contributed by Jim Watkins

I have mostly fond memories from my stay at Colville, but it was kinda dreary at times for a 17/18 year old kid without a car.

I remember one of my first nights there they had an alert in the middle of the night. I ran with my roommates and somebody handed me a gun & shoved me into a truck. We headed up the hill & partway up two of us were told to jump out & go to a foxhole. I remember the other guy telling me not to sweat it, that they`d come back & get us in a few minutes. Then I started to hear somebody firing a rifle. (I found out later that guys would shoot the deer.) We stayed there about 3 hours before they got us & we were two very cold guys.

We had a lot of venison in the chowhall because guys were allowed to shoot deer on the reservation. Rumor was that it saved money & allowed the guy in charge to spend the savings on better food. Might have been true because I remember the food as being very good.

Big thrill for me to play on the base basketball team. Played at Trail, B.C. once as part of the grand opening of an arena. They treated us like major celebrities!! Big introductions with spotlights,played "The Star Spangled Banner" for us, invited us to special seats at the hockey game that followed our game, etc. Very nice experience!!

I also remember going back & forth to work in either 6x6`s or an old WWII type blue ambulance. Guys would rock back & forth on the snowy road & slide the ambulance off the road. Kinda scary!!

Another remembrance that just popped into my head-- One night at work a kid named Jim Hardy (Switchboard operator) and I went out & took a tobaggon down the hill. He had called the AP at the gate to open it for us. I had never been on a tobaggon & Jim was from Alabama so you can see that we`re not dealing with very bright people here!!

At any rate, we must have been going about 60 mph when we went through the gate!! It didn`t help that after the gate there was nothing but pitch blackness. We made the first turn from memory, but the second turn was our downfall. Jim flipped off the sled & slammed into a snowbank. Under the snowbank was a guardrail that opened Jim`s knee and kind of laid one half over the other. I stayed on the sled & was extremely lucky that it didn`t hit anything too solid before the underbrush stopped it. I almost had to swim back to the road because I couldn`t stand on the snow without sinking in a few feet. When I got back to the road I put Jim on the sled & pulled him back to the AP at the gate who called for help. I had to report to the guy right under the base commander (XO?) in class A uniform to explain it the next day. It might have helped that this guy refereed our basketball games and was a nice guy. My punishment was that I had to work a few nights in the chow hall,so I guess he let me off with a little slap on the wrist. This was followed though by restrictions on what guys were allowed to take up the hill to work.