The Other Crossroads – Fort Dix and
Dover
Besides the Ocean City – Somers Point crossroads that changed many people’s directions in the summer of ’65, there were two other nearby places of note where major changes in directions were made – Fort Dix in the Jersey Pines and Dover, Delaware.
Fort Dix, where Jim Croce, “JJ” and
many others received their basic training, is adjacent to McGuire Air Force
Base, where many servicemen departed and returned to after deployment overseas,
especially Germany and Vietnam.
Fort Dix is where Croce’s drill
sergeant, “Big, Bad” Leroy Brown was given responsibility for training all of
the dog soldiers who were considered troublemakers, including Croce, “JJ,”
Jimmy Hendrix and dozens of others who just didn’t fit in with the regular
recruits.
Leroy Brown was from the South Side
of Chicago, and he was a bad ass mother, but he also had a soft spot in that he
liked good music, especially the blues, but he liked all kinds of music and was
fond of saying, “There’s only two kinds of music, good music and bad music, and
I knows the difference when I’s hear it.”
Besides being the top drill
instructor, Sgt. Brown was also responsible for the base band, seeing that reveille
and taps were played at dawn and dusk every day, that the flag was raised and
lowered, and that musical entertainment was provided for officers, politicians
and celebrities who visited the base.
Brown also had a key to the canteen,
and knowing all of the guys in the band, he got the best of them to jam in the
canteen after dinner every night, and also had this little tight group perform
for the soldiers as they were getting ready to go overseas and when they
returned, as a sort of farewell and welcome home serenade.
While many guys fit in and played
with Brown’s jam band, a few stood out, including Elvis, who harmonized with
them on his return from Germany, when he was met at McGuire by Nancy Sinatra,
who also sat in and sang a song with the band at the Dix Canteen. Hendrix came through there too, with his left handed guitar, but few really took notice of
his greatness, and he hadn’t started playing the weird stuff yet, so he was
considered just one of the guys.
Private Ronald Hawkins made some
musical friends in the service, and took a particular shine to four young black
recruits Sgt. Brown introduced him too, a pair of brothers and two cousins who
could really harmonize and each played an instrument and jived well with
Hawkins, who called them the Black Hawks, but when they got out of the service,
the southern white roadhouses where Ronnie Hawkins performed wouldn’t let the
Black Hawks play because they were black, so he had to recruit some white kids
from Canada to back him, the guys who became the Hawks.
Conway Twitty, then known as Private
Harold Lloyd Jenkins was also there, and was beginning to make it as a rock and
roll star, and along with Elvis, inspired the Broadway play and musical “Bye,
Bye Birdie,” about rock and roll star “Conrad Birdie,” who is drafted into the
Army, much to the dismay of his fans. While Colonel Parker wouldn’t let Elvis
sing with the Army band or entertain the troops as part of the Special
entertainment troop – because the Department of Defense would own the recording
and copyright, Conway and Croce and others did entertain the troops, and
themselves.
Jim Croce, who wasn’t in the base
band, but came around to jam with the group in the canteen after meals. “JJ”
also sat in with them on occasion, and was himself serenaded twice, once when
he left for Nam and again when he got off the plane on the rebound.
If you got serenaded by the Leroy
Brown Dix Canteen Band you were one of the lucky ones. The ones who didn’t make
it back alive from Vietnam were put into flag draped boxes and sent to Dover
Air Force Base in Delaware, where over 50,000 American causalities were
processed over the following decade.
DIX and DOVER –
The Bermuda Triangle Nexus
Dover Air Force Base was where a
military cargo plane took off from one sunny afternoon on a routine mission to
deliver two nuclear bombs to a Strategic Air Base in Canada when shortly after
takeoff, one of its engines suddenly gave out and it began descending quickly.
The pilot kept his cool however, and
after running through a number of emergency procedures that failed to work, he tried
emergency procedure 3-D107A – eject cargo, and so with the flip of a toggle
switch, the rear cargo bay door opened and the skated pallets with two multi
megaton nuclear bombs rolled out and before they could splash into the ocean
the plane pulled up fast and safely returned to base.
The two multi megaton nuclear
weapons however, crashed into the sea somewhere off of Cape May, New Jersey,
and floated to the bottom of the ocean, out of sight and out of mind, an
incident kept out of the news by the military powers that be, and generally
forgotten about until the summer of ’65 when the movie Thunderball was
released, and related the story Ian Fleming wrote about the international crime
syndicate cartel SPECRTE fishing out two nuclear bombs lost in the ocean and
using them to blackmail the world.
Did Fleming know about the two nukes
lost off Cape May?
Could some terrorists find them and retrieve
them?
Could some fishermen with long line
nets snag them?
Where were the bombs and could they
be retrieved?
What were those Russian fishing
ships doing off the coast of Cape May and what were they fishing for?
How long would it take for the metal
casings to erode through releasing the plutonium poison into the sea and polluting
the entire North Atlantic Ocean?
When this "Broken Arrow" nuclear accident happened, they just covered it up and didn't even bother looking for the bombs, but the Thunderball movie got some
officers at the Pentagon thinking, and one general, who didn’t want to take the
fall for someone else’s mistakes, ordered some Colonel to get the answers to
those questions, which would also send another dark cloud over the last few weeks of
the summer of ’65 at the Jersey Shore.
Stay Tuned – More to Come
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