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Serving Our Country — Gary Hendricks

Hendricks served in Navy and Air Force

-Messenger photo by Chad Thompson
Gary Hendricks, a U.S. Navy and U.S. Air Force veteran from Humboldt, looks over some aircraft photos at his home recently. The photos are a tribute to an old friend named Klemme, he said. Klemme was a pilot in the U.S. Army Air Corps.

HUMBOLDT — Gary Hendricks was 115 miles away from an atomic bomb test site in the south Pacific Ocean. And that was too close, he said.

“I got sent some place I pray to God nobody has to see that,” Hendricks said. “I got sent to the south Pacific where we were refueling ships down in an atomic test area.”

“As a matter of fact, we witnessed three detonations,” he said.

Hendricks, of Humboldt, was serving in the U.S. Navy in 1961 at the time. At 18-years-old he became a boatswain’s mate.

“I turned 18 in boot camp,” he said. “My mother always said I started things early.”

-Messenger photo by Chad Thompson
Gary Hendricks, a U.S. Navy and U.S. Air Force veteran from Humboldt, talks about his time in the service.

He was the lookout on the USS Tolovana during the first detonation at about 4 a.m. one morning around Christmas time.

“There was no moon out,” he said. “It’s like being out in a cave with no lights on.”

Then the bomb was detonated.

“All the sudden it was like a noon day out,” he said. “Everything was lit up.”

He turned away from the flash.

“You could still see white light,” he said.

Hendricks felt a shockwave.

“There was a big wind at my back and a few seconds later a heat wave,” he said. “The heat wave felt like someone was standing about two feet behind my back.”

After finishing his mission in the south Pacific, Hendricks was assigned to the USS Oklahoma City.

“I was on that ship until I left the Navy,” he said.

Hendricks was stationed near Japan as a radar operator.

“I was looking at a big old circular screen, watching for other ships,” he said.

In 1964, Hendricks planned to re-enlist for another six years, but he received a letter from his dad before he could sign the papers.

“The letter basically asked me to come home and try it on the outside,” Hendricks said. “I think my parents were concerned I went to the military too soon.”

About a year later, Hendricks decided to join the U.S. Air Force.

“I knew I had to have some way to make a living, so I went back to the military,” he said.

As a radar operator in the Air Force, Hendricks was stationed in Sioux City in 1966.

All of the military’s radar sites were fed into the big computer, Hendricks said.

The three-story building he worked in was packed full of electronics.

“We had so much equipment, that was the heat source,” he said. “All they did in the winter was turn down the air conditioner a little bit.”

The bottom story of the building was one big computer, he said.

“When they tore it down, the wires that were in it, you could have gone around the world five times,” he said. “That’s a lot of wire.”

Hendricks specialized in electronic verification of aircraft.

“I liked that job because you had to be on top of your game,” he said.

Some of the work involved tracking the Air Force’s experimental aircraft.

The screen Hendricks used displayed a map of about 15 states, he said.

The Chicago O’Hare International Airport was shown in the upper right portion of the screen.

“It looked like a big circle of worms going in it,” he said.

One particular aircraft was especially challenging to track.

“The Blackbird,” he said. “You would see on one side and it would flash every 10 seconds.”

“But you better pay attention because you’ve only got three blips before it was gone,” he said.

Later, Hendricks was moved to Havre, Montana. He wrote the operations manual for the system there, he said.

He continued to track aircraft throughout the United States.

“Most of the time it was like being a police officer,” he said. “You spend 98 percent of time bored stiff, and 2 percent of the time they can’t pay you enough to be there.”

The time usually went fast, though.

“Sometimes I would sit there on that screen for a 12-hour mission,” he said. “All the sudden 12 hours had gone by and it seemed like it went by just like that.”

In 1969, Hendricks was transferred to the island of Miyako-jima, which is part of Japan.

“That’s another base that no longer exists,” he said.

While there, he tracked B-52s as they traveled to Vitenam and back, he said.

Hendricks finished his service in 1970.

He described his time in the Navy.

“Being at sea is something I can’t explain the feeling it gives you,” he said. “You wake up in the morning, go out on the deck and take a deep breath of that sea air. The air so clean it almost makes your lungs ache. You’re a thousand miles from nowhere.”

“I enjoyed my military time,” he added. “To me it was basically one big long vacation because I loved it that much.”

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