Raising the Flag, OSU vs Michigan

Raising the Flag, OSU vs Michigan;

‘The Game’ wrapped up this year with one of the greatest contests in the history of the 119 year, epic rivalry.  A double overtime win over the team up North with a national playoff berth on the line.

The instant classic brought joy to Columbus while also reminding me of my own OSU vs Michigan experience…and an opportunity to write a quick blog to end my blogging drought.

Where:

Ohio State University, 1992.

I was back from my tour of duty in the United States Navy, finishing out my degree at OSU.

I had enrolled as an ROTC student while I played around with the idea of becoming an officer.  ROTC stands for Reserve Officer Training Corp and is one of the most common methods for recruiting and training officers in the United States military.

I had signed up after returning from the Navy….in the Army ROTC.  I know, what’s a Navy squid doing with a bunch of GIRBs? (GI Rotten Bastards)  I actually had a lot of respect for the Army and was seriously thinking about a career as an Army civil engineer.

(It was through Army ROTC that I was able to attend Air Assault Training at Fort Gruber – see Boot of Pain)

                                            (OSU ROTC Bldg, Converse Hall)

The Color Guard:

But what does this have to do with OSU/Michigan football? 

Everything. 

ROTC cadets form the color guard that raises the flag at all OSU home games in the storied Horseshoe.

Each branch of ROTC took turns raising the flag on a rotating basis.  It was a voluntary detail, but a prestigious one.  It also got you a free seat at the game.  In the North endzone, literally on the field.  Which was great for play on the North half of the stadium. .. not so great for the Southern half.

I had been part of the color guard all season and the Michigan game was going to be my third flag raising (remember we rotated the duty with the Navy and the Airforce).

Normally, at the start of each game, the color guard marched from the ROTC building at Converse Hall, South to the Horseshoe.  The guard formed up with cadets on each side of the flag.  The flag itself was HUGE.  About thirty feet long and twenty feet wide.  But while marching the Stars & Stripes to the stadium it was folded into a large tri-color. 

The color guard then marched South to Jesse Owens Plaza, up the Plaza, and into the Horseshoe.  Or more precisely, into the tunnel on the North end of the Stadium that leads onto the field.

(Jesse Owens Plaza looking towards North entrance to Stadium)

There the color guard halted.  Standing at attention, in silence, inside of the darkened tunnel, with the bright green field stretching out before it.  The field, ten acres of sunlit glory with the crimson crowd going up on all sides as high as you could see.

There you stood, waiting while The Best Damn Band In The Land (TBITL) formed up behind you.  Then out you marched in lock step.  From the dark tunnel into a bright field of green with teeming thousands staring down with all eyes on the flag. 

At the site of the flag, and in anticipation of the soon to come game, the crowd would give a cheer.

The color guard then came to a stop just in front of the 147 foot high flag pole.

Then the OSU marching band would stride out, with drilled precision, dividing into two columns, going around on each side of the color guard and onto the field.  As soon as the band emerged from the tunnel a slightly larger cheer would go up from the crowd.

And then The Ohio State Buckeye Football team would run out onto the field to an enormous cheer.

Once the color guard, band, and team were all on the field, the band fired up the national anthem.  And while the band played the color guard expanded the flag out to its full width.  Held taught on each side by cadets as the stars end was attached to the lanyard on the flag pole.

Then as the anthem rose in pitch and volume the color guard released the flag and the lanyard man raced the rope down to the pole and secured it.

That’s how it usually went.

That’s NOT how it went in November of 1992, vs Michigan.

On that day, as soon as the color guard cleared the edge of the tunnel, a deafening roar erupted from the crowd.  The roar shook the stands and crashed over us like a sonic wave.  It rattled your teeth.

And it never stopped.

The band, didn’t wait for the color guard to get to the flag pole.  They charged out of the tunnel at a run.  One band member hit me as he ran past.  Knocking my garrison cap off my head.  Sending it spinning across the end zone.

For the next three hours the roar from the crowd continued.  Unabated.  At rock concert levels.  My ears didn’t stop ringing for two days.  My own throat was horse from screaming through the game.

The game itself ended in a 13-13 tie.  But I’ll never forget it.  It was an unbelievable experience to be part of the opening ceremonies at the ‘The Game’.

Post Script Ohio :

Back in 1992 the field was astro turf.  If you’ve never had the ‘pleasure’ of playing on astro turf let me describe it for you.  Astro turf is a quarter inch of carpet.  With strands/fibers made of short, rough, green plastic.  With the whole thing rolled out over solid concrete.

It was indestructible.  So much so, that if the team or the band wasn’t practicing on the field, the student body was allowed on it.  To play Frisbee, soccer, football or whatever you liked. 

Yup, you could actually go out onto the field, in the Horseshoe, with your roommates, and play football in Ohio Stadium.  Most people did it at least once.  Almost no one did it twice. 

Astro turf sucked. 

It was dangerous.  The quarter inch carpet gave almost no padding from the concrete.  And the plastic grass was so rough and abrasive that if you were tackled on it, any piece of exposed skin was instantly transformed into a rug burn.

It was so bad, the OSU football players would coat their skin with Vaseline to try and reduce the friction and stop burns.  Finally, someone came to their senses and they got rid of the crap.

Post Post Script Ohio:

The end of my senior year, I started interviewing with companies.  One of the companies I interviewed with was General Mills.  They flew me and several other students out to their headquarters in Minneapolis for a gauntlet of interviews.

At the end of the interviews, their human resources department took us out for a dinner.  Just two of their younger HR people with about six of us.  The first thing one of the HR guys says is, “Relax, this isn’t part of the interview process”. 

FYI, whenever someone says, “This isn’t part of the interview process”.  It’s part of the interview process.

Dinner proceeded and during the conversation, it came out our one HR guy was an OSU graduate.  Eventually, talk turned to OSU football as it usually does.  And we started lamenting about how John Cooper’s team always played down to the level of their competition.

Then the HR guy says, yeah but I was in the band and no matter how bad the team played people always said the band was awesome (and they were too).

He then starts talking about how at the Michigan game the band didn’t wait, charged onto the field, and he crashed into one of the cadets and knocked his cap off.  I kid you not.  I looked over at the guy, and said, “Hey brother, I’m the guy whose cap you knocked off”. 

Talk about a small world.

The Plane Exploded!

This is a quick follow up to the last post, "The Plane's on Fire!".

While looking over the 'Plane' post, another in-flight incident popped into my head.  Again, the major reason I'm writing this stuff down.  It's funny how writing about events triggers buried memories of other events.

But back to the story:

Where:
NAS Cubi Point, Philippines.

Naval Air Station (NAS) Cubi Point, usually referred to as just 'Cubi', was the Naval airport that serviced the base at Subic Bay, Philippines.  Which is the departure point (literally) for this story.

Cubi is gone now.  The US military was expelled out of the Philippines in 1992.  And the airbase along with the port facility at Subic Bay were shut down.

However, at that time, Cubi was the primary maintenance, repair, and supply center for the 7th Fleet's carrier based air squadrons.

The airfield was literally carved out of the Philippine jungle by the Seabees and was three miles away from the massive port at Subic Bay.  Consequently, the airbase was much quieter and had a remote isolated jungle feel to it.

A little side note on Cubi.  The officer's club at Cubi Point was infamous during the Vietnam war for it's wild escapades.  The stories associated with the "O" Club at Cubi are the stuff of legends.


What:
I'd wound up there in the late 80's along with a shipmate of mine named Jake.  

Jake and I were just passing through on our way back to our home base at Atsugi, Japan.  We'd been deployed together on a special mission which took us from Japan to Whidbey Island, Washington.  
From Whidbey, we sailed up and along the Aleutian Island chain, down past Japan, then to Korea.  After Korea, we proceeded to the Philippines and then on out of the South China Sea.  We went right past Singapore without stopping and into the Arabian Sea.  There our ship took up station, just outside the Persian Gulf.

At that point, my and Jake's mission concluded.  So we flew off the U.S.S. Nimitz (our home during this epic journey) and onto the tiny flyspeck atoll called Diego Garcia.

Diego was a supply point for the U.S. Navy's assets in the Persian Gulf.  It's considered British Indian Territory but the U.S. has a large base, airfield, and port facility on the atoll.  It's located smack dab in the center of the Indian Ocean.

We stayed there for a couple days while we waited to catch a military flight back to the Philippines, enroute to Japan.

A quick note about Diego, or DG, as it's sometimes known.  It's hot.  Hot with a capital H-O-T.  It's the only duty station in the U.S. military where shorts are authorized as part of the uniform.  It was so hot, that you couldn't walk on the beaches during daytime.  The sand would burn your feet.   If you didn't have on sunglasses, the reflection off the sand would blind you.  The beaches were gorgeous white sand surrounded by crystal blue lagoon waters.  But nobody hung out there.  The water was so damn hot, it was unpleasant to be in.  And if that wasn't bad enough, it was filled with sharks.

So Jake and I spent three days washing Seabee construction equipment in the motor pool, then caught a flight out to Cubi.

At Cubi, we had to wait again to catch a military flight back to Japan.  Our home.

We were stuck on Cubi for a couple days.  Which we spent at the enlisted club drinking beers and playing video games.  Finally we got word there was a C-2 cargo flight heading out the next day to Japan.

The following morning we dutifully reported to the airfield with our large green seabags slung over our backs and waited for the plane.  We didn't have to wait long.  We got word to proceed to the flight line and board through the open cargo bay of a C-2 transport.

So we grabbed our seabags, stepped out of the air-conditioned terminal, and into the oven like heat radiating up off the black tarmac of the flight line.  The Philippines isn't as hot as Diego but it's damn close.  And that day was no exception.

It must have been in the upper 90's, with a blue sky that gave Mr. Sun a direct line of fire down on our heads and backs.  We immediately started to sweat, profusely, as we walked towards the waiting aircraft.

As we walked, a flight of three U.S. Marine's AH-1 Supercobras (a vicious looking attack helicopter) slid past us.  They were nose to tail with only a yard separating their rotors and only a foot off the ground as they went by.  The pilots' skill was amazing to watch.

They went past and we walked on out to the C-2.

The C-2 Greyhound was a small to medium sized, twin engined, transport plane.  Which was the workhorse of the Navy's logistic supply chain.

They were used for everything.  To move personnel between bases.  To transport needed supplies across the vast distances of the Pacific.  And perhaps most importantly, they were the main way to move people and cargo onto and off of the fleet's aircraft carriers.

A little trivia about the C-2 Greyhound.  Nobody called it a Greyhound.  It was most commonly referred to as the COD.  Which stood for Carrier Onboard Delivery.

Jake and I had been shot off the pointy end of the U.S.S Nimitz in one while departing for Diego Garcia.  And had ridden in a C-2 from DG to Cubi.  Now we were boarding another one for the final flight back to Japan.

The rear loading ramp was down and we walked into the cargo area where we took seats.  Which all faced rearward towards the open cargo door.

And we sat there, and sat there, ... and sat there.  Inside an un-airconditioned steel tube in tropical heat.  I felt like I was a giant stick of butter slowly melting into a pool of salty water.

There were about a dozen of us waiting to take off and none of us knew the reason for the delay.  It was miserable.  The heat was shimmering up off the tarmac and radiating off the steel skin of the aircraft.  No one spoke.  We were too drained and wretched to speak.  But everyone had the same thought going through their head.  "What the hell are we waiting for?"

After about an hour with the plane set on Convect Bake, we found out.  A hummer came rumbling out onto the flight line and pulled up next to our plane.  Out jumped a tall blond officer's wife with her suitcase in hand.

The crew grabbed her luggage and she strolled on and took a seat...as a dozen, sweat drenched, wilted, surly sailors stared daggers at her.  She had the good sense to realize she'd royally pissed us off.  She avoided eye contact a gave us an apology for the delay.

Which, as much as I hate to say it, is more than many officer's wives would have done.

So we let it go and prepared for take off.

The rear cargo door came up and sealed, the engines fired up, and we taxied down to takeoff position.  We got the green light, the pilot released the brakes, and we sped down the runway then climbed quickly to altitude.

And that's when it happened.

Jake and I were in our seats, just settling in after our climb when the plane exploded.  Explosive decompression to be precise.

One second Jake and I were getting relaxed for a long flight and the next second the plane was in chaos.

Just as the plane reached altitude a large BANG went off in the cargo bay (where our seats were).  Like having an M80 firecracker thrown at your head.

My skull rang and my vision blurred.  "What the hell just happened?", went through my brain.  Followed quickly by, "Shit.  The plane's going down!"

I can truthfully say I didn't piss myself or crap my pants.  But my heart about leapt out of my throat and my pulse went through the roof.

I looked around quickly.  But looking around was difficult.  Papers and loose trash were whipping around inside the cargo bay and the "air" was filled with shimmering crystals.

I say "air" in quotes because there wasn't any.

The air was gone and the crystals were water molecules that had been in the air.  They were now frozen and hanging in space.  Giving the inside of the plane a surreal look.

A split second later the yellow emergency masks dropped down from above our heads (You know the ones.  The masks the flight attendants always demonstrate before take off.  "Please place the yellow cup over your mouth first.  Then assist your children...")

Yeah, those things.  Definately not a good sign.  I grabbed mine and put it on.  But the clear bag attached to the yellow cup wasn't inflating.

I flashed back again to the civilian flight attendants, "Even though oxygen is flowing through the bag, it may not inflate...".

Mine was not inflated.

Ok, maybe it was working.  Deep breath.   I think I'm getting something.  I turned to the guy in the seat next to me and pointed at his mask.  He gave me a thumbs up.  I breathed in a couple more times and decided it was working.

The plane banked hard and dived for the landing strip.  The wheels touched sweet tarmac and we taxied up to the hangers.  I can tell you, having wheels touch terra-firma after you thought you were a goner is a GREAT feeling.

We exited and went back into the terminal.  A few minutes later we found out what happened.  Once we reached altitude, the seal on the rear cargo door gave out.  All the oxygen was then pushed out through the breach in less than a second.  Creating the explosion.

We swapped planes, and for the life of me I cannot remember if the officer's wife got back on or threw in the towel.  The replacement plane and flight were uneventful.  But that was Ok with me.  I had enough eventfulness for one day.

Post Script:
I'd make it back to Cubi a number of times.  On one visit, I had to walk from the flight line back up the hill to the barracks area.  About a mile trek.  Most of it on a road that cut through dense jungle.

The road had an eight foot fence topped with concertina wire (razor wire) at the top on both sides.  I was dressed in my flight suit.  A full length affair made out of nomex.  Which does not breath.  And with mid calf, steel toed, all leather boots on my feet.   In the tropical heat with all my gear slung over my back it was not pleasant.

I was about 2/3rds of the way up, strolling along the paved road by myself, when a troop of Howler monkeys came out of the jungle on my right.  They were about fifty feet in front of me and there were about twenty of them.

I froze.  I stood stock still and tried not to look threatening.  Howler monkeys are large animals with fangs and they're immensely powerful.  And did I mention there were twenty of them?  While not known for being aggressive, if they had got it into their heads to come after me I'd have been in deep shit.

So I stood still and watched.  And it was fascinating.  

They worked together and looked out for each other. One came out of the jungle and climbed a tree to get to the top of the fence.  Then it pulled aside the razor wire and let another of the troop through.  The monkey that passed through the wire then climbed down the other side, found a utility pole, went up it and held open the wire of the fence on the opposite side of the road.

Then one by one the rest of the troop came out of the jungle, and taking turns at each spot, worked the entire troop across the road.

It was one of the coolest things I've ever seen.