various things while you were there and various levels of of responsibility depending on your rank that you were in you're all in a certain place for a certain time i so i think the more friendship i built was when i was in two years in japan and one gentleman was from massachusetts and so we stayed in touch for a while he went to mother's but was social media we sort of try to keep in touch that way well it was mostly obviously letter writing at that time but that got to be tiring to write multi page letters so i got a brain idea that i would buy a recording device all tapes at the time and i bought one for my parents and one i kept and we recorded messages so you could actually hear voices family members and it was easy to ship that back and forth well mainly it was the traveling because we were we had tokyo was in our in and one of them really are but at that time it wasn't very popular so it was just get back into the mainstream of civilian life i signed up for four years but at that time you could get out three months early if you went back to college and i was going to bentley at the time before and so i plied to get back in and got a three month early to go back to school so that's what i did after that it was a little bit difficult because i was a lot older than the  students obviously coming out of high school and here i was already had four years over them but it worked out well i also worked at the same time i was going to school so i was going back and forth from work to school i think i think there's a lot of curiosity and being away for two years never got home so i was curious to see what was happening but more more so is prior to going into the service while i was a boot camp since i was applying for the navy need the energy security group they had to do background checks so there was people talking in the neighborhood they would come in and interview people neighborhood so they're all curious of what i was doing so when i got home they were all very curious i was well very well welcomed back i haven't we it's interesting because all the different lives you you build your own family in and so far no i haven't met up with anybody but we do very occasionally talk to social media well that was another interesting thing when i mentioned that i wanted to get into accounting but got into communications since then i worked for a company and went back into the accounting department but they had a layoff and they gave me a job back into their communications center so i figured i was destined for that so i stayed in that and that became my career basically in telecommunications and major companies in the area i think a lot i think a lot of the patriotism at that time i don't know people might say there was another patriotism that time but seeing the people that went in i think they were very patriotic once once they were there and i think of it now i think of a hope that our country gets back to the patriotic ways that we really need to be to be successful and i do like when you see a veteran coming home from the war zone that we congratulate them and thank them for their service yeah i think when i st went in you know it's very hard to get in boot camp very disciplined and you think about it and you really dislike it because you're being told what to do but i think it gives you some structure in life and i think it's it's a good thing that keeps you focused and keeps you on track again that's i think you go back to what we're talking about and again the vietnam war was not well like so it was kind of difficult but i think it's a an evil necessary that we have today and something that we need to watch i think of all of the the men and women that are in the service today that i think we have to look at them in a different light in to to really be appreciative of what of what they're doing that was their families their putting their lives in danger and so i think we need to look at them in a in a different light and really more thankful and appreciative of what they