I started my Navy career in Albuquerque, New Mexico. People do a doubletake when I tell them that.
When I graduated from Officer Candidate School in Newport, RI, the Navy apparently had a bunch of shore billets to fill. A number of my classmates were assigned to communications stations, instructor duty, etc. and I got orders to Sandia Base in Albuquerque.
Nobody at Newport could tell me what Sandia Base was or what the Navy was doing there. A popular movie that year, Seven Days in May, involved a secret base in the desert and that heightened the mystery.
When I reported for duty I learned that Sandia Base was the field headquarters of the Defense Atomic Support agency, which administered the nuclear weapons program for the Armed Forces and worked with Sandia National Laboratory. Members of all three services worked together. I had a staff assignment reporting to an Air Force colonel and supervised two Air Force sergeants.
The 200 or so Navy people at Sandia literally were fish out of water. Some compensated by using more nautical jargon than I ever heard at sea. A hapless visitor who asked a sailor for directions would hear something like: Take the ladder to the second deck and follow the starboard passageway aft past the scuttlebutt.
Since Sandia was a joint-forces base, the annual Army-Navy football game was an excuse for otherwise dignified senior officers to act like sophomores. An admiral had a Beat Army sign erected on the roof of one office building; a general countered with a Sink Navy sign on another building. A colonel complained to the base housing office that the lighted Go Navy sign on a commander’s lawn was shining into his windows. I did not attend the academy and did not much care who won, but enjoyed the free beer at the officers’ club during the game. I sat with the Air Force guys.
Because we were in the nuclear weapons biz, much of our work was classified. At the end of each day all our work went into a safe. Everything we did was on a need-to-know basis, so I did not know much about what my friends in other offices were doing.
When people we met around town asked what the Navy was doing in Albuquerque, we obviously couldn’t tell them. So we made up stories about a subterranean channel under the Rio Grande and a secret submarine base.