I have been skating since I was about 12 or so back in about 1980. I got serious when I joined the Air Force in 1988 and learned how to drop in on a mini ramp at Holloman Air Force Base in New Mexico. There was a six foot mini ramp in this guys barn and I would go up there about 5 days a week and it took me about a month to learn how to drop in, kick turn on the other side and then roll back. My first trick on a mini ramp was a 50-50 grind. For some reason I couldn’t do a 50-50 stall and could only grind for the first couple of weeks. Then I learned fakies and that opened up a whole new bunch of mini ramp possibilities and to this day I am still learning new tricks.

I was stationed in Holloman and got my orders to be stationed at Incirlik Air Base in Adana Turkey. I took leave and came back home to Orange County for a month in July 1989 and ended up breaking 3 toes rolling off the roof of my vw rabbit and had to be rushed to El Toro Marine Base to get fixed up. That was one of the good parts about skating in the military, they always patched you back together for free!! I arrived in Turkey in September 1989 with a broken foot for skateboarding. My job was a cop (Security Police) and they naturally hated skateboarders and in turn hated me off the bat because I was unable to work due to skateboarding. My job was to carry a gun and bust people for stupid shit and since I was on crutches for a few months I was unable to carry out my normal duties. I remember the first time I went up to the YMCA thing they had there and a mini ramp was out in front. It was about 9 feet tall, 10 feet wide and was built like a ditch! The trannies were not smooth at all. I decided to approach the director of recreation with an idea to build a new ramp that was actually skateable. With the help from my new friend that traveled over from the states with me named Jerry Holcumb, a few other military skaters and a bunch of local kids we had the man power to build the ramp. The funniest part of this was the fact that my foot was still broken and I was crawling all over the skeleton with a cast which also pissed off my supervisor but I didn’t care it was all about skateboarding.

The Director was down to build a ramp and we gave him a list of supplies that we were going to need. The coping and 2×4’s were no problem but he could only get us 5/8 plywood for the skate surface. Our original plan was a layer of plywood and a layer of masonite on the top but that turned into 2 layers of 5/8 plywood. I don’t know if you have every tried to bend 5/8 plywood but it doesn’t work! Every piece had to be cut in half, soaked on both sides with people sitting on each side to pre bend it and then slapped up on the trannies.

We topped this ramp off with a coat of Thompson Water Seal to help protect it from the rain. When completed it was 18 feet wide, 8 feet tall with a 10 foot extension on one side that we didn’t bother to put coping on. We were stoked we had a nice sized ramp that was built like a brick shit house, we couldn’t be happier. I ended up getting an award from the base commander for my contributions to the Recreation Center. We skated the shit out of this thing every waking moment, due to the war raging on around us we had a little slack and let us do our thing. Since Incirlik AB was a staging area for troops moving back and forth to Saudi Arabia and the fact that this was a NATO operation we had thousands of tough guy jock types cruising by and asking us to skate the ramp.

I remember one time in particular when a group of nail eating French Green Berets came up and started talking shit on us Air Force pussies and told us how easy it was to skate. I willingly gave him my board and set the shit talker up for his first drop in. This genious thought it was so easy he was to go in from the 10 foot extension with his combat boots on. Well needless to say this guy slammed! He made it to the flat with tons of speed and the board shot out from underneath him and he landed on the back of his head and knocked himself out. After this all the foreign military guys kind of left us alone. Desert Storm had come and gone and it was now March 1991. We would get videos and skate shit from Intensity and remember watching Danny Way killing the mini ramp in Hocus Pocus so we decided if we were to learn anything new, we had to build a smaller ramp. I was living off base at the time and we built this little four foot gem in our backyard. The flat bottom was pallets and we scrounged up whatever wood we could find to build it. It was 8 feet wide 4 feet tall and had a 4 foot wide hip as well. This is were I learned how to transfer over hips and and a few more early grab variations as well as my famous nose stall revert. We skated both of these ramps all summer long until I left in September 1991. There was fun marble stairs and stuff in the local town of Adana that just tripped all the Turks out. The had never seen people skateboarding much less grinding up their marble stairs and ledges. I learned every trick I can do on these 2 ramps and this was a time in my skateboarding life that I will never forget. Since Southern Turkey was officially made into a war zone in early 1991 these are the only 2 ramps that I have ever heard about in an official war zone in history. I have heard of skaters being in Desert Storm but I never heard of any decent sized ramps built in a war zone even to this date. Hope you like the little piece of history and if you have wartime ramp stories that I should be aware of send me a comment

Above is a picture of my traffic radar operator card, part of being a Military Police

Here is my Law Enforcement Certificate of Training

Here is a pay stubb for 2 weeks. You cant beat $395 for 2 weeks and that includes hazardous duty wartime pay

I still had time to drink and smoke which you can see in the picture. I grew hair back then as well as kept up with the latest concert shirts and it was a thing in Turkey at the time to wear gold chains so I did that to.