1988
Squeaks was a Police Explorer from the Dubuque troop. She and I met at the National Revolver Championships held at Camp Dodge, Iowa. Several Police Explorer troops from around the state had been invited to the military base on which the annual competition was held to help out with simple things - organize tables for events and tell people where to go.
Squeaks was cute in a rough and tumble sort of way. The apples of her cheeks were round and plump. She had a cute button nose and her hair was a tangled mess, like a fifteen-year-old Janis Joplin. I was about a year younger than her, thin and gangly, an unlikely pick when boys outnumbered girls fifteen to one in every troop. She had the largest roundest breasts of any girl I had held hands with up to that time.
But I'm getting ahead of myself. We weren't invited to the army base for romance - no one ever is.
When we first got there we took a tour of the grounds. We dropped off our bags in one of the barracks where we would sleep, and then jumped back in officer Holmes' minivan and drove down to the ranges. We passed the rifle range with its targets laid out at 50 and 100-yard increments for at least 400 yards. The rat-tat-tat of someone shooting an m16 with three round bursts enthralled us and we pressed our faces to the window as we passed.
Beyond the rifle range were the pistol ranges, blocked out with shooting lines at 10, 15, and 25-yard distances. In all, two hundred or more people could shoot at one time on the base, which would be filled with officers shooting all morning and afternoon for two days. More than ten thousand rounds would be fired during the competition, some in un-timed competitions for accuracy and others timed, placing the pressure of speed against the zone of accuracy.
Officer Holmes pulled up behind a couple of other cars parked on the grass by the third range down. We got out of the car a little stiff from being crammed together so tightly for the past hour on the road. Holmes waved to a short round man with a blue ball cap and dark sunglasses who was chewing gum and smoking.
The man took the cigarette out of his mouth, and waved. Several Explorers were sitting under an overhang to keep out of the sun while a couple of others examined the dune heaped up behind the targets at the end of the range to see if they could dig out any old slugs.
"Hey, y'all. Come over here and meet post 865," the man with the cigarette hollered at the explorers down range.
The kids dusted off their hands and walked back to the shade.
"How's it going, Doug?" officer Holmes said, shaking his hand.
Doug was a Staff Sergeant and in charge of the Dubuque Explorer troop.
"Good, good. How the hell are ya,'" Doug replied, looking past Holmes distractedly.
We went around the group and exchanged names. Two girls stood out in contrast to the crowd of gangly boys. Heather had joined our troup a month before and had mostly proven herself as one of the guys. She was great at directing traffic and she could hold her own when the teasing came around her way. The other was Squeaks. No one remembered her name after the meeting, but we all remembered her laugh. She was a real girl also, with a flirtatious distance from the boys and her long hair pulled up on top of her head in a messy knot to meet the requirements; no hair was to hang below the collar. The nickname was as far as teasing would go for her.
After introductions the other troop headed back to the armory to set up tables and chairs for training seminars that would kick off the event. I, along with the rest of Troop 865, cased the pistol ranges for any trash that might have been overlooked by the staff, but there was little to find. Some of the guys started a football game that quickly devolved into a game of catch due to the heat. We waited for the event to start.
To be continued.