Dear Folks, Over the past few days I've been remembering how it was when I was a secretary with The Coca-Cola Company during the Vietnam War years. This is what I wrote this evening. vee The Vietnam War and Coca-Cola May 3, 2005 In early 1966 in San Francisco I was job hunting and responded to an ad for a secretary with The Coca-Cola Company. I was soon called in for an interview and I was hired on the spot. Mr. Welch, my boss, had explained what was required of me and what his position was at the time. He had been enjoying his job as the company's west coast military representative and in that capacity he would visit the military bases in the west to make certain that everyone was happy with the Coca-Cola they were receiving that they sold in their commissaries, their cafeterias and their base exchanges. What he really loved about his job was that he got play a lot of golf with the commanding officers and was on a first-name basis with a few admirals. He told me that the company had started to receive large orders from the military for canned Coca-Cola soft drinks for shipment to Vietnam from the west coast. As a result, he needed me to handle the orders, notify the canning plant of them and after everything was shipped, I needed to bill the military. The job started off smoothly enough but within a very short period of time, we were flooded with orders of a huge magnitude and I was swamped. It didn't take long for us to realize we needed to have an office in the canning plant in San Leandro across the Bay so that we could work more closely with them. From our office in San Leandro things became more hectic for me and also for the canning plant. The orders were sent by AAFES (Army and Air Force Exchange Service) and each order had specific instructions as to how many cases per month were expected to be shipped and the cut-off date that they had to be unloaded on the dock at the port of Oakland for loading aboard a specific civilian container ship. That's when I really got caught in the middle of all of it. The AAFES office at the Oakland port kept a close eye on our shipping schedule and I was the liaison between AAFES and our company. My contact there was Joan and she was a bear to deal with. Not only did the order have to be shipped as scheduled, she needed to know how many pallets of Coca-Cola would be shipped, what the weight of each pallet and what the cubic measurements were of each pallet. In addition I had to advise the canning plant what to stencil on each and every case according to AAFES strict requirements. After I had made all of the calculations, I then had to type up bills of lading for each and every truckload that left the plant that included all of the pertinent information that was required. When it got to the point where I was processing over a million cases per month that involved many, many truckloads going to the dock, I found myself having to lug home every night the very heavy calculator I had to use to make my calculations so that I could continue to calculate everything before the next day. After the last truckload left our loading docks, I had only a minute to breathe a sigh of relief. I knew what was coming next. I had to bill AAFES for the entire order and run off the required number of invoices. When we first started out we had only a Ditto machine to run off the copies but it didn't take us long to realize that we needed the latest model of copy machines which were crude at best during the late 1960s. It took longer for me to run off the copies than it did for me to type up the invoices in the first place. In the middle of all the hectic activity, which was beginning to smooth out, the next thing we knew, the union workers at the plant went on strike. When I told AAFES that we couldn't make delivery of the orders because our production line had been shut down, Joan wouldn't accept that as an excuse whatsoever. We'd have to find another canning plant that could make the shipments. Oh great! We had many bottling companies on the west coast but very few canning plants. I got on the phone and talked to the canning plant manager in Seattle, Washington, and the one in Phoenix, Arizona. After much back and forth letter writing and written instructions, the two plants started to make shipments to the nearest west coast ports. In the meantime I was still up to my eyeballs in typing up bills of lading for the other plants, carrying home my calculator every night and it got to the point where the company agreed to hire another secretary for our two-man office-Mr. Welch and me. That's when Sandy was hired and took some pressure off me. Nonetheless, on a daily basis Mr. Welch and others of the management team had to cross the ugly picket line. When I got to my office one morning, I was faced with a large broken window in the office and glass shattered all over my desk, the floor and everywhere else. Of course I had to clean it all up. How I ever stayed sane over those years I don't know, but Joan was having the same problems with AAFES. They were putting the screws to her to get the shipments out and not only did she have to put the screws on The Coca-Cola Company but also on Pepsi, 7-Up, Dr. Pepper, Granny Goose potato chips and heaven only knows what else was being ordered for shipment to Vietnam. Although we both screamed at each other over the phone, we knew we were in the same boat and on the few occasions that we met socially at a cocktail party or dinner, we couldn't wait to share our woes with each other. I guess you could say that we were actually friendly enemies in the same boat. I still have memories about those years, but now that almost forty years have gone by my stomach is no longer tied up in knots the way it was then. I can now sit back and remember the excitement of those hectic years. It's now an important of my past and it's time I told a bit of it.