www.OthelloOutlook.com The Othello Outlook – Thursday, November 5, 2009 A5www.OthelloOutlook.comA4 The Othello Outlook – Thursday, November 5, 2009

The desert to the ocean and back

For every post he went to, he was late.That’s how Duane Bisnett de-

scribes his tour of duty with the U.S. Coast Guard.

And it started right from the get-go.“I was in Seattle waiting to ship out

and they called me at 5 a.m.,” Bisnett said. “I was still asleep and I told them I already left. The next thing I knew, I work up at 9.”

He called and told them he was on his way and of course, they said they thought he was on his way.

“They said, ‘enjoy your sleep, it’s the last one you’re going to get,” Bisnett said.

Bisnett joined the Coast Guard in Au-gust 1969. He knew he would be draft-ed and he didn’t want to go to Vietnam.

“They told me they would take me in July, but I said I had too many things to do and I’d go in August,” he said.

His fi rst stop was boot camp in Al-ameda, Calif. He said basic training is different than other branches.

“We didn’t have to shoot rifl es, just pistols,” Bisnett said.

After basic, he was off to Alaska as a buoy tender. His duties included tak-ing care of the lights on the buoys and search and rescue operations.

“We did a lot of search and rescue,” Bisnett said. “I helped rescue eight people who lived and two fatalities.”

Bisnett said the Coast Guard res-cues a lot of fi shermen who go out unprepared and end up stranded or in trouble.

“Our job was to go out and get them,” he said. “One had gone 200 miles out in the ocean and ran out of fuel.”

The Coast Guard also is the fi re de-partment for many of the Alaska islands.

After a year and a half, Bisnett was transferred to Milwaukee, Wis., to a brand new base. He spent six months there and only worked about 2 hours a month.

Then, it was off to Detroit, Mich.,

where his duties included repairing boats and houses.

Bisnett came to Othello in 1963 with his parents from Canton, N.Y. After the service, he returned to the Columbia Basin.

He went to work for Evergreen Im-plement, then ran a mobile tune-up service with Dewey McDonald. That was followed by a job at Bruce Farms.

In 1979, he started at Carnation. To-day, he’s the area maintenance team leader at J.R. Simplot. He will work for about another four years before considering retirement.

One thing he never did, however, was get back on a boat for a long time.

“When they drop you off in 10-foot swells, it gets to be way too much,” Bisnett said. “We were always fi ve feet above the water when the ship rolled. When we were the farthest away from the side of the ship, we dropped.”

And growing up in Canton and Othel-lo, Bisnett wasn’t exposed to a lot of water. In fact, he can’t swim and barely passed the test doing the dog paddle.

It’s a good thing it’s not a require-ment for service in the Coast Guard.

“We always used life jackets, even spending one solid year on boats,” Bisnett said. “Besides, what good would it do you … the water is so cold, even an excellent swimmer couldn’t make it 20 feet.”

Bisnett said the Coast Guard is noth-ing like people think.

“The New York Police Department has more offi cers than the Coast Guard has troops,” he said. “They offered me a raise to stay, but I was ready to come home and help my dad.”

He said the pay was good consid-ering they had no expenses. And he earned his E-5 rank in only two years, which he said is unheard of in the other branches of the service.

“We were spoiled, but it got boring,” Bisnett said. “I thought I had better things to do.”

Bisnett said he would recom-mend others join, as long as they are independent.

“The Coast Guard has a lot of sta-tions, but few people, and you do learn to do every job,” he said. “There’s very little formality; it’s just like getting up and going to work in the morning.”

In four years, he only had two pa-rade inspections. When they docked, they wore their uniforms off the ship, walked 50 yards to a shack and changed into civilian clothes.

But there were times when it was interesting. He was part of a team that caught a couple Japanese ships in American waters.

And he was involved in the 1970 rescue of the USS Intrepid. He said that story appeared in The Othello Outlook at the time.

“That was a good mission,” he said.The most dangerous part was ser-

vicing the buoys. He said they could

weigh several tons and they had to be pulled up, chain and all, to have the batteries replaced and to clean and-or paint them.

“I was the one who was always in the water and I’d mark the landing for the ship to come back and drop the buoy,” Bisnett said. “When it dropped, the chain went fl ying.”

Bisnett said he has no regrets about choosing the Coast Guard or coming home after his four-year stint.

“Other than I didn’t get a pension,” he said. “But without the choices I made, I would have missed out on a lot and I had a blast.”

Trading one uniform for another

There’s not much difference between being a soldier and a police offi cer.

At least that’s what Othello Police offi cer Matt Rooney said.

“In the military, you take and give orders and you set out to do a mis-sion,” Rooney said. “A police offi cer does the same thing — sets standards and follows policies and procedures.”

Born in Akron, Ohio, Rooney’s fam-ily moved to Tampa, Fla., when he was a mere 2 months old. Growing up, he hated school and tended to get into trouble. He wanted to travel and see the world.

His answer was to join the military. He signed up in 1971.

“I took the tests to join the Navy, but I couldn’t go to boot camp for six months,” Rooney said. “So, I went to the Army.”

His basic training was at Fort Jack-son, S.C., and then he went to Fort Gordon, Ga., where he studied com-munications, specifi cally radio relay carrier and attendant.

“I didn’t know what I wanted to do,” Rooney said. “But I had high electron-ic aptitude scores.”

From Georgia, he was sent to Fort Bliss, Texas, where he worked with the Hercules missile.

“Those used to be the big deal, the heavy capacity,” he said. “A lot of what we did was top secret.”

Following that, it was off to Fort Benning, Ga., and Fort Bragg, N.C., with the 101st Airborne.

“Then, it was Europe,” Rooney said. “That’s where everything changed.”

Rooney spent 12 and a half years in the European theater as a communi-

cations specialist. His unit was based in Heidelberg, Germany. From there, he fl ew to different NATO bases, typi-cally on team missions.

“We’d go where we were directed to go,” Rooney said.

Yet, even after all that time in Germany, he only knows conversa-tional German.

“In most places, we had an inter-preter,” he said.

In addition to communications, his specialties also include biological-ra-diological operations and intelligence.

Once back in the U.S., he was sent to New York in the winter to a little town 10 miles from the Canadian border. Rooney said the cold was amazing.

After 20 years, he retired as a 1st Sergeant, yet he was doing the duties of a Command Sergeant Major. He moved to Utah and went to college. He stud-ied criminal justice with a major in law enforcement and a minor in sociology.

“I was going to be a lawyer, but I needed six elective credits to gradu-ate, so I went to the police academy,” Rooney said. “The last week of school, we had to do mock scenes.”

During an exercise for a multiple fi ght scene, he caught the eye of the police chief of Clinton City, Utah, who asked him if he wanted to come to work.

“I thought he was joking,” Rooney said. “I was 42 years old and I had no intention of being a cop, but he told me to stop by and see him.”

When he showed up at the police chief’s offi ce, the man handed him a badge, gun and car keys and said, “Welcome aboard.”

“I still wanted to be a lawyer and sue cops,” Rooney said. “I wanted to specialize in abusive law enforce-ment actions.”

He spent 13 years in Utah and was getting bored, so his daughter told him to come to Othello because they were looking for offi cers. That was March 2002.

Rooney and his wife Nancy have been here since. They have three chil-

dren — their daughter lives in War-den and their sons are in Ephrata and Moses Lake. His youngest just got out of the Army.

He said he would recommend kids join the service in particular incidences.

“With a lot of the kids I deal with who are into crime, I ask them if they ever thought of joining the Army,” Rooney said. “But I don’t believe in the draft, because you want people who want to do it.”

And it’s not an easy life. “But I enjoyed it,” Rooney said. “It

was good for me.”He said the best part of being in the

service is having the opportunity to

learn a variety of fi elds.“You get to do things you didn’t

know you were capable of,” Rooney said. “It ages you out real quick.”

Rooney said he wouldn’t have made it a career if it hadn’t been for the support of his wife.

“She’s the best thing I ever did,” he said.

While he was being a soldier, she was raising the children and working differ-ent jobs to help out. She’s found she likes his career as a police offi cer better.

“Yes, they are similar jobs,” Rooney said. “The only difference is, when you’re a cop, you can quit when you want.”

Heeding the call

Roger Schell is a U.S. Navy veteran who served on active duty during the Vietnam War. But unlike a lot of young American males in the mid-60s and early 70s, who were praying not to get drafted, he enlisted in April of 1966 at the age of 18.

“I am an American citizen,” he said. “It was my duty to volunteer.”

Schell’s Military Occupational Spe-cialty (MOS) was a diesel engineman. He spent his basic training at Naval Base San Diego Upon his graduation, Schell was sent to the Norfolk Naval Base in Virginia for his Advanced In-dividual Training (AIT).

“We trained in a boat pool where they maintained 50-foot utility boats for the fl eet,” he said. “I was sent to Vietnam after that and was assigned to a LST (Landing Ship, Tank) in the Mekong Delta.”

LST’s are slow-moving vessels that were used to transport food, ammo, parts, fuel, medical supplies and troops up and down the rivers from the De-Militarized Zone (DMZ) to the Mekong Delta. The crews aboard served under very harsh conditions and like most in-country Navy units, received very little recognition for the job they did, even though doz-ens of lives were lost and hundreds were wounded when the LSTs struck a mine in the water or were hit by recoilless rifl e fi re.

“Most people back home didn’t even know the Navy served in-coun-try,” Schell said.

More than 50 LSTs fl oated the ‘brown rivers’ in Vietnam. Members of the crews were awarded a total of 395 Battle Stars, 19 Presidential Unit Citations, 48 Navy Unit Citations and 44 Meritorious Unit Citations.

Schell served aboard the USS Cad-do Parish, an LST 515 class ship that received nine Battle Stars, one Navy Unit Citation and one Meritorious Unit Citation.

“We saw our share of action,” he said. “But nothing in comparison to what the guys in the jungle saw … the Army and Marines … I had nothing like that, at least to my way of thinking.”

Schell was born in Vancouver. He grew up in Yakima and moved to Othello to take a job with the Othello Police Department in 1973. He re-tired from the OPD after 33 years of service as a jailer and a patrolman.

Schell served in the Navy for three years, six months and 10 days.

“I used to know the hours and min-utes, but I’ve forgotten that over the years,” he said.

A national Vietnam Veterans Read-justment Study estimated 15 percent of Vietnam veterans suffered from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder 13 years after the war ended. Thirty per-cent of the veterans had experienced the disorder at some point since re-turning from the war.

Schell said it wasn’t something he noticed right away.

“I didn’t think I had it, until I moved here,” he said. “During the fi rst four or fi ve Fourth of July cel-ebrations when they shot the mor-tars off at the park, I said, ‘I’m out of here.’”

Many American families disagreed with the reasons for being in Vietnam in the fi rst place, but not Schell, who didn’t give it a second thought when he answered the nation’s call.

“It doesn’t matter if you agree or not, you are an American citizen,” he said. “This country was built on mine and your ancestor’s blood, so why would anybody think they are better than them? If they were good enough to give their lives, so should we be.”

Schell said some people in the U.S. take their freedom for granted.

“Especially those who’ve never served (in the military) or lived in a third-world country,” he said. “When you watch a line of people standing alongside a river and one is using it for a bathroom and one is using it to wash their baby and another is using it for drinking water, you can’t compare what we have to what they don’t have.”

Re-adjusting to society after a war can often be as stressful as being in the battle itself, but the transition wasn’t so hard on Schell.

“For me, it wasn’t too diffi cult,” he said. “My upbringing and my Christian background prepared me for a lot of things most aren’t prepared for.”

Things did go pretty well for him after he got back from ‘Nam.

“I reconnected with an old girl-friend and got married,” Schell said. “We’ll celebrate our 40th anniversary next May.”

Schell said he knows there are folks in the community who are wor-ried about their sons and daughters currently serving active duty in the Iraq and Afghanistan, so he offers there words of advice.

“Keep your faith in God,” he said. “And if you don’t have it (faith), get it. It will carry you through.”

For the love of � ying

Bill Morris, U.S. Air Force Lt. Colo-nel, retired, gave 20 years of service to his country.

However, when you think of a ca-reer soldier, he admittedly didn’t fi t the image of a gung-ho hard-nosed individual it typically conjures up, at least not on the surface.

Born in 1931, his initial plans were to avoid having to take part in the Ko-rean War as a young 20-year-old.

“I spent four years in college at Oklahoma State University,” he said. “Had I chose to drop out, I’d have been in the middle of the fi ght.”

But in 1955, he got his fi rst exposure to military life after enrolling in the Re-serve Offi cers Training Corps (ROTC).

He graduated as a 2nd Lieutenant but was given a temporary deferral.

“I was allowed to stay out of the ser-vice for a year afterward because I had taken a job with Colgate-Palmolive in Kansas City,” he said. “I wanted to be able to have a choice of careers. I could either stay in the military or I could take a job with Colgate-Palmolive.”

He ended up staying in the Air Force for 20 years.

“That’s because I got an assignment overseas that I wanted, so I opted to stay in and retire as a Lt. Colonel in the summer of 75,” he said.

The assignment was the Air Force Base and aircraft of choice a com-bat ready RF-4 Phantom jet, after he served his tour in Vietnam that is.

“I got to go back to Alconbury, Eng-land,” Morris said. “I wasn’t qualifi ed to fl y the aircraft, but they weren’t about to let me sit around, so they taught me how to fl y it.”

During his tour of duty in Vietnam, 1965 to 1966, Morris piloted a small two-engine prop unarmed Cessna 310.

“My missions were to deliver pro-cessed fi lm to the Army in the fi eld,” Morris said. “We’d either land in an abandoned airfi eld and drop it off or toss it out the window at pre-deter-

mined places, mainly soccer fi elds.”Timing of the drops was crucial as

both deliverer and receiver had to be in the designated drop zone to avoid any mishaps. But Morris said things didn’t always go according to plan.

“The dumbest thing I ever did was land on a abandoned airfi eld,” he said. “I wasn’t about to hang around too long and was in the process of taking off, when I saw the Army Jeep arrive. He was two minutes late and I was two minutes early and that was enough of a gap (in time) that I shouldn’t have been there. I was a sit-ting duck without protection.”

Morris said there really were no at-tempts by the enemy to disguise one of their Jeeps in an attempt to intercept the footage. But he did have to go to extra lengths at times to make sure the area was secure before he touched down.

“They took extra precautions to make sure the fi elds were safe to land in as they really needed the fi lm,” he said. “If we had to make more than one drop in a particular area, we’d make four or fi ve passes from different directions before we made the drops.”

A rather horrifi c experience, which Morris volunteered to do.

“My primary job was a desk job that required me to coordinate the Army’s request for photos,” he said. “The de-livery of the fi lm was just something in order to keep fl ying.”

Morris got married a year after he graduated from ROTC and found it a bit diffi cult when he had to leave his new bride behind.

“It was hard, but that’s military life,” he said. “In my case, I was not only trained to fl y an airplane, I was trained to live without my family.”

On the fl ip side of that, Morris said they gave him plenty to do to keep his mind off the separation.

“I never had a day off the entire time I was over there (Vietnam) and I didn’t want a day off,” he said.

In 1970, Morris was sent stateside to Mountain Home Air Force Base in Idaho where he trained pilots for four years to fl y the RF-4 Phantom aircraft.

He said the demand for the planes in Vietnam was great.

“We lost a lot of them there,” he said. “So many so they had to form a training squad to get the pilots ready to send over.”

Morris and his wife moved to Othello in 1975 because he had in-

laws living in the area.“After traveling around for 20 years

with the Air Force, I asked the fam-ily where they wanted to live and they said grandma’s house,” he said.

That place was the Powers farm be-tween Bench and Kuhn road.

“I worked in the orchards and raised beef-a-lo for a while,” he said. “I was also a county commissioner in 1988 and did noxious weed control for a few years.”

Later on, he opened his own business.“It’s called Phantom Water Service,”

Morris said. “I named it after the RF-4C Phantom Jet I piloted. I am a state-certifi ed water operator, which means I can fulfi ll the Department of Health requirements to advise building con-tractors on water safety.”

Morris remarried a local gal in 1988 and the two recently celebrated their 21st anniversary.

“Her name is Kathy Francisco,” Mor-ris said. “She was a school teacher here for many years.”

During his 20 years of service, Mor-ris put in over 2,000 fl ight-hours in a T-33 trainer and the RF-4 Phantom.

V E T E R A N S T R I B U T EV E T E R A N S T R I B U T E

Making a name for himself

Mike Beardsley enlisted just out of high school, but he was used to a life in the service before that.

His father was a 30-year Navy man, which was one reason why he joined the U.S. Marines.

“I didn’t want to go to the Army or be known as ‘Frank’s kid,’” Beardsley said. “That left the Air Force or Ma-rines and I wanted to see if I could handle the challenge.”

Beardsley spent a summer in Alaska working at a cannery, then came back and left for basic training in Septem-ber 1963.

“It was off to the races,” he said.He entered the service in San Diego,

Calif., and did his infantry training at Camp Pendleton, Calif. Then it was back to San Diego for radio-telegraph operator school.

With his training complete, he spent six months in Okinawa, Japan, before shipping off to Vietnam. He was sta-tioned on China Beach and his duties included setting up a perimeter and building a bunker on the beach.

“I became an expert body surfer,” Beardsley said.

At night, the patrols would come by and visit.

“We would trade for chocolate and muffi ns,” Beardsley said. “And we managed to have some fun.”

Beardsley was generally in charge of groups or tasks, including security and construction supervision for the new Marine headquarters when it was being built.

“That was a fun assignment,” he said. “While there, I met a guy who was an engineer and he invited me to his home for a genuine Vietnamese dinner.”

Beardsley’s main duties included being a communications link to get information out of country.

“I’d go out in the Jeep with a radio, drive into a C-1 plane and fl y into the combat zone,” Beardsley said. “Some-times, I had a truck-mounted unit, which was larger and I’d go out farther.”

He became profi cient at voice, tele-type and Morse code communica-tions. Yet, he wasn’t set up very well to defend himself.

“Fortunately, there were lots of Ma-rines around to protect me,” he said.

After a nine-month tour, he left via Saigon for the U.S. He was discharged as a Sergeant E-5 after three years and 19 days with the 5th Communica-tions Battalion Comm. Co.

Beardsley was born in Seattle and spent his childhood moving from place to place, beginning in China, then San Mateo, Calif.; Honolulu, Ha-waii; and Monterey, Calif.

“As a kid, you’re open to change, so I always looked forward to moving,” Beardsley said. “It meant new oppor-tunities and experiences.”

At the age of 16, his mother died, leaving his father to raise 10 children. Beardsley was the oldest. His father remarried to a woman with eight chil-dren and they had two of their own.

The story of his family was the basis

of the 1968 fi lm “Yours, Mine and Ours,” starring Lucille Ball and Henry Fonda. The movie ends with Mike heading off to the Marines.

He said being a Marine gave him the chance to accept a lot of responsi-bility at an early age.

“A tour in the service affects your life dramatically,” Beardsley said. “And you learn to appreciate how little others have and what you have.”

Some of the lessons he learned were appreciation for America, following a chain of command and being part of a team.

It also helped him to be a good stu-dent in college. He has a bachelor’s degree in accounting from San Jose State in California.

Beardsley has two grown children — David is in Portland, Ore., and Johanna in Colorado Spring, Colo. He chose not to have a large family like his parents did.

“I guess I changed enough diapers in my time,” he said.

He moved to Othello in 2007 follow-ing a seven-year position as fi nance director for Port Camas-Washougal. He is the director and manager of the Port of Othello.

“This was an effort to go into gen-eral management,” he said.

Beardsley said being a Marine is one of the best decisions he ever made and he’d recommend it to any young person.

“The maturity you’re given is invalu-able,” he said. “And while being in the service is risky, the lessons learned are useful and valuable.”

In fact, he thinks the U.S. should bring back the draft.

“I see so many kids who are lost,” he said. “In the service, they’re doing something productive.”

He said the service also gives the op-portunity to go after ambitious objectives.

“A Marine says, ‘don’t expect any thanks, it’s your job,’” Beardsley said. “Plus, you meet good friends, good buddies.”

The Othello Outlook pays tribute to local veterans in all branches of the military. Their service to our country should never be forgotten.By LuAnn Morgan and Bob Kirkpatrick