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If the Selective Service draft included the Air Force, Merritt
Nesin of Brooklyn, NY, probably would have quickly found a home
with the fly boys. He held two engineering degrees; had worked
two years for Boeing Aircraft at their Wichita plant on the tooling
of a new wing for the B-52H bomber and on its flight-test instrumentation.
That was followed by an engineering job at Bendix Aviation in
New Jersey, which ended abruptly when in late 1959 at age 24
he received word that the Army wanted him (via a draft notice).
The Cold War was heating up at the time, and in the Army's drive
to become a million-man force, an aggressive draft was striking
many American homes.
Still a kind of small miracle occurred after basic training.
With two BS degrees (mechanical engineering and industrial engineering)
and consequentially an expert knowledge of trigonometry, the
Army found the perfect MOS school for Nesin -- Artillery Surveyor
training, where trigonometry was the primary skill. Upon graduation
at Ft. Sill, Oklahoma, Nesin was offered a faculty position at
the school and a permanent stateside assignment. But, since he
knew he had pending orders for Germany, he could not resist the
temptation of Europe.
Shortly after his arrival at the 3AD (2 Bn, 73rd Arty, Hanau)
in March, 1960, Nesin was - out of the blue - bitten severely
by the photography bug. Pursuing the subject as an engineer would,
he purchased three cameras with three different film sizes: a
Rolleiflex medium format, a Miranda 35mm, and a Minox "spy
camera," with its miniature, but sharp, 8x11mm film frame.
Study and experimentation followed, with considerable time spent
at the Pioneer Kaserne Service Club Photo Lab. A small sampling
of the resulting pictures are shown in this section, with the
majority being scanned from his original tiny Minox negatives.
But, as quickly as photography blossomed as a hobby, it just
as quickly faded away when Nesin returned to civilian life in
1962. The military adventure was over, and life became too busy,
he says.
Nesin's only major complaint about his time at the 3AD occurred
late in 1961, when he was due for return to the States, upon
completion his two-year draftee stint. East Germany, backed by
the Soviets, was hurriedly constructing the Berlin Wall; the
Cold War was growing more tense; and he was involuntarily extended
in Germany for three months into early 1962. Finally Nesin then
returned home to Brooklyn, taking a job with Revere Copper &
Brass, which included being on a design team developing radar-jamming,
aluminum chaff for the Pentagon. He later went to work for the
Ivan Sorvall Company designing blood-testing centrifuges, which
led to his starting his own medical devices company in 1968,
which became Razel Scientific Instruments. Now (in 2004) in its
36th year of operation, his business manufactures and sells a
medical infusion pump that is sold worldwide.
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