These are some personal notes that describe some of my memories and opinions of the organizations that I served with in an Army career that spanned nearly 30 years. If you find this site by accident through a search engine you are welcome to contact me and share your thoughts. Thanks. My e-mail address is BradenClan@ gmail.com.

Following my year in Vietnam, the Army sent me back to Purdue for further studies. Bonnie and I lived in Married Student Housing (like a smaller version of the government quarters we would live in for many years) except that married students at universities are poor and the Bradens were rich. Well, "rich" is subjective; let's just say that I was drawing pay as a Captain during this time.

Bonnie also returned to school, and I recall us working at our studies on the small table in the large studio apartment room that served as kitchen, dining room, and living room.

We must not have studied all the time, because we were blessed with the birth of Karen during this assignment. We took turns getting up in the night to take care of her needs, and we sterilized the heck out of all her bottles and feeding parphernalia - something we did less of with each child. To take care of Karen, we moved from our one bedroom studio apartment to a two bedroom apartment. We moved everything we owned in one U-Haul trip. Over the years we would continue to accumulate "stuff" and haul it from one house to another.

Purdue had a field behind the married students' housing that was plowed up each year and used for student garden plots. Bonnie wanted a garden plot, and I didn't. So on the given day there we were standing in line with many others, waiting to sign up for a 25' x 25' plot. When we got to the front of the line, we found that plots were $4, so we ended up getting two. Soon we were there inspecting our 25' x 50' piece of land, not having much of a clue as to what to do. Of course Purdue, as a land grant college with a strong School of Agriculture, had lots of experienced students, so we watched them. We drew the ground up into furrows and I put in a string line that went down the center of each furrow. We planted lots of "stuff" and kept everything that came up under the stringline, weeding out all else, because we couldn't tell vegetables from weeds. One of our successes was with watermelon. We planted it and then learned from fellow gardeners that watermelon doesn't grow in Indiana. Well, we didn't know that, but I guess no one told the watermelon, as we did grow some. We got a lot of other food from our gardening effort, much from what we planted, and more from other gardeners who grew more than they needed and donated their excess to us as they probably sensed that we didn't have much of an idea as to what we were doing. It was fun, however.

One of my professors was Dr. Altschaeffl, who looked after me and got me through my masters program. We exchanged Christmas cards for many years.

At Purdue, we also met Lenny and Guy Donaldson. Guy was also an engineer officer back for more schooling. We were to meet up with them again at our next assignment at Fort Belvoir.