Dad in the Military

My dad, Robert Barnett, had a career in the US Military. A couple of years in the Navy and the rest in the Air Force. Here is a few memories I have on what he told me once.
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In the Navy he was stationed several different places but I think mostly on the east coast. He would tell a story of being in port in New York City and going to a bar where there was a man singing that he didn’t think was very good. Having had a few drinks he went up and told the man he didn’t think he would ever make a go of it as a singer. Later he would see the man on TV and it would be Tennessee Ernie Ford who was a very well known singer back in the 1940’s and ‘50’s.

Bob said that he was in one of the last battles of the Korean War. I am in the process of getting information about his service record to verify this but don’t have it at this time. He gave a lot of information about Korea to his grandson, James Edmonds, Jr. that he wouldn’t give to me.

After his term of service was up he got out of the Navy and went back to Cortez, CO but it wasn’t long before he enlisted in the Air Force in about 1947. I am not sure if he was stationed anywhere else before being stationed at Kirtland Air Force Base outside of Albuquerque, NM or not.

It was in early 1950 that he met Catherine Green when another of the men in his barracks, Richard Jepson, asked him to go with a couple of them to the Green home to visit. As stated above he and mother married, with Jepson as his best man. Not long afterward Jep married a woman he met named Joyce. The two couples were to keep in contact with each other from then on. Jep and Joyce had three boys and adopted a girl while they were stationed in Italy. We would meet up with them again when Jep was stationed in Phoenix, AZ and we moved there for a while. Later when Jep retired he and family went to California where his brother lived. They came to mine and Lee’s wedding in Nov. of 1970. In about 1980 Jep and Joyce moved to Los Cruces, NM and they visited with Bob and Kate some at their home in Silver City. I think the Jepson’s still live in Los Cruces but I have lost touch with them.
I was born while he was stationed at Kirtland AFB. In fact I was born at Sandia Army Base because Kirtland didn’t have a maternity ward. Kirtland AFB is still a very active AFB but Sandia Army Base disappeared sometime and was the land and buildings became part of Kirtland.

While at Kirtland one of Bob’s jobs was to go out with the crews that picked up the pieces of the airplanes when they crashed. Some of it was top secret that he never would talk about. Said he wasn’t allowed to even right up to the time of his death. I have a few photos that were taken of planes that had crashed and showed the larger pieces on flatbed trucks coming back to Kirtland. He also knew more about the military missiles that were in the Monzano Mountains to the east of Kirtland and Albuquerque.

Before anyone should ask he always said he was not involved with the ‘Roswell Incident’. I believe it happened before he was stationed at Kirtland.

When I was about three Bob was transferred to England but I am not sure where in England. I have found a note saying it was Alconbury AFB about 80 miles from London. As I said I am trying to get more information on his service record. I have a few photos of him that were taken there but they don’t give much information either. The photos do have the name Ilford on the back of them like it might have been a town where the photos were developed or it could have been the name of the paper the photo was developed on like Kodak is her.

Daddy didn’t seem to care for England. I think his job at the motor pool on the Air Force base might have been a bit boring. He did go to London a few times to see the sights with some of his friends. He said it was too big a city with too many people and he couldn’t get used to people driving on the ‘wrong’ side of the road. He did get a few days once to visit with his friends Richard and Joyce Jepson. He was also, upset that he couldn’t be with Mother when she had my sister, Sarah. We had stayed in Pampa, TX while he was in England.

After he came back from England he was stationed at a base near Burlington, Vermont where my sister, Janice was born. Then it was back to the base near Amarillo, TX for a few months of schooling, and on to Nellis Air Force Base near Las Vegas, NV.

While at Nellis he worked as a jet mechanic for the Air Force jets and sometimes on the special flying group called the Thunderbirds. While at Nellis he said that he got to see some of the first computers. They were those great big, old computers that took up a big room in a huge building. He didn’t use them but he did get to see them and he said that he would have never guessed that those computers would become what they are today. He said this was in 1958. He said the government was having to hire lots of people to learn to work on computers and operate them and that lots of times they had all kinds trouble getting the computers to work.

It was at this time that the first astronauts were going up into space. Daddy always had a big interest in the space program. He was all for it. Every time a space ship would go up he would wake us up very early in the morning so we could watch as, due to the time difference, they went up at about 5 am our time in Nevada although it was much later where the space launch was in Florida.

After four years at Nellis AFB he was transferred to McDill Air Force Base near Tampa, Florida where he worked on jets and was always prepared to leave due to the Bay of Pigs Incident.

One last move led to Davis Monthan Air Force Base near Tucson, Arizona and a year later Dad would retire and we would move to Sandpoint, Idaho. Dad would work for the Forest Service in the summer and at a gas station in the winter. He didn’t like not having a decent job and after two years we moved back to Albuquerque, NM where Dad would get a job working at the Base Commissary on Kirtland Base. We had come full circle. But after two years his job was done away with and it was on to Phoenix, AZ to do the same job at a base there.

In a few months I joined the Navy and left home. After a year there my parents would move with my sisters to Silver City, NM where Mother and Daddy would spend the rest of their lives.