Military Spotlight: Captain Bob Breglio

By Linda L. Austin

Bob Breglio had a 30-year career in the Navy, but he never had intentions of signing up. “I wasn’t deciding to go into the Navy. It was a fluke. That’s one of my favorite stories. So on the night of fifth of June 1961…” His buddy called asking for soda cans, which could be turned in for five cents a can, to buy gas at 11 cents a gallon. He wanted to go to the Naval Reserve Center to sign up. After gathering cans from the garage and buying gas, Breglio rode with his friend for company. “I got home that night, and the first thing my mother said to me was, ‘When you leaving?’ Because I had signed up too.” If his mother was upset, she hid it well. His friend wanted to be trained as a boiler technician since his father had an oil business, but Breglio still has no idea why he, also, signed up. He was just riding with his friend on a drizzly day. He had graduated a year earlier, attended one year of prep school, and confesses that he was just bored.

Being in the service wasn’t a new thing for the family since his father and several uncles were in World War II. “I remember the day he (Breglio’s father) came home from the war. It was the first time I ever saw him. He was in uniform.” Breglio was four or five years old.

A few weeks after joining the Navy, he was in Great Lakes, IL, going through enlisted training. After boot camp, training on two ships and a school, “I decided, you know, I’m getting money, I’m getting paid, so I started college,” and graduated with an engineering degree. In the Navy, Breglio was in a two by six program which said you had to go in for six years. “You had to do two years continuous active duty. I didn’t do two years continuous active duty. I kept getting these ships going someplace, getting paid for it, saying wow, this is alright. But I never amassed, in those six years, two continuous years of active duty… I went from active duty to reserve.” Attending college, he had only the summers to be on active duty. “I figured out that they’ve got me now because I didn’t get my two continuous years unbroken,” so he applied to Officers Candidate School and was sent to Pensacola, FL, for Navy Air. Later the Navy sent him to the Air Force’s postgraduate school, the USAF Institute of Technology, Dayton, OH, for a Master of Science degree.

During the Vietnam War, Breglio was in a VP squadron which was a land-based squadron with large aircraft deployed to the Philippines. “They (squadron) had to maintain a permanent detachment. Out of nine aircraft, we always had four or five in Cameron Bay, Vietnam. I was in that det as the maintenance officer.”

When asked if he ever saw combat while stationed in South Vietnam, he stated with a chuckle, “They used to shoot rockets in at night, especially when we were having the John Wayne movie, which really made us mad.”

To get off the base occasionally, he would accompany the Navy and Air Force doctors as an armed guard when they went into the hamlets and villages to treat the natives. He added that no MEDCAP team had ever been ambushed because the Vietcong knew they needed the medicine.

He recalled an incident while in one of the villages that had bamboo huts and a bar. When the doctors went to the dispensary, they told the team to meet them afterwards at the bar and cautioned them with, “Be careful drinking the beer. Make sure you drink the beer through your T-shirt because the VC put ground glass in the bottom of the beer.”

Bob explained, “So you’d pull your T-shirt out, put it over the end of the beer and then you’d drink the beer through your T-shirt. Didn’t matter how sweaty you were.”

Breglio finished up with yes, he had seen combat, and he related another story. The Vietcong wanted to take the P-3s out of action. Crews were flying out of Cameron Bay looking for gun runners that were sending guns into the Mekong Delta. North Vietnam wanted to get rid of the P-3s because they were interdicting their gun running and they were quite successful.

“They came after us one night, three or four of them. They came across the bay. The First Class maintenance guy shot one or two. They went after the aircraft. We had these things called a Buddha, huge tow tractors because these are big airplanes. But these things have to weigh 20 million tons. These Vietcong in red speedos, that’s what they were wearing. Red speedos. They’re sappers. They swam across the Bay, climbed through the concertina wire. They took out the guard, hit the guard tower at the main gate. They threw a satchel at the guy driving the Buddha. He just drove his tractor over the satchel charge, and it blew up. But this thing was so heavy it didn’t hurt it. It literally lifted the Buddha off the ground.”He continued, “So one of the stories that links the two incidents was when those sappers came over the wire, they were carrying satchels. One of the guys that our maintenance guy shot actually was carrying in his haversack medical supplies that had been issued by the U.S. And they had the serial numbers that one of the MEDCAPs from Camron Bay had brought to one of the villages. So we figured, now we knew what’s going on. The MEDCAPs, the doctors would go out. They would, under humanitarian directions, give the natives medical attention, supplies, but everything was serialized. The intelligence people were monitoring the serial numbers, and so the VC would pick it up because they were hiding in the bushes while we were there. They wanted the medicines.”

Breglio’s humor kept creeping into his stories. “So combat? Yeah, that one. We got to go on MEDCAPs, never got shot. I got to go, enjoy the sun, see the jungle roads, and drink beer. That’s a hero. That’s a hero’s thing to do, right?”

Breglio mentioned many additional interesting assignments and stories. He was selected for an internship with the Office of Secretary of Defense for one year where he “would get to see, experience, and learn that world without having to spend a threeyear assignment.” While there, he said, “I’m the only Navy Lt. Cdr. who drove an M60 tank. And it was the last M60 tank out of the depot at Anniston, Army Depot down in Alabama, and it was being sent to Egypt. And I got to drive it.”

Never one to stay idle, after retiring from the Navy in 1991, Breglio continued to have interesting job assignments. “I started the west coast operations for a New York based engineering support contractor that won Navy contracts supporting what was then called the Naval Air Rework Facility at North Island and contracts providing engineering support at Naval Air Station Pt. Mugu, Oxnard, CA. When the company was sold, I first moved to providing engineering support to (then) SPAWAR contracts for inertial navigation systems used by both the Navy and Air Force. Work with these systems lead to supporting the U.S. Naval Observatory program that designed and built the atomic ‘fountain’ clocks that generate the time standard for U.S.’s GPS constellation. This work led to working with the Navy’s Metrological ground-based sensor systems. And I spent the last four years on active duty as the Navy’s Tomahawk Cruise Missile Technical representative at General Dynamics here in San Diego. I am currently on the board of directors for an engineering support company.”

He, also, is active with the Midway Museum as a docent and organizes the continuing education for the volunteers, selecting speakers and setting up the Zoom presentations. As a member of Military Officers Association, he was a recent president.

The military life was quite different from his early childhood. Breglio spent many years living with his maternal grandparents on a small dairy farm, along the Hudson River east of Saratoga, New York. “They and my mother, came from Norway, and I identified with my Norwegian ancestry. No other nationality feeds a little kid cod liver oil every night – they did. Growing up on that farm, I was Bobby Steen to everyone who knew me. In fact, when I return to the area for a visit, and I do, when I’ve seen people I knew as a child, they still think of me a Bobby Steen, albeit my birth certificate says ‘Breglio,’ except for my uncle Harold. I remember that he referred to me, and my brother as the Spaghetti Bothers.

“After my father’s graduation from dental school following WWII, and leaving (being dragged away from my grandparents’ farm) I played football and played clarinet in the H.S. band in West Springfield, Massachusetts. The biggest change for me was that I went from being Bobby Steen who lived on a farm with his Norwegian grandparents in rural New York, to becoming Bobby Breglio, just another Italian kid who lived in an urban town in Massachusetts, where ethnic groups had clustered together for a hundred years. Just think, I moved from lutefisk to pasta. What a change!”

Bob and his wife Donna have lived in Coronado for over 30 years. Their family lives nearby and is their primary focus. Breglio’s son Bob lives in Escondido with his wife Julie and children Megan and Michael. Bill lives in Temecula with Kristen and their children Tessa and Will.

Besides family, the Breglios enjoy traveling and plan to continue their adventures. They have had three house exchanges to France, Ireland, and England, and this year took a two week cruise to western Baltic countries followed by a visit with relatives in Norway. Travel in the U.S. is on the current agenda, returning to hometowns in New York and central Massachusetts.

Captain Bob Breglio tells all of his military assignments, jobs, volunteer work and collateral activities with an entertaining amusement. Even the serious items contain a thread of humor. The phrase “A Life Well Lived” certainly could be applied to him.