PANAMA PAGE 1
I arrive at the Military College, The USARCARFB SCHOOL, at Fort Gulick, Canal Zone. This is the base that the US Army uses to train South American's nations officers as well as USA enlisted men, e.g. the Supply Clerk School. The street you see is typical of the School.
There are several floors to each barracks and, as you can see, each soldier has a bunk. Directly overhead on beams, the soldiers hang their cloths. In the morning it was a mad house to get a "cloths pole" to get your clean clothes down as there were only two or three poles for about 50 soldiers.
The swimming pool may have only been for foreign officers but I can't recall. I am posed by the street with a barracks in the background.
The School has several lagoons on the property and make a nice scene as do I posing again.
The enlisted men at the School "volunteered" many weekends to help in the clean up the oldest fort under the United States flag, Fort San Lorenzo. The fort was first established about 1575 and later capture by Morgan's Raiders in 1671. It was captured and partially destroyed by Sir Edward Veron 1740 and partially rebuilt by the Spaniards 1751-1752 and used as a port of call and transshipping as late as 1852.
We enlisted men used axes, saws, and machetes. The walls and bluff the fort sat on were heavily over-grown with brush and tree, some rather larger that the engineers took down with dynamite!
|
|