Memories of Saglek
Stuck in Saglek 1965-66
I was stationed at 924th AC&W squadron at Saglek AFS in Labrador from April 1965 to April 1966. My previous duty was with Systems Maintenance Control (SMC) at the 4645th SUPPRON, at Duluth AFB, Minnesota. My journey started out from Minneapolis airport through New York to McGuire AFB in New Jersey. I departed out of McGuire AFB on a decrepit oil dripping, squeaking, C-54. En route to Goose AFB, the flight engineer had to throw a sleeping bag against the cargo door to help stop an air leak. We finally arrived at Goose without any further problems. My next journey was from Goose AFB to Saglek AFS on an EPA DC-3. Since Eastern Provincial Airways didn't have any insurance, the Air Force would not allow their aircraft on USAF side of the base. We had to take a bus to the Canadian side to board the EPA aircraft. While taxiing out, the co-pilot was unable to secure the cargo door and we taxied back to the hanger. The co-pilot asked a mechanic for some wire and then proceeded to wire the door shut. In spite of airplane door problems, I arrived safe and sound at Saglek. There must be some more dismal places on the face of the earth but I don't know where. But I was to suffer along with 75 USAF types and 75 civilians. One look at the cabled down buildings and I knew I wasn't in paradise. No trees, grass, or weeds. The site sits on the edge of a cliff about 1/4 mile above the Atlantic ocean. I was assigned as a ground radio repairman upon arrival and worked in a room in the radar tower.
My wife has kept all the letters that I sent her while I was there and I've just read them all to get this story straight after more than 35 years.
We each had our own room which wasn't much larger than a walk-in closet but it was our private world in a lonely spot on earth. One of the first things you are confronted with is the food. Most of our frozen foods were packed in 1959-1962. So it was already three to six years old by the time I got there. My main complaints were that the meat contained lots of fat and that the milk was all mixed up from a powder. The best place to get a hamburger was at the snack bar because they, somehow, had managed to get a more recent vintage and grade of meat than the chow hall. Plus they had my favorite soda, Wink. Our cooks and baker did their best and on Christmas, we even got wine with our meal. Unfortunately, the wine was from a recent vintage unlike the meat. But the cheese was great from aging.
Transportation from base camp to the station in summer was by four wheel drive truck and in winter it was mostly via Thiokl snow cat. The Thiokl was a Ford Falcon powered square box on tracks like a tank. It came with a shovel and a 15 foot length of rope. In case of a whiteout, the lowest ranking man would get out of the vehicle with snowshoes and guide it from marker flag to marker flag. He would tie one end of the rope around his waist and the other end around the bumper of the Thiokl. The driver would follow along until the rope went tight and would slam on the brakes and drag the guide back up from the crevasse or side of the mountain. We never did lose anybody doing this but my letters indicated that a couple of snow cats went over some minor drop offs without injuring anybody. My biggest scare was going down the hill to the lower camp and being told by the driver of our truck that we didn't have any brakes. We managed to make it down without breaking anything or anyone.
My letter of May 15 indicated prices on a few staples. An airmail stamp was 8 cents, a movie cost 25 cents, a carton of cigarettes was $1.30, and a haircut went for a whole dollar. I didn't and still don't drink beer and smoke cigarettes so I managed to save more money to send home to my wife, Kathy, and small daughter, Laura. There always seemed to be some job around to earn a little extra money to send home. My extra job was manually setting pins in the bowling alley. Lots of bruises but Kathy managed to save a lot of money for my return to civilian life. I also developed black and white film in the photo room for a few extra bucks. To further keep myself busy, I volunteered to be a disk jockey at our closed wire radio station, KSAG. We also had ping pong and pool tables and a new gym to further help us in times of boredom. We did also have an area to watch regular movies. All the good movies were censored and edited to make sure we didn't see any nudity. I think the best movie we saw was about a remote site in the Antarctic, that like Saglek, had a mixture of Air Force and civilians. In the movie, all of the civilians wore plaid shirts. One of the airmen decided to wear a plaid shirt one day and started a riot with the civilians who considered it a blaspheme. I think everybody in the theater that night suffered a case of really sore ribs from laughing so hard at this movie and of course ourselves.
We did encounter some more exciting happenings. One night on May 25, a polar bear reached through a window and attempted to grab a sergeant sitting on his bed. Boy, talk about being excited! On July 16, a bush doctor flew into Saglek in a Piper Cub on floats. He was asked to come help an Eskimo woman who was having problems with childbirth. Because of my type O negative blood, I was told to wait outside of the infirmary door incase they needed a quart. Everything worked out fine. Previously on July 4, a Canadian ice breaker dropped off their ship's doctor with a fractured arm. He was then air transported out of Saglek. He was lucky with the weather. A constant complaint in my letters was that the weather at Saglek was so bad most of the time, that the mail and supply planes were often canceled Speaking of bad, I once observed the anemometer in the OPS area get pegged at 200 knots in gusts! That is a breeze!
We had a red fox that would come up to the site and mooch food from the airmen. It was such a regular daily event that when he disappeared, he caused a scare in our food supply. I was rooting around (unbeknownst to anybody) in the orderly room one day and found a letter to the veterinarian at Goose requesting that he come check our food, specifically the veal patties that we were feeding the red fox. The disappearance of the fox was the reason given for concern.
One day, the first sergeant led me out to the edge of the cliff where there was a really large pile of beer in cans. The beer apparently was past its shelf life and needed to be tossed over the side of the cliff. Since I was probably the only non-drinker on the site, I protested being stuck with this duty. The first sergeant pointed out that my non-drinker status was the reason he picked on me to do the job. He couldn't trust any of the drinkers to safely do the job. I couldn't dispute his logic and I spent the next hour heaving the stuff over the edge. There was a lot of beer there and I just can't imagine what other treasures lie below that cliff to this day.
In October, my wife sent me an electric blanket to keep me really warm. This turned out to be a handy gift because shortly thereafter, we lost heating for a couple of days in the barracks area. I could have sold that blanket for a ton of money!. And for some reason I can't explain, my room remained fairly comfortable during the heating outage unlike everyone else's. Being fairly tall, 6'4", I often encountered problems with the piping that ran along the ceilings. On several instances, I bounced my head off the heating pipes, which probably explained why I often had headaches.
I left Saglek to return home for the birth of my second child in August. Unfortunately, maybe not, Wendy decided to take her time to be born and got her dad into trouble. Mainly an Article 15 for four days of AWOL. When it was time for my leave to run out, I would call the first sergeant and ask for a couple days extension. I always called when I knew he would be down in the NCO club partaking and would be most agreeable to extending the time. The commander finally figured it out and sent me a telegram to return to Saglek. But I did wait till Wendy came along and then returned. My punishment was 90 hours of extra duty. Big deal, what else was there to do. And Colonel Solomon, if you read this, you messed up big time assigning me to the baker for extra duty. I thoroughly enjoyed helping him make pies and doughnuts. He even let me lick the bowl when he was done filling the pies. And that was a big bowl!
Other recollections from letters:
We got a teletype circuit that connected all the sites from Saglek to Goose. One night, I took the opportunity to butt in on the busy circuit and claim that I was a female entertainer visiting one of the sites and wanted to chat with the "lonely G.I.s". You wouldn't believe what kind of personal questions G.I.s will ask females!! It took them about an hour to figure out that they were being had.
I know of a couple of occasions when KP personnel tried to make officers sick. One was to wipe off their eating utensils with their used napkins and then rearrange the dirty forks and spoons so that the next officer could enjoy it. Also, I saw a KP use a filthy scudsy pitcher to put milk in and then take it to officers mess. This pitcher had been lost behind the dish washer for quite a long time before it was discovered and used, unwashed, for this nasty trick. It only worked because the dried milk looked just as nasty as the container it was in. I was poisoned by scallops just before going to Goose for my separation physical. I barfed all the way from Saglek to the hospital at Goose where the doctor told me I had flu. My next visit to the chow hall at Goose caused me to turn green when I approached the scallops. That and I heard a conversation between a couple of sergeants talking about how bad scallops had wiped out 75% of their sections. Just recently, I have been able to eat scallops again.
In January of 1966, the commander allowed us to have a beard growing contest. The BX took a survey of what magazines the inmates would like them to stock. Surprise, surprise, it was Playboy and Hot Rod!
On November 27, 1965, a paltry 85 MPH wind blew in two of the walls on the gymnasium. The Canadian contractor that I talked to said he told the Air Force that the gym would never stand the winds at Saglek before they built it. And he was right.
Coldest temperature I remember was only 17 below zero Fahrenheit. A lot warmer than Minneapolis in the winter.
And last but not least, I left Saglek forever and was discharged at McGuire AFB in April of 1966. I swore I would never ever wear anything with blue on it again. Times change. I am now a retired FAA air traffic controller and a retired Air Force Reservist.
Mark Welter
MSgt, USAFR, Retired