Gunner Joe

 home: http://minemen.us/ 

by Ĝan Ŭesli Starling
copyright 2003

Last I heard from Gunner Joe he’d just sold his house in favor of a motor home and was planning to tour the country with his wife. That rather fits as I surely can’t see him ever becoming sedentary. He wrote to me disclaiming that he had ever been a senior chief. But Bob Shoeman and I both distinctly remember that he had indeed been promoted to senior chief for just a couple of months or so before he made CWO4. Gunner is what folks call him now, but those of us who’s terms were up in 70’s recall him simply as The Chief.

Some folks you just never forget. Bosses in particular are especially easy to remember. What I personally remember of Joe Balderrama after a span of 25 years is only a patch-work quilt of highlights. He was my boss in two respects, first a the chief on the SLMM team, second as the warrant officer in the MOMAG supply department. As with many others I quite liked and respected him. One thing surely, he had style.


Table of Contents:

  1. Sound sleeper
  2. Trivia buff
  3. Drill sergeant
  4. Stunt driver

Sound sleeper    ↑   → 

Chief Joe smoked, if memory serves, Kool filter cigarettes. I remember he bought them in a soft pack and always tamped the pack vigorously down on its filter end so as to better pack the tobacco. Then he would always open the pack from its bottom end and carry them upside-down in his pocket the better that they should stay tamped down. I remember it distinctly because uncle Syrus had once done similar. Sy had gone further by treating the ends with a drop of clove oil each. My uncle Sy had died of lung cancer. Which should have been a lesson for me.

But back to Chief Joe and his smoking habits. Perhaps it was his Vietnam experience that contributed to his very sound sleep. But the Chief neither tossed nor turned. He always had a cigarette the very last thing when he went to bed. He’d finish maybe half of it before falling sound asleep, flat on his back, right hand palm-down on his chest, with the filter of his menthol jammed firmly into the crook of his fingers. The smoke would go out when it had burnt down to the filter while he slept. Then come morning the Chief would awaken, reach carefully over to the ashtray and let go of the cigarette from which the remaining ashes had not even fallen off.


Trivia buff     ←   ↑   → 

If ever the conversation was at a loss for a topic Chief Joe could supply. He had a way of animating any subject so as to make it interesting. The Chief was into a special branch of trivia which today are called imponderables: the kind of things which’d give anyone pause except that no few had till then bothered to give them adequate consideration. Sometimes I could supply an answer. And for this Chief Joe tagged me with the nickname Perfessor, deliberatly mispronounced as in the old TV sitcom Gilligan’s Island. It rather stuck, but I really didn’t mind since it was better by far than many another I had previously suffered to bear.

Some of these imponderables were interesting in that the Chief could argue them from all points of view. A recurrent theme was How does a fly land on the ceiling? How indeed? Does he barrel roll to plant his feet up there? Or does he rather halt at the apex of a loop? Whichever side one elected to take in this debate the Chief would addroitly argue in favor of the other. He gave the air of having given deep and thoughtful consideration to this very worthy topic was on the verge of changing his own mind about it.

Well Chief, I do hope you read this, because I have since obtained full disclosure on the question. Not that I had to do any research but stumbled upon it by accident. Some few years after my release from indenture I was applying for a job at the Upjohn Pharmacutical Company. They had a whole battery of tests for applicants to take. The tests were offered only once every several months and to groups of a hundred or so. I finished second out of the lot and so had plenty of time to kill hanging out in the lobby. All the magazines there were of an educated flavor. One of them, I think it was Nature, had an article on flys.

Immediately I thought of the Chief and his scientific bent for this topic. And indeed the journal agreed with the Chief for importance of this matter. It turns out, however, that the Chief was wrong on both counts...as were we all since no third theorem had ever been posited against the two main camps: top-of-loop versus barrel roll.

Here are the stats. A fly has four wings: two to propell and two to steer. It has only two speeds: off and full on; the front wings either buzz at full speed or else they are still. The rear wings afford him to tilt and yaw in only a limited way. He has a maximum manouvering capability of only about forty-five degrees. So he can bank left and right, tilt up or down...but alas he is poorly suited either to do barrel rolls or loop-the-loops. To land on the ceiling he climbs at his steepest angle, extends his two foremost feet before him, then just slams headlong into it. Momentum then carries his back feet to pivot over his front and thereby does he alight on the ceiling. How utterly inelegant! Chief, I rather liked your own two alterante theorems better.


Drill sergeant     ←   ↑   → 

Believe it or not we minemen had a precision marching team. This was at COMOMAG in Charleston. Not my kind of thing and so I did not volunteer. They wouldn’t have had me anyway since I’ve got two left feet. But I do remember watching them with occasional interest as Chief Joe was their flamboyant drill master. He had military bearing more than enough to look the role and the right leavening of humor to coax even sailors that they too could march.

Like I said, the Chief had style. Sometimes you see a drill sergeant to make display with a sword. This is not very usual, but it does not look at all out-of-place. It adds to the flair. He can gesture grandly with it: salute, point, signal various commands. This was entirely too mundane for our Chief Joe. Stories rumored from the old-timers told of how the Chief had carried a sawed-off, double-barrel shotgun during his cruise on a river patrol boat in Vietnam. However cool, nothing like that would do at all here, though.

Instead the Chief carried a bull whip. Mostly it stayed coiled at his belt, or coiled in his hand. Only on rare occasion would it ever fling out into the air to issue an attention-getting crack. But this alone was all that it took for the COMOMAG drill team to stand out distinctly on the parade ground.


Stunt driver     ←   ↑ 

The SLMM team often went on deployment. One of those times the Chief and Lt. Gentry had rented a motor home for the journey. Since Gentry had forbidden me yet again to ride my chopper even just that very short distance from Charleston SC to Washington DC I was a passenger on the trip.

With its truck-sized fuel capacity and an on-board head (aka bathroom) the motor home had a theoretical crusing range of many hours. The Chief and Gentry thought it a prudent exercise in military efficiency to switch drivers without ever bothering to stop. Now at the time highway speeds were only 55 mph. So it’s not as bad as if they were trying the same today. And they weren’t half bad even with their first attempt at this manouver. With practice they got better still.

But it did result in some small degree of meandering about in the right-hand lane. And at the time the Chief’s car, a Ford Pinto, was trailering along behind, attached by one of those cheap trailer-hitch adaptors of the sort you rent from U-Haul. By the time we got to Washington the Pinto’s front bumper was nearly pulled off.