Fort Ord

And then I was drafted in the United States Army and I went in in October of 70.

I spent, you know, part of my, my first duty was basic training at Fort Dix, New Jersey, and then went on to Fort Ord, California to shoot 81 millimeter mortars.

And, and then I, at the end of my, my, what they call my advanced infantry duty, they were, I was going to get orders to go to Vietnam or Germany.

I wasn't sure which.

His name was Hal Fisher.

He said, would you like to try out for the team? I said, yeah, I'd really like to do that.

I was at Fort Ord, California, and the tryouts were in Presidio of San Francisco, a couple hours up the highway.

I got on a bus the next day.

Death Valley has gained a reputation for being a foreboding and hazardous place notorious for unexplained disappearances and deaths.

In 1958, First Lieutenant Paul Byron Whipkey, a young Army pilot, went missing from Fort Ord, California, under mysterious circumstances.

He had informed his fellow officers that he would get a drink nearby, but was found hundreds of miles away in Mojave, California, where he checked into a hotel without apparent reason.

Why he went to Mojave and how he got there is still unknown.

The next day, he reportedly bought 14 gallons of gasoline and then vanished off the face of the earth.

The only clue would come five weeks later, when California Fish and Game officers found Whipkey's abandoned vehicle in a remote, forbidding region of Death Valley, 15 miles away from the main road, and 400 miles from where he had begun his strange journey in Fort Ord.

Whipkey's dog tags, suitcase, and other personal belongings were found within, but there was no sign of where he had gone.

The Army claimed he had deserted and died after wandering in the desert.

That was from a man that was a career soldier.

And I went down to Fort Ord, California for my advanced AIT, advanced infantry training, but it wasn't really infantry training.

I think that was just the name they used, you know, and I shot rifles and stuff.

I did that.

I could always shoot a rifle.

My family was from here and they deer hunted and all that stuff, you know.

So I could shoot a rifle and down in uh, in Fort Ord, California.

I mean, if you hit the ocean, two out of three shots, you were an expert rifleman.

... um, I then had a one-week leave, which meant that I got to go home.

And then, uh, you know, and then I had to ship out to the Presidio of Monterey, and my barracks were originally at Fort Ord, California, Seaside.

But Fort Ord was on the base realignment and closure committee, and so now Fort Ord is known as UCál Monterey Bay.

But anyways, when I was there back in 1993, um, I just absolutely fell in love with the Monterey Bay where I did my schooling at the Defense Language Institute Foreign Language Center, Presidio of Monterey.

It's right off of Cannery Road, right down on Lighthouse Road.

Okay, cool.

There is one thing I wanted to share very briefly in about 90 seconds, and that is when I finished my basic combat training in Missouri, and then I flew out to, um, uh, SFO, San Francisco International Airport, and I had a connecting flight that took me to the tiny little Monterey Airport where, uh, y- one of those white military vans was waiting for us.

[laughs] And, and took us down to the barracks at Fort Ord, which is where I initially received my housing.

And so she's like, "I'm gonna be this linguist in the Army and do this intel stuff." I'm like, "Okay, that's cool.

Where, where are we going? Monterey, California?" I was like, "Okay, that'd be cool." So I went as a s- military spouse to, uh, essentially to Monterey, Fort Ord.

Um, and then I was like, "Are you kidding me? Is this what the Army does?" Right? So I saw DLI from a spouse perspective.

Um, and then I started to do my research again, and as I'm over there, there wasn't...

and I honestly didn't know if I would live to see my 11th birthday at 10.

I was old enough to understand what was happening, and with the Fort Ord Army Base just a hop, skip, and a jump from our house, we figured it would be a target.

Yeah.

We

They next had to scour the massive missing persons report and find out what the police learned about Sandra and what headway they had made in their investigation into her disappearance back in 1982.

Through the file, they learned that Sandra had met her husband Patrick while he was stationed in Fort Ord in Monterey, California.

Their relationship was described as them being two very different people.

While Sandra was an extrovert, Patrick was an introvert.

So that's okay, I guess.

Stilwell was the commanding officer of the 7th Division at Fort Ord, California in this period.

He... became known as vinegar joe and he would go on after this to be sent to china in 1942 after pearl harbor he spoke chinese he had been posted in china before he served as a military advisor to the chinese leader chiang kai-shek who we've talked about before as part of american efforts to keep china in the war you know to divert some of the japanese forces in that direction He was the U.S. commander of the China-Burma-India Theater and later the deputy commander of the Southeast Asia Command.

But because the China-Burma-India Theater was not an official quote-unquote theater of operations and did not have an overall U.S. commander, Stilwell largely commanded Chinese troops and he had to work closely with British and Chinese leadership.