Vet heading for brewing school
<p>Justin Eaton takes a break in the helicopter repair shop at Camp Leatherneck during his tour in Afghanistan. He has finished his five-year Marine commitment and is now planning on attending brewery school.</p>
Not long after graduating from Columbia Falls High School in 2007, Justin Eaton listened to a friend’s arguments and joined the Marines. It paid off just like he’d been told, he said.
“I didn’t want to get stuck in the valley,” he said. “It offered me a good opportunity to go to college and see the world.”
A second generation Flathead native, Eaton finished his five-year military commitment on Nov. 30 and is enrolled in college, where he’s completing prerequisites for further schooling — in the UC Davis Master Brewers Program.
A single father with a seven-year-old daughter, Eaton gets veterans benefits for tuition, books and living expenses.
“It was a good experience and a good deal,” he said. “I’d recommend it to other people in the Flathead.”
The nine weeks at the Marine Corps Recruit Depot boot camp near San Diego proved to be as tough as advertised, but it also “showed you what you can do.”
“I got lots of blisters, all the time, but you just want to finish and get it over,” he said. “You don’t want to do it all over again.”
Boot camp was followed by a month of combat training at Camp Pendleton and then specialized training in avionic air frames in Pensacola, Fla. Eaton spent a year learning about structural and hydraulic components for Cobra helicopters.
In 2010, Eaton began his seven-month deployment at Camp Leatherneck, Afghanistan, a base the Marines shared with troops from the United Kingdom and Georgian Republic. His friend from high school was a grunt there, and the helicopter gunships Eaton worked on supported the combat soldiers who ventured off base.
“We had some mortar attacks, sometimes they’d find weapons on the base, and a guy blew himself up in the chow hall,” Eaton said. “But most of the guys I was with were too busy to ever go to the chow hall.”
His high school friend is in college on the East Coast now studying forestry.
“We had a good run,” Eaton said about Afghanistan. “A prior deployment had a chopper go down.”
The tough part were the long days and hour-long bus rides from the flight line back to his quarters.
“We were Marines — we did what we were told,” he summed it up.
Eaton hopes to be enrolled at UC Davis in fall 2014 or spring 2015. He said he got started in beer brewing while living on the Marine base in San Diego with his daughter. It was a hobby and his favorite products were IPAs, Imperial Russian stout and fruity lambic beers.
“The stout is a very heavy beer,” he said. “If you’re worried about calories, you shouldn’t drink beer.”
The year-long UC Davis program provides the credentials needed to work at breweries all over the world — including Dogfish Head, in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, a cutting-edge microbrewery that Eaton has his sights set on.
Eaton keeps up with the brewery world with books and online news. He says he isn’t brewing here because he doesn’t have the room and it’s too cold, but that doesn’t mean he wants to move back to sunnier California.
“I missed winter,” he said. “I like snow. It got repetitive down there. I like the seasons.”