My Life. A Mostly True Story
1/25/17 Note: It has been pointed out to me that some of the things in the following paragraphs led to multiple clues. Leave it to the Army to mess up numbers. Anyway, I have made corrections that should make this less ambiguous. My apologies
As a child living on military posts, we used to hide from the Military Police when they drove down our road. It was fun to see them look as us and wonder what we were up to. We were up to messing with their minds. Never in my wildest dreams did I think I would someday enlist and become a Mathematics Statistics Assistant. When I arrived at basic training at wonderful Fort Knox, we found out that Drill Instructors were not as much fun as they appeared on TV. But, the only one I remember was from the Gomer Pyle Show. It turns out that these implementors of torture could come from any place in the Army. They could even be a Food Service Specialist (just a fancy Army name for a cook) or a Birdie Repairman. Everyone in the Army has a funny story. I had a buddy who used to make maps of upper Alaska. This part of the state is covered with lakes and they were supposed to label the lakes with their elevation unless they already had a name. Most of the guys would sneak in the name of their current girlfriend when labeling a lake. So, if you ever look at maps of Northern Alaska and see a lake with a girl's name, you now know where it came from. About the time I left the Army, the did away with my job and reclassified me as a Software Analyst. It was the last straw. It made the decision to leave the Army pretty easy.
It turned out that I had a good buddy in the Military Police. This was a job where rank was difficult, so they often change jobs to help them make rank. My buddy tried out to be a Track Vehicle Repairman, but the Army said ‘no tanks’. So, he stayed an MP and drank cold coffee while making his nightly patrols. While we were off duty one night when he saw two training soldiers in the woods changing from their uniform to civilian clothes, so they could spend a night on the town. As training soldiers, they were not allowed out of uniform and were not allowed off post. He just watched until they were gone. Then, he went over and picked up their uniforms where they had hidden them and put them in his trunk. He never said another word about what happened. Those two guys were probably reassigned as a Chaplain Assistant or a Terrain Analyst. They never did get their uniforms back.
Oh well, three years of fun was enough for me. While I continued to work for the Army, I did a lot of work with predecessors to GPS including adapting the inertial guidance system to vehicles. When I saw my first GPS in 1990, I thought of all the wonderful things I could do with it. I never thought that one of them would be geocaching.