16 Hours Number Two

I was afraid that things were getting too long for one thread so I'll finish with this one. I know that it is too long but I just wanted to get it off my mind.
By 1600 that day had taken on several faces; the main base was a scene of abject mayhem, the Shellbank Area was a bunch of young air crew just having some fun and they weren't endangering anyone except themselves. They had broken into the skeet locker and gotten the Very pistols and flares and in the early evening kept the sky alight with flares and bonfires but we finally retrieved the fire engine and left them alone.
By 1900 the calls were coming in for too many things for us to respond but several were pretty bad . By that time we were more of an adjunct to the hospital than the" law enforcement arm." The officer's club called in an injury and an alarm that things were getting bad. When we arrived, "we" was three of us who couldn't have done more than to come in the front door and see who was causing a problem. The who was a crowd of people in a raging turmoil. The O'Club was at the west end of the base near the causeway to the main land and overlooked the inlet. The upper main floor overlooked an Olympic sized pool below a fancy balcony, accessed through floor to ceiling glass sliding doors. On the left was the bar, on the right was a lounge with tables to have a nice dinner and drinks. We arrived to a totally destroyed facility. The glass doors were smashed and most of the nice dining room furniture had been thrown into the pool below. The din of the "celebration" was a mix of loud yelling and music, to which a woman in her underwear was giving a barefoot dance on a remaining table. The problem wasn't her semi nudity but the broken glass on the table on which she was dancing. After a brief argument with some of the drunks, we managed to get her wrapped in a table cloth and carried her out to the Jeep and took her to the hospital. Her feet were lacerated beyond description. Several other women were also taken with her to have various injuries attended to.
Our call to the NCO Club was about the same only worse. Two severely injured women were the reason for the call, one stabbed with an ice pick, one hit in the face with a beer bottle but there were several more who had been raped behind the club and others that ha been assaulted in other ways. Their husbands and boy friends seems helpless to do anything and they were in bad shape also. Several trips to the hospital from that one. We didn't have any stretchers or medical help so we had to carry them to load them into the Jeep and sometimes a Command car.
At about 0200 we got a call from a frantic Charge Of Quarters at the Squadron C Barracks that a riot was taking place on the third floor and we should get there. When we checked with him we could hear the noise up stairs and he opened his door just a crack to make sure that we knew where to go. He was about 5'-3" and gazed at us through steamed up glasses and said," You have to be careful! They are combat types, you know!" Yes, they were. Veteran mechanics and crew chiefs from the various Air Forces over seas. They kept the bombers going here at Langley. We went up the concrete stairs,(down which a cascade of beer flowed,) to the third floor and witnessed the combat types having their own party in a rather quiet but animated way. They had an inkling that the war was ending soon and they had collected empty one gallon mayonnaise jars from the Gas House and filled them with gallons of beer in which were bathing and throwing around...even drinking some. When we left we told the CQ to make sure that his door was locked for the rest of the night.
So, the night wore on with violence and people getting brutalized. The base hospital was almost full and we were taking injured people to the Shellbank Hospital. Finally it wound down before sunup but there were still some that never received help for a few hours.
Some time in the morning around 0800 we were called off duty and went to our bunks and crashed...until about 1100 when I was rudely shaken awake. "You're on duty in two hours, get up!"
My uniform was a write-off, torn in places and fouled with blood and vomit. I had to go to my second outfit before I faced Guard Mount at 1400. Most of us had bruises and scrapes and all of us were in a state of shock, I'm sure.
I have told people about this night years ago and I got rolled eyes and a "more war stories look" so I never mentioned it again. I don't know what happened at other air bases, only the newspaper pictures of what happened in the cities. I have never been able to understand the violence at Langley.
In 1991 when I was working on the777 , I went downstairs to the instrumentation guys and faced an ex-squadron mate who was stationed with me at Langley sitting there with a look of shock on his face. Jack Talbot was assigned to the Shellbank Hospital that night and he said, " I remember seeing you carrying people into the hospital most of the night". He was the only person that I knew that could verify what went on that night and we talked many times after that. He was an engineer in the instrument panel design group and unbelievably he lived in Lake Stevens, Wa. just north of me. He made a homebuilt airplane that I never saw and before I could make it up there he passed away several years ago.
So, that was my VJ-Day memory. Hope that it wasn't too long. It was good to get rid of it.

 

The least aggressive and calmest people were the combat veterans. The worst were the bad apples that took advantage of the situation to do their dirt.

 

Yep, I guess so.