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This Fred (not real name) was intelligent, but he did very stupid things. We first met while we were in the Navy attending radar school at Great Lakes, Illinois. In the year I knew him before he got married, I remember him as an average guy and my experiences with him were relatively uneventful. However, after completing the radar school, we both transferred to another base for more school, where he got married and he also got stupid.

The first stupid thing Fred did was marry an 18-year-old woman who was dumb and hot headed. Fred was also hot headed, so they did not need to be together. As separate people, they may have been okay, but together, they were a disaster. As far as I knew, he never hit her, but she loved to do things that made him angry enough to break things; she thought it was cute. There were picture hanging on the walls in odd places in their home to cover holes he had punched in the walls.

Shortly after he got married, we both transferred to another base. Before he transferred, he reenlisted and received a ten-thousand dollar reenlistment bonus, about eight thousand dollars after taxes. Instead of keeping the check or putting into a checking account, he decided he wanted to take the money in the form of $100 traveler’s checks. I went with him to the bank as he got 80-$100 traveler’s checks. I had to wait as he signed all 80 of them. Once we got to the next base, he opened an account in a bank and deposited the money, so he had to sign all 80 checks again.

I rode with Fred and his wife to the new duty station. Before we left , he bought an Irish Setter puppy, so I rode in the back seat and puppy sat. At the new base, they lived in a trailer park and the dog ran loose a lot. One day it got hit by a school bus and one of its front legs was paralyzed. When the dog ran, the leg swung around and hit things, so they had to wrap it in a rubber hose to protect it. It got very hot in the summer in south Texas. They left the dog outside during the day and one day it died of a heat stroke. The wife wanted another Irish Setter, but it had to be from the same parents, so they drove back to Georgia to get another puppy from the same breeder.

Before we left the old duty station, instead of waiting until we got to the new base, they bought a doublewide mobile home. Since it was so big, it could only be towed over certain roads. To move it to the new base, the movers had to detour around some states so the move cost them about as much as the mobile home had cost originally.

Fred must have had “sucker” tattooed on his forehead.

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