RESERVATION BORN TO LIFE ON A SHIP Charles Weeks knew early he wanted to serve

Charles Weeks decided he wanted to join the Navy before he was old enough to enlist himself. After trying for months to convince his father to approve his enlistment at 17, Weeks started his journey around the world.

Weeks was “born and raised” on Rucker Reservation. He was surrounded by the Army while growing up in Ozark, but he knew by the time he turned 17 that he wanted to join the Navy. He actually quit school to join.

“My dad had to sign for me,” he said. “I turned 17 in April, and I started trying to join the Navy, trying to get him to sign for me until September before he would sign.”

He finally enlisted, with his father’s permission, in September 1944, in the last years of World War II.

“No father, I guess, wants to see his son go to war,” Weeks said.

Weeks completed boot camp at Naval Station Great Lakes in Chicago, Ill. He said he was probably more physically prepared for boot camp than he was mentally prepared.

“I was raised right here on the reservation,” he said. “It was out in the country. Physically, I feel like I was (ready for training) because I had plowed with a mule and sawed wood. I had done something (physical) my whole life.”

He spent nine weeks in boot camp training before he was able to revisit his friends and family on a nine-day leave. After leave, he returned to Chicago before joining his outgoing unit.

“Some officer would call your name, and you’d get in that group,” Weeks said. “They were separating us, putting us in different groups. I wound up in a group going to Camp Oak, Calif.

“(We) went from there to the ship that carried us to the (Philippine Islands). I was on Palawan in the Philippines. That’s where we set up and manned a naval air station. The rough part of the whole thing was, the Japanese didn’t want us there.”

Weeks arrived at the naval air station on a troop ship that carried around 2,500 crewmembers after a 35-day trip. He said that no one on the ship knew their destination when they left California.

“We didn’t know where we were going,” he said. “We didn’t know where we were when we first got there.

“If you called home or wrote home of where you were going, the Japanese would know where you were,” he said. “On our way over (to the Philippine Islands), we zigzagged. We couldn’t figure out where we were going.”

Weeks reached the Philippine Islands as a Seaman in April of 1945, around the time of his 18th birthday.

“I tell people I spent my 18th year in the Philippines,” he said.

He served in the Philippines for 13 months working in the commissary at the naval air station. While he was stationed there, the Philippine Islands were liberated from the Japanese.

Weeks received the Philippine Liberation Medal, the Bronze Star and the Good Conduct Medal.

After 13 months in the Philippine Islands and the end of World War II, Weeks returned and was honorably discharged from service. He said he then worked “odd jobs” during this time, such as a meat cutter and in a sawmill, before he re-enlisted at the start of the Korean War in December 1950.

“I thought about making a career out of (the military), and I just decided I’d rather not,” he said. “(I) came out, and when the Korean War started, I went back in.

“This time, it was an altogether different story. The Korean War was going on, and I was assigned to a small landing craft in North Virginia. We did our training – I called it playing war games– up and down the east coast and then Caribbean.”

During his second enlistment, Weeks helped commission one ship in Florida before transferring to a smaller landing craft where he served as a cook, earning the rank of Commissaryman Second Class.

“They put me in, what I call, a hole in the ship where the supplies were,” Weeks said, stating he initially started out in the commissary again. “I couldn’t tell if it was raining or the sun was shining or what was going on. I was just down in that hole.

“I started grumbling about it. My division officer came down one day, gave me a book and told me to study it for my commissary man rank.”

After a discussion, Weeks said his division officer moved him up to learn with another cook, earning him his new job on the ship.

Weeks then spent four years based in Norfolk, Va., traveling the East Coast and the Caribbean and spending two, five-month tours sailing the Mediterranean Sea with the Navy.

While he took part in training exercises with ground forces and Marines along the East Coast, Weeks said he also remembered being able to bring his car along for the ride at times.

“I did that several times,” he said. “All up and down the coast, the skipper would beach and I’d drive aboard. We’d get where we were going, (the skipper would let me drive around).”

He has several other fond memories of his time in service during the Korean War, including one humorous story of his landing craft finding a sand bar in the Mediterranean Sea.

“We were in the Mediterranean, and we landed some tanks, but we hit a sandbar right before we got to the beach,” he said. “The skipper of the landing craft told the Marines, ‘Let me back up and move, maybe to hit the beach. It may be deeper.’”

Weeks said the Marines were insistent to drop the ramp and move to the beach while the ship was still at the sandbar.

“They ran off the ramp, and maybe 10 or 12 feet (away), they went out of sight,” he said, laughing. “Three Marine heads came popping up.”

He was also able to experience riding a camel with his fellow crewmembers in the Sahara Desert during his tours in the Mediterranean Sea.

“We went on a little tour of the upper edge of the Sahara Desert,” he said. “We were just walking around, saw there were camels in a pen. We found somebody that could speak English, and we were talking to him about the camels. They told us that we could ride a camel (for a price).

“There were four or five of us that decided we wanted to ride. They brought them out, and they had wooden saddles on. Between the wooden saddle and the camel’s back was sheep hide.”

He said a “young kid” led the group on camels through the desert for a short time.

“It was probably about two football fields back to where we started,” he said. “The kid started jabbering, and I thought, ‘Uh oh. Something’s coming up.’

“Next thing I know, he let the camels loose at the same time and stepped back.”

He said the ride back to the area the group started from was then (rough).

“You’re talking about a rough ride,” he said, laughing at the memory. “They didn’t speed up either. They bounced harder, but you weren’t going much faster.

“It was an experience.”

He had many more experiences like these, including meeting his brother – a fellow sailor in the Navy– in an unexpected place across the world.

“Believe it or not, my brother (J L Weeks) was on a destroyer,” Weeks said. “(In) Suda Bay, Crete, I saw this destroyer. I knew my brother was in the Navy, but I didn’t know where he was. I saw this destroyer come in on another pier. There was his number; I knew what number ship he was on.

“I got the signalman to signal over there and tell my brother to come over,” he said. “We met in Suda Bay, Crete. Neither one of us knew the other was over there.”

Weeks said they explored the city they never expected to meet up in.

“The odd thing about it was, what was the chances of meeting him over there like that?” he said with a smile.

Weeks ended his second enlistment in October 1954. During his second stint in the Navy, he was able to visit several countries around the world, including Algiers, North Africa; Spain; Italy; France; Turkey; Greece; Cyprus; Crete; Puerto Rico; and St. Thomas of the Virgin Islands.

After returning to civilian life, Weeks received his GED and said he believed he wanted to go into the upholstery business. Instead, he was able to begin working in helicopter maintenance at Fort Rucker, the place he was born.

“I did maintenance on them for 13-14 years,” he said. “Then, I was a maintenance inspector for the rest of 39 years.”

He married his first wife, Martha Payne, in 1954, and the couple had three children: Sherry, Russell and Shannon. Weeks said his son also joined the Navy. After his first wife passed, he married his second wife, Gayle Weeks, and the couple currently lives in Ozark.

When asked why he chose the Navy instead of the Army, which he was exposed to growing, up, Weeks said, “”I enjoyed it. I just decided I was going to be in the Navy before I was old enough to go.

“It was kind of enjoyable,” he said. “I enjoyed riding the ship.”

He also said the idea of seeing more of the world was enticing.

“That’s one of the reasons I thought I would like the Navy,” he said. “I figured there would be more travelling and seeing more places. As far as the danger, one (branch) was about as dangerous as the other.”

Being on a smaller ship in the Navy, Weeks said he also got to become close with his fellow shipmates.

“That small landing craft (I was on) didn’t have more than 10 men on it,” he said. “You get to be, more or less, like a family.”

Weeks also gave a “blunt answer” for those considering joining the Navy.

“It’s a great life if you like it,” he said. “I know that’s a blunt answer. If you don’t like it, you don’t. If you do like it, you do.”

Though it has been many years since he served not once, but twice in the Navy, Weeks said he would do it again.

“I was protecting my country,” he said. “I didn’t know this was such a great country until I visited others. If you don’t think this is a great country, go visit (other countries).”