More Boot Camp Memories

Another Navy dental story. A few weeks into boot camp in San Diego and I was getting my teeth checked which of course was standard procedure. It was amazing to see how many guys were in tremendous need of really serious dental work. Especially those southern rednecks. 

I had a couple of cavities to get taken care of and the dentist was a young guy who told me he needed to get certified in California. He was going to fix my two teeth in the front with gold fillings. This was one of the procedures he needed to accomplish and here I was. This was his first time doing gold fillings and he was a little nervous. He ended up spilling some of the hot liquid gold on my paper bib which caught fire. He quickly threw some water on my chest and patted out the flames. I was OK but my shirt had a burn mark. Now having a damaged and dirty uniform in boot camp was a serious offense. I had to have a note from the doctor explaining why my uniform was not perfect.

In the picture of the barracks above you see the metal racks. That was where we hung our clothes. Just beyond those metal clothes racks were stone tables that were used for scrubbing our uniforms. We did our own laundry manually for the first three weeks of boot camp. Then we moved to a different area of the base into different barracks that included laundry service. Nice.