Imagine what a ride that must have been....for months.
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Hardship tours are all the same - awful. Then again, there were a few swabbies I worked with who claimed sea duty hardship tours were more endurable than land ones - the land ones were longer.
I heard this story long ago. Some JO flunked out of whatever school he was attending, and put on his revised dream sheet, “anything but sea duty.”
He was sent to our (then) ally Ethiopia, where he supervised a quonset hut in the desert, where he and a few enlisted men changed giant reel to reel tapes made by their NSA-type antenna farm, and once a week loaded them onto a C-130. That weekly visit by the Hercules was their only contact with the outside world, other than via radio waves.