GREAT LAKES NAVAL BASE, WAUKEEGAN ILLINIOS

Great Lakes was one of the three bases for basic training in the Navy, and the only one that nukes were sent to. The other two were Orlando and San Diego. Great Lakes was unique among the three because it had cold winter weather. I was there from September 18th to November 18th, 1982. I saw some of the cold weather, but luckily didn't have to do any snow shoveling. For those of you about to start whining abut how you had to put up with the heat in Orlando or San Diego, I'd reccomend that you spend some time in the Chicago area before calling their summers bearable.

BASIC ELECTRICITY AND ELECTRONICS SCHOOL

This was the introduction to electronics for any rating that would need to know anything at all about electronics. Whether you were an electrician's mate, missile tech, radioman, or whatever, we all went through the same school. The course of study was divided into modules. The number of modules you had to complete depended on what your job was. Since I was an electronics tech I had to complete all of the modules. The school was self paced (as long as your pace wasn't too slow), and it was a piece of cake. We spent enough time working to keep the chiefs from noticing us, but didn't exactly bust our butts. If I remember correctly, it took about 6 weeks to get through it.

ELECTRONICS TECHNICIAN CLASS A SCHOOL

For any rating, the associated class A school is the one that gives you the minimum training and skills to do the job. For Electronics techs, it consisted of 34 weeks of additional training. The first part of the school is general electronics training. The second portion is radar systems, where we got to work on SPS-10 surface search radar sets. The last portion was some basic communications stuff. For non-nukes, there was some additional comm stuff after that, but I never got to do that.