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"Strap Hanger" © 1997 Donald E. Valentine This Section covers ENLISTMENT, BASIC COMBAT TRAINING, AND ADVANCED INFANTRY TRAINING If you haven't already done so, please read http://www.don-valentine.com/gruntp.htm first. LIFE WITH THE GRUNTS
[1953-1961] As the chartered Greyhound Bus pulled away from the bus station in Knoxville, I waved goodbye to my mom and my stepfather. Some of the other guys on that bus were feeling blue, but I was excited because I was off on a great adventure. You see, I was about to become a paratrooper. As I watched the familiar landscape flow past the window, I thought about why I had volunteered for the paratroops. Earlier that year while playing sandlot football, I had injured my back. Mom had tried our family doctor’s treatment and that hadn’t helped. My pain was so bad that I could barely walk. I was hobbling around like the Hunchback of Notre Dame and my mom asked the doctor to make a house call, which he did. [Doctor’s still made house calls back then]. For a couple of months, I had suffered with that back. Nothing that our family doctor did or suggested had helped ¾ the salve, the heat lamp, nothing. Someone told Mom about chiropractors and she took me to one. The doctor’s office was over a corner drugstore that adjoined the Tennessee Theater on Gay Street — directly across the street from the theater was the "original" Orange Julius fountain. I was addicted to Orange Julius’ drinks. After only about fifteen minutes on the chiropractor’s table the pain was gone and I could stand erect again and walk like a human being. To me, that was a miracle. The treatment only cost my mother three dollars. My back required three more treatments, but the pain and immobility were gone after the first treatment. The chiropractor said no more running or physical contact sports for me. Football was the only thing that I truly enjoyed in high school and my injury had put an end to any hope that I would play varsity football my senior year. I would be willing to bet that I am the only dumb ass high school kid that tried out for football every year, never missed practice and never even made 1st string on the B Team our Junior Varsity as some schools called it, much less the varsity team. I was just too slow. At least that is what I think the problem was, nobody bothered to tell me what my problem was. Central High had so many kids trying out for their teams they could be very choosey. Looking back, I believe being undernourished at that time was the source of my problem. As a latch-key kid, when I lived with Mom and my stepfather, I only got breakfast and lunch and then whatever I could find to eat after that. And sometimes I didn't eat lunch in the school cafeteria and spent my lunch money on a soft drink and sweets instead. A friend of mine had talked me into joining our local National Guard unit, Tank Company, 278th Infantry, in November of the year before. At the time, I had only been sixteen, but my height and a slight fib about my age, got me into the guard. The two weeks that our unit had spent at Fort McClellan, Alabama that summer were fun. Honestly, I can’t say that I enjoyed pulling KP [kitchen police duty], but overall I did enjoy that two weeks. It was very hot and dusty at Fort McClellan. When we were on the range firing our tank cannons, several loaders had to be pulled out through the turret and treated at the hospital for heat exhaustion. We were in the old, out-dated M-42 tanks or at least that’s what model of tank I think they were. At any rate, those tanks didn’t have air-conditioning or electronic controls: everything was manually-operated. There was a horizontal crank to the gunner’s right and a vertical crank to his left. The gunner used these cranks to move the turret right or left and to elevate or depress the cannon. The "trigger" for the cannon was in the floor by the gunner’s and it resembled the clutch or brake pedal in a car. Loading that cannon, without losing a hand and avoiding the breech block when it fired, was the primary concern of the loader. His secondary concern was staying on his fold-down metal seat during the bumpy rides, and believe me, they were bumpy. They trained me to be a loader and a gunner, but I preferred being a gunner, except for when the tank commander adjusted my fire. My tank commander was a crusty sergeant that had been a tanker during World War II. If I missed with my first round, he would yell, "Short! Raise it a red cock hair!” If that round was a miss, he kicked me in the back of my helmet and yelled, "I said a red cock hair, you dumb ass hillbilly!” At first, I had absolutely no idea what that man was talking about. But it didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that a red cock hair was apparently a very fine adjustment and any other kind of hair was a larger adjustment. I quickly learned why tank gunners wore helmets, especially hillbilly tank gunners, and also why the sight has a rubber cover-they help to absorb the shock when the tank commander "adjusts" fire. Qualifying as an expert gunner by the "cock hair" method wasn’t easy, but I somehow managed it. However, as a loader, I was only so-so. When I was the loader, I hated trying to ride on that damn silly seat they had built for the loader. Finally, I just stood up and held on for dear life when that tank was moving cross-country. We learned a great deal during those two weeks, especially me. Hell, I couldn’t help but learn because, to be honest, I didn’t know much of anything before I went to summer camp. One thing that I remember learning was a little diddy that went something like this: "I was born in a
canebrake and suckled by a bear. Since I was only sixteen years old at the time, I thought that diddy was cute. The interior of our tanks were painted entirely white. At first, I thought that the white interior was to help the crew see better when we "buttoned-up" inside the tank — silly me. The first day we turned our tanks in at their motor pool after being out on the range, I learned better. The white interior made it easier for the officers to inspect for dirt: some officers even wore white gloves when they inspected the interiors of the tanks. If you think washing a car or truck is a pain in the ass, try cleaning a tank inside and out until it is spotless after it has been through a dust storm or mud bog, especially if it has a damn white interior. One night some of the guys talked me into going downtown to Anniston, Alabama. We wore our khakis with bloused boots. We were wearing boots because they had not issued us any low quarters [smooth toe oxfords]. We didn’t get a hundred yards from our tents before the MPs [Military Police] stopped us and made us unblouse our boots. They told us, "Only paratroopers are authorized to wear bloused boots with khakis in this area." They obviously didn’t care that we had not been issued any low quarters. This was my first time in Anniston so I just followed my buddies around town. It seemed to me that Anniston had the most taverns of any place in the world. Every other business was a tavern or at least they were in that section of town. Right away I noticed that Anniston was a very friendly town. Actually, Anniston was probably the friendliest town I had ever seen, especially their women. Ladies sat in cars parked all along the curb on both sides of the street. They seemed real eager to talk to all of the lonesome GIs. Every now and then, those ladies would take a GI for a spin in their pretty car. A couple of those friendly ladies called me over to their car-they wanted to talk to me. We only talked for a short time, but those nice ladies seemed real concerned that I might be lonesome and need cheering up. They said, "Honey, if you’re lonesome, we’ve got just the cure for you. Hop in sugar and we’ll go for a spin." It sure was a temptation to go for a ride in their nice new shiny car. The lady behind the wheel even offered to let me drive, but, being only sixteen years old at the time, I was still too shy around women so I declined their nice offer. Besides, I really wasn’t lonesome anyway, I slept in a tent with at least a dozen other guys. Those ladies sure seemed disappointed. I figured that they must operate a special kind of taxi service, probably for the USO. [Later, I learned that wasn’t so.] Playing football was my only goal in life at that time so I was considered enlisting in the military. I chose the army because I already had a general idea of how it worked from being in the Tennessee Army National Guard. At least, I "thought" that I understood how the Army worked. Actually, my first choice had been the French Foreign Legion because Errol Flynn, Cary Grant, and Victor McLaglen sure looked like they enjoyed being in the Legion. The only problem was nobody seemed to know where their recruiting office was located and somebody said that the Legion spoke only French. That surprised me because McLaglen and those other guys hadn’t spoke one word of French in the movies. My Uncle Glenn had already advised me to get out of the tanks. He said, "A moving foxhole attracts attention and the enemy shoots everything they have at tanks." Uncle Glenn had served during World War Two in the Fourth Armored Division of General George S. Patton’s Third Army. Glenn lost a leg and suffered some shrapnel wounds to the body in a battle in Belgium. [However, Uncle Glenn neglected to point out the fact that, as an infantryman, he was "outside" the tanks not "inside one." That’s a big difference when the bullets and shells start flying in your direction.] Glenn told me about the battle when he was wounded: "We were armored infantry and rode in halftracks. We were somewhere in Belgium, when our officers ordered us out of the halftracks and formed us up to attack an enemy position. They ordered us to advance at the enemy right smack through a large mine field. The field was covered with little "humps". We all knew that a mine was under every one of those humps, but we were ordered to attack and we did. We were too busy firing back at the enemy to watch for every hump. I stepped on one of those humps and a mine blew me about ten feet into the air. Two medics came into that mine field after me. They put me on a stretcher and started back through the mine field. The medic in the front stepped on a mine that blew both of his feet off at the ankles. The same blast also killed the medic carrying the rear of the stretcher and wounded me again in the body. The wounded medic drug me to safety by walking on the bloody stumps of his legs. I don’t know how he did it." When I was very young, I asked Uncle Glenn, if he had killed anybody during the war. That seems to be a popular question for anyone who has never been to war. I don’t know of a single combat veteran asking another combat veteran that question. Glenn could only say for sure that he had shot one soldier. Glenn said, "I don’t know if I killed him or not, but I was sure trying to kill him. That German had stuck his head up to shoot one of my buddies who was moving to a different position." He added, "Most of the time, there were lots of people shooting at each other and there was no way of telling for sure who shot who." When Uncle Glenn finally got out of Walter Reed Hospital and came home for the first time after the war, it was summer and I was staying with Mama and Poppa Valentine. They lived in a big two story farm house at Reagan Station. Reagan Station was on the Knoxville-Chattanooga Highway about five miles south of Sweetwater, Tennessee. The station was a small gray and white wooden shed alongside the tracks. Howell’s Nursery had an office about a quarter of a mile south of the station. The nursery also had a large warehouse located on the opposite side of the tracks from their office. The station was directly across the highway from Momma and Poppa’s driveway. One summer during the war when I was spending a summer at Reagan Station, the railroad had a large crew working on the tracks directly in front of their home. Every day for as long as they were there, Momma Valentine made several trips to that track carrying those men ice-cold lemonade. From our house to the track, round-trip, was at least a quarter of a mile and Mama Valentine was in her fifties, at least, and over-weight. Uncle Glenn and Uncle Greer were the clowns of the family so naturally Glenn didn’t get off the bus in front of the house instead he waited and got off at the next road where the office of the nursery was located. Using a foot path that went through the woods and around a large frog pond, Glenn walked from there back to the house. Mama Valentine was sitting in a chair in the big shady yard stringing and breaking green beans for supper. Mama had me raking leaves and I was fussing, to myself mostly, because I couldn’t go exploring in the woods and fields. Then I saw Glenn coming up the path along the pond. He was on crutches and he was carrying a small bag. "Here comes Uncle Glenn!” I yelled. Mama Valentine leaped straight up off that chair, spilled all of her beans onto the ground and started screaming like a banshee. That little old lady literally flew to meet Glenn. She scared me out of ten years growth. I had never seen Mama Valentine act like that and I sure didn’t know that old gal could move that fast. All three of Mama Valentine's sons, Glenn, Greer, and Gay, served in that war. They each joined a different branch of the service. Uncle Greer was the oldest and joined the marines long before the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. As I recall, Greer was riding horses on beach patrol when the war began. Glenn joined the army after the war began and Gay, who was the youngest, joined the navy last. All three men served in combat. Uncle Greer probably saw the most combat because he was already trained before the war began. Greer made several invasions in the Pacific. He would never talk to me about it. The only one he mentioned it to was my mom and then only when he was drunk. My mother told me what Uncle Greer had told her when he was drunk. She told me, "Don, your Uncle Glenn was wounded in the body, but your Uncle Greer was wounded in the head. Greer told me that he was a member of an anti-aircraft gun crew during his last battle. They were on the beach and after one Japanese air attack, he was the only survivor of his gun crew. The marines sent Greer home shortly after that." At the time, I was about eight or nine years old and did not really understand what Mom meant. I thought that she meant that Uncle Greer had been shot in the head, but I was still puzzled because he didn’t have any visible scars. Glenn and Greer were both a little wild when they first returned from the war — well, maybe more than a little. My mother told me that Glenn and Greer got into a fight one night with a bunch of guys at a tavern. Glenn went outside and leaned on one crutch and used the other as a bat to "polish off" the guys that Greer sailed out the door. Uncle Gay was the exact opposite of Glenn and Greer. He was tall, slim and very, shy. When Gay returned home, he married a local girl that Mama Valentine despised for some reason. Mama Valentine did not like Martha Jo, but I never understood why because I liked her. Anyway, Gay didn’t come home much after he married, but they’ve been together now for about fifty years. Maybe Mama Valentine missed the mark on that one. Poppa Valentine was a foreman for Howell’s Nursery. Uncle Glenn told me, "Poppa was foreman because he knew the nursery business better than anyone else there and because he was honest and a hard worker. Poppa keeps the job because nobody can out work him or whip him". Poppa was the foreman, but he worked in the fields right alongside the field hands every day. Poppa was a large, quiet man. He stood about six feet tall and he was stout, very stout. To me, his huge thick hands looked like hams. Even after I was a grown man, Poppa’s hands still looked huge. Poppa was a very stern father, and he had a very abrupt way about him. The way Poppa taught his kids to swim is the perfect example of how blunt he was. Poppa just took the kid to the nearest swimming hole or mill pond and literally threw him in it and walked away. If the kid wanted to survive, he had to save himself and swim out. That was Poppa Valentine’s swimming lesson. Not many kids asked Poppa Valentine for swimming lessons. Poppa loved to sing and always sang in church on Sundays, sometimes at dinner-on-the-grounds at the church and always while driving. He had a deep baritone voice. In the middle thirties, he, my mother, and two other men that I can not remember, formed a singing group. They called themselves, the "Sweetwater Valley Four". I remember my mama telling me that people said that they sounded like the “Chuck Wagon Gang” which was a very popular group back then. They sang at churches and on the radio. My mother was also their guitarist. Me, I can’t carry a tune in a bucket and don’t know one end of a guitar from the other, but I love to listen to a banjo and the bagpipes and for some strange reason Cajun and Irish bands make my favorite sound. Don’t ask me why I love the sound of those bands, I just do. Greer told me about an incident that happened during the 1930’s. Greer said, "Poppa took Glenn and me along to Chattanooga with him to sell a truck load of nandinas. We just parked at the curb on the street right in downtown Chattanooga. Somebody stole some of the shrubs while we were eating lunch. Poppa set out trailing the thieves by the berries that had fallen off the shrub. Poppa followed that trail wherever it took him. Glenn and I tagged along too just to see the fight when he caught up to the thief. The trail went in the front door of several apartments and out the back door. Poppa marched right through those apartments with me and Glenn right behind him. The trail of berries finally petered out and we never found the thief". My mother once told me, "Don, you get your size and strength from Poppa Valentine, your looks from your Uncle Gay and your sense of adventure from Glenn and Greer." I’m not sure what I got from my father, James Newman Kennedy, probably my bald head. I never met him. Mom told me that he was Irish and that either his mother or one of his grandmother’s was a Cherokee Indian or was at least part Cherokee Indian. [The only member of my father’s family that I have ever met was his sister-in-law, Belva Kennedy, and that wasn’t until I was almost fifty years old. Aunt Belva is a very sweet lady and she lives in the Riceville, Tennessee area. Being part Indian is "in" now and almost every family in East Tennessee and Western North Carolina claims to have a dab of Cherokee in their family tree whether it is true or not. I thought that my Cherokee heritage was doubtful, but I now have a photo of my grandmother Kennedy holding me when I was a baby and she sure looks Indian. In the only photo of my father that I have or have ever seen, he sure looks Indian also. If I am part Indian, it is a mystery to me just exactly what part of me is Indian, I’m bald [and when I had hair, it was brown not black], half-blind, slow as a snail and as white as a newspaper. However I am notional, so maybe that's the Indian blood in me.] For me, being a teenager was a miserable experience. I hated high school. When I was sitting at my desk in class, it felt like I had a giant screw worm inside my gut that just wouldn’t let me sit still and concentrate. What I was going to do after high school was a complete mystery to me. College was definitely out because my grades in high school were terrible. My step-father at that time, Harry Lett, thought that it was because I was just plain stupid and he seldom missed an opportunity to express that belief. Eventually, I began to believe he was right. The adults that were close friends with my mother and my step-father were all drunks. Mostly they worked as used car dealers, mechanics, race car drivers, bootleggers and bootleg drivers. One of their friends, Gene Majors, was a pole climber for the local power company and, as I recall, he worked on hi-tension lines. Gene was a nice guy and I liked him fine, but I didn’t think that I wanted to be that close to all of that electricity. I reckoned, if I really was stupid, I wouldn’t last a day before those hi-tension lines fried me crispy. At any rate, I did not want to be like any of their friends that I met. That was a very lonely and frustrating time for me: I had no idea which way to turn and I didn’t think there was anyone that I could ask for advice. None of my class mates confided in me that they also had such feelings so I figured every one else must have their life all figured out. Naturally, I thought that I was the only dumb ass in the entire school. [Later, I learned that most teenagers go through this stage. Very few have a specific "goal" that they are working towards. What a waste. Those teenagers that are working towards goals are very lucky indeed. I don’t know how our public high schools work now, but It seems to me that "all" teenagers need to regularly participate in some kind of "group sessions" where they can share their problems with each other. Perhaps part of the registration process for a high school freshman should include an Aptitude Test. Also, maybe every high school student should receive individual career counseling, "guidance", and re-evaluation at least once a year because they change so much during those years.] One day in September 1954, when I was in downtown Knoxville, I decided to stop at the US Army Recruiting office. "What the heck," I figured. "Why not. I’m walking right by the place anyway." Prominently displayed on the wall was a poster promoting the paratroops. The poster depicted paratroops jumping from an airplane. The main character in that poster had just jumped from the plane and his parachute had not yet deployed. He had a Tommy Gun [submachine gun] strapped across his chest above his emergency parachute. The expression on that paratrooper’s face as he exited the door of that plane sold me on the paratroops right there on the spot. He had a grin on his face, well maybe you should call it a smirk. He seemed to be thinking that he could handle whatever happened or perhaps he just didn’t much give a hoot what happened. There’s no telling how much that recruiting chart cost the army, but it sure worked on at least one dummy — me. I signed up for the paratroops before I walked out the door, but there was one catch. The recruiting sergeant told me that being barely seventeen years old I was too young to sign the papers myself. My mother had to sign for me until I turned eighteen. After I walked out of the recruiting office, I thought, well Uncle Glenn, I took your advice. I’m out of the tanks." [But I was totally unaware of Uncle Cecil’s experience in the paratroops. I learned about Uncle Cecil’s experiences later.] While Uncle Cecil was in the stockade at Fort Oglethorpe, Georgia during World War Two, Cecil had been "volunteered" by his commander for a new commando unit. The army was forming this new unit at an old army camp near Helena, Montana. It was called the 1st Special Service Force [FSSF]. Among other things, the members of the FSSF were also put through parachute training. This unique outfit was usually referred to by its members simply as "The Force". Many years later, when I talked to Cecil about that outfit, he said, "That outfit was a bunch of eight-balls." I learned later that he was right. Most of the Americans were "volunteered" by their commanders while they were doing time in the local stockade. Their commanders were just getting rid of their misfits. Uncle Cecil had a bad habit of taking "unauthorized vacations". The same soldier, at the time I figured he was Uncle Cecil’s buddy, always came over to our house to go back to camp with Cecil. His buddy was always in uniform and he always wore a pistol and an arm band that had "MP" on it. Cecil’s "buddy" would leave his arm band and pistol at our home and he and Cecil would go out for the night together. The next morning, they would leave together for camp. Some American "volunteers" for The Force actually arrived in chains and under guard. Half of the outfit were Canadians. Canada had sent their best soldiers and they had all "willingly" volunteered for The Force. Cecil told me, "My company was fed a bowl of dry cereal and one cup of coffee for breakfast¾nothing else! We went on thirty mile speed marches with very heavy packs. When we finally got parachute training, all they did was show us the parachute and demonstrate how to put it on. Then they had us try on a chute. When we had the chutes on, they lined us up and marched us to the planes. Our instructor said, ‘Now we’ll show you how to use it. Don’t worry if your chute doesn’t open boys, the snow on the drop zone is ten feet deep. You won’t feel a damn thing either way.’ They loaded us onto the planes and we jumped. I made six jumps and the sergeant was right. The guys on the ground had to come around every jump and pull me out of the hole that I made in the snow when I hit." Uncle Cecil completed all of the Force’s training and he served with the Force during the Aleutian Islands Campaign. The Force also served in Italy and Southern France, but Uncle Cecil did not serve with them in Europe. After the Force returned to the states from the Aleutian Islands [I think it was in 1943], Uncle Cecil went home on leave and suffered a broken back in a car wreck on US70 in Dandridge, Tennessee. Cecil had accompanied his brother, Jack Allen, on a whiskey run that day from Cosby to Knoxville. Jack, who was my first step-father, died from his injuries. That car wreck was probably a blessing in disguise for Uncle Cecil. If he had gone to Europe with the Force, he probably would have been killed because they suffered 200% casualties in Europe. After their first major engagement when a German officer that was surrendering pulled a hidden pistol and killed one of their favorite battalion commanders, the Force never accepted the surrender of another enemy soldier. After that first engagement, the Force only took prisoners when ordered to do so for interrogation purposes. They didn’t murder the Germans that tried to surrender to them, they just told them to either fight or go someplace else. They patrolled every night and many of the force men left their shoulder patch on the forehead of any enemy that they killed while on patrol. As it turned out, this was a great propaganda tool. The Germans began calling the members of the Force the "Black Devils" because they fought mostly at night with blackened faces and because they were fierce fighters and took no prisoners. The Force became known as "The Devil’s Brigade" and a book by the same name was published about them which was quickly followed by a movie of the same name. The Force never failed to accomplish their mission and they never lost an inch of land after they took it. The Force never had a single soldier surrender and they never lost a member to "shell shock". The Force was feared by the Germans more than any other allied unit, yet they never had more than 2,500 troops assigned to their brigade at any one time. As tiny as that unit was, its reputation spread throughout Germany. [Sixteen years after World War II ended, the Germans still believed that the American paratroops in WWII were all blood-thirsty ex-convicts and that American paratroop units still did not take prisoners.] The Force had numerous wounded members who deserted from the hospital and returned to their unit long before the doctors had released them. The Force also had the worst World War Two military record because of their outlandish antics when their unit was taken off the lines and they were allowed some off duty time. Apparently, if it was against army regulations or any known law, somebody in the Force was doing it. Cecil told my mother about his experiences in the Force before I had volunteered for the paratroops, but no one had bothered to pass this information on to me. When I told my mother about my plans to drop out of school and join the army, all she said was, "Don, I’ll sign for you, if you promise me that you will finish high school while you are in the army and that you will not join the paratroops." Well that really put me on the spot. So being a typical teenager — I lied and agreed to her terms. When mom went with me to the recruiting office, the first thing she noticed on those papers were the words, "Airborne, Unassigned". [Unknown to me at the time, "unassigned" meant that I would automatically go to the infantry.] Mom asked, "What does airborne mean?" I jumped in and answered her question before the recruiting sergeant could, "Oh mom, that’s just the army air force." So, I lied again. She signed the papers and the recruiting sergeant never uttered a word. [The very next year I passed a battery of tests and received my High School General Equivalency Diploma. One out of two isn’t bad, right. Well, actually I did even better than that because I later passed the CLEP test which gave me credit for the equivalent of one year of college.] We had to be examined by doctors before we could be sworn in and sent for basic training. When I filled out the medical forms, I did not mention my back injury. Lying was getting to be a habit. Now I was on that bus heading for the 101st Infantry Training Division at Fort Jackson, South Carolina with about fifty other recruits. When our bus pulled to a stop at Fort Jackson, I noticed one very sharp soldier. He was well-built, wore a khaki uniform with bloused jump boots, and his hat was cocked down over one eye. His boots were so shiny you could use them for mirrors. The red and white patch on his shoulder had an "Airborne" tab sewn above it and a blue dragon in its center. [I learned later that was the patch of the 508th Regimental Combat Team-Airborne.] He stood out from the other soldiers like a wart on a beauty queen’s face. He was a paratrooper. There were quite a few enlisted soldiers mingling around the immediate area when our bus pulled in. As we unloaded they all shouted, "You’ll be s-o-r-r-y!” I thought they were kidding¾they weren't. They processed us through the Replacement Depot at Fort Jackson before we were sent for Basic Combat Training. The old soldiers called that place "Reppel Deppel". We slept in large canvass tents called "squad tents". There were large garbage cans between the tents and the sergeants awoke us each morning by rattling billy clubs around in those cans and yelling, "Drop your cocks and grab your socks! Reveille!” They made one heck of a noise. As if that wasn’t enough noise to wake the dead, a bugle loudly tooted some ditty from loudspeakers scattered throughout the camp. We later learned the words to that bugle call. They were, "Oh, you can’t get them up, you can’t get them up, you can’t get them up in the morning. You can’t get them up, you can’t get them up, you can’t get them up at all. The corporal’s worse than the private; The sergeant’s worse than the corporal; The lieutenant’s worse than the sergeant; and the captain’s worst of all. Oh, you can’t get them up, you can’t get them up, you can’t get them up at all." About thirty minutes later the sergeant’s yelled, "Fall-in for chow!” and I'll be darned if that bugle didn’t start tooting again. We also learned the words to that ditty, "Come and get your chow boys, come and get your chow. Come and get your chow boys, come and get your chow. Come and get your chow boys, c-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-me and get your cho-o-o-o-o-o-w." This and retreat became my favorite bugle calls. Apparently the army had a bugle call for every possible situation. First Call, Reveille, Mess Call, Work Call, Retreat, and Taps or Lights Out as some guys called it, were the bugle calls that were played most frequently and the ones that I can remember. We took several different tests while we were there. The army tested us in every possible way that a human being could be tested. We all ate in one very large mess hall. Over the front door of the mess hall they had a sign that read, "Take All You Want-". The first time we went through the chow line, the guys really loaded their trays down with food. When they were finished and about to empty their trays and turn them in, they discovered the other half of the sign that was hung over the back door, "Eat All You Take." For most of us, this was our first encounter with what the old soldiers called a "Catch 22." We soon discovered that army life was infested with Catch-22s. Beside the back door stood the biggest, ugliest man I had ever seen. At least, I think he was a man. If his face wasn’t clean shaven and his hair cut short, he could have passed for a gorilla wearing cook whites. Apparently, his only purpose in life was to enforce the second sign, which he did very efficiently. Then I understood why there was a "hyphen" on the sign on the front door. Heck, we hadn’t even noticed it the first time we entered the mess hall. It was here in Repple Depple where we first learned that one must be alert for the "hyphens" and Catch-22s in this cruel world. We were not allowed to dump any food into the garbage cans before we turned in our tray. Our trays had to be empty of food before we turned it in. Guys who had put out a cigarette in their left-over mashed potatoes or coffee really regretted that mistake because they either had to eat it, wear it, or hide it. One GI put out his cigarette in his mashed potatoes. He evidently thought that sign and King Kong [not his real name] were both a big joke. When he tried to dump his potatoes into the garbage can, King Kong grabbed him by the neck with one hand and scooped up the potatoes, cigarette butt and all, with the other hand. King Kong then proceeded to cram the leftover food into that recruit’s mouth. He also managed to smear it all over his face in the process. When King Kong released the recruit, that boy’s feet hit the floor running. Mr. Kong didn’t seem to mind cleaning up the mess and turning in the tray that the terrified recruit had dropped. Whether it is good, bad, true, or false news travels fast in the army and no one else in our group ignored the sign. Of course bad news and lies travel the fastest of all. King Kong never said a word during this encounter. The entire time that we were there, I never heard King Kong speak a single word. We weren’t even sure that King Kong was human. After King Kong helped that one recruit empty his tray, the "old hands" took less food and there was no telling what you would find stuffed in the napkin holder on the dining room table when new recruits arrived. [I did not witness the incident between King Kong and the recruit. I do not recall who told us about it. It may have been 'embellished' a little by the time we heard it.] Us East Tennessee boys didn’t seem to have a problem finding a place to put the chow, especially me. My relatives had sworn for years that I had hollow legs because of my well-earned reputation for putting away the food and I didn’t have an ounce of fat on me at the time. When I was playing football, I stayed quite a bit with my first step-father’s mother and sister, Alma "Mama" Allen and Helen Allen. It was not unusual for me to start breakfast with a serving bowl full of cereal and a glass of milk. Then I would top that off with six eggs, bacon, sausage or ham, a whole pan of biscuits smothered in sausage gravy [some folks call it "Sawmill Gravy"], and one or two more glasses of milk. When I think of those days, I always wonder how they fed me. Those two women treated me as if I was their son and I will never be able re-pay them. They weren’t my blood relatives either. A simple "Thanks" or "I love you" just doesn’t seem to get the job done. Since then, I have tried to show as much respect as possible to my In-Laws. When I entered the army, I was still a growing boy: Some called me a "late bloomer." As my mountaineer cousins would say, I was not yet "full-growed" because even though I was taller than average for my age, I was still as slim as a fence post. Folks said that I was stout and maybe I was, but I never made a fuss about it. I could carry a bale of hay in each hand or a bag of feed under each arm long before I was a teenager. When Uncle Edgar repaired and replaced fences and encountered a stubborn fence post, he would call me over and ask me to pull it out for him. If there were any field hands about, Uncle Edgar would bet them that I could uproot the post just using my hands. Uncle Edgar never bet much because he was a very religious man and the hands didn’t have much money. He only paid them about $25 a week. Me, I wasn’t showing off. I was just doing what Uncle Edgar had asked me to do. Anyway, Uncle Edgar did not let me in on the joke until afterwards. Mostly, Uncle Edgar was just teasing me and the hands. Uncle Edgar had a great sense of humor. It was what you might call a dry sense of humor, but boy was it active. The only problem that most of us East Tennessee boys had adjusting to army life was the army’s version of discipline. Most mountain people don’t hold with kowtowing as they called it back then and even though I was schooled in Knoxville, my ancestors had lived in the Great Smoky Mountains for two hundred years and I guess it was in my blood. Soldiers called it boot-licking. [That type of behavior later became known as butt-kissing, sucking-up, and brown-nosing.] It took me a very long time to adjust to two specific things. One was saluting an officer’s "rank" instead of the officer himself. The other was saying "Sir" to someone that was about my own age and later on younger than me. Those two problems, more than anything else, kept me from being promoted faster than I was. It also played a prominent role in my not becoming an officer. In the army at that time, the officers who got the most promotions were the ones who were the best at boot-licking. They were "Yes Men" because their shithead commanding officers did not want to hear the truth. You could only tell them what they wanted to hear¾nothing else was acceptable. [I firmly believe that damn no-win Korean War created that type of officer corps and they, in turn, created the army that we had during my service. Their effect on the army was most apparent during the Vietnam War. If anyone had analyzed how our army had been affected by the way our troops had been forced to fight the Korean War, maybe we could have avoided the Vietnam fiasco altogether. Of course I didn't serve in the Army during WWII or before so maybe it was the same way even during that war.] When I was four or five years old, my first step-father, Jack Allen, taught me to answer any questions that any stranger might ask about him with, "I don’t know". Jack did that because he was a driver for, Sam Poston, the biggest bootlegger in Knoxville at the time. That became a habit with me and it took me another twenty years to shake it. When an instructor asked me a question, I always answered first with, "I don’t know" and then I would answer the question. This drove instructors nuts and sometimes they would ask someone else to answer the question before I could add an answer to my automatic response of "I don’t know." Everyone must have thought that I was a real shit-for-brains. About two hundred of us recruits were assigned to take Basic Combat Training with H Company of the 501st Infantry Training Regiment on "Tank Hill." My platoon’s drill sergeant was Corporal Allen and our Field First Sergeant was Staff Sergeant Walker, both were East Tennesseans. The first thing they did when we arrived was to issue us our field equipment, bedding, and lockers. For some reason, this all had to happen in a big rush in order to please Corporal Allen. Corporal Allen quickly made it very clear that pleasing him was our one and only goal in life. That night, we had to practice "Fall In" and "Fall Out" drills because we were not doing either fast enough. Hell, we were never fast enough at anything, according to Corporal Allen. At reveille the next morning, we found out what happens to recruits, if they were not freshly shaved. The drill sergeants had the offenders lie on their belly on the pavement right there in ranks and clasp their hands behind their backs. They then made them rub their chins on the asphalt until they bled. No one forgot to shave after that. Even though I just had a little peach fuzz to shave, I shaved every night any way. That day we were marched to several different places. To us recruits, it seemed like we marched all over Fort Jackson to draw our clothes. At least it seemed that we marched all over the post, but we really had no idea how big that post was. "Individual Issue" was what they called it and they also referred to it as our "initial issue.". As we went through the line drawing our clothes, the supply guys would measure the recruit and then shove a bunch of clothes at him. "Sergeant, this is too small!” "Don’t sweat it kid, you’ll grow into it!” "Sergeant, this is too big!” "Don’t sweat it kid, you’ll grow into it!” The amazing thing is, most of us did "grow into it" because the skinny kids grew and the fat kids shrunk. After a few weeks of training, some of the guys who had been obese had to get re-issued new clothes that better fit their new bodies. I think they had to get their new issue before they left basic training, but I won't swear to that.. To me, uniforms were a comfort. A soldier never has to be concerned about selecting what he is going to wear each day. The army has already taken care of everything, including color coordination. Personally, I loved that. [Much later, I discovered that this was a serious problem for female soldiers. But of course, females always seem to complicate life anyway. It seems to be a God-given trait that we males are forced to endure or die resisting.] That night we had more "Fall In" and "Fall Out" drills, but this time we had more toys to include in our little game. We fell in on the company street when Corporal Allen blew his little whistle. By this time, we all wished Corporal Allen had that little whistle shoved up his ass. When that whistle blew we had to race out of the barracks and form in four ranks facing Corporal Allen on the company street. Once, some practical joker locked the screen doors after we came back into the barracks. The next time our little Corporal blew that damn whistle, we lost two screen doors. Forty eight hustling asses jammed the first two guys right through those locked screen doors. We usually had about one minute between formations and the uniform for each formation was different. It was also very creative. For example, we might be told that the uniform for our next formation would be jock strap, shower clogs and steel helmet — without the helmet liner. That’s all we would wear to that formation. We were the silliest looking bunch of people you could ever hope to see in your lifetime. It took all of my concentration to keep from laughing out loud in formation, which was definitely a no-no. One does not laugh while at the position of attention¾it seemed to disturb corporals something fierce. Standing outdoors wearing nothing but a jock strap and shower clogs was silly enough, but add a steel helmet without the liner and somebody will laugh. Hell, somebody has to laugh. When they did, Corporal Allen pounced on them like a duck on a June Bug. For the next formation, which was one minute later, we might wear boots, very baggy one-size-fits-all, GI-issue skivvies that had draw strings on the sides, our winter Ike Jacket, and fatigue cap with our footlocker carried on our right shoulder. This went on for hours and we repeated it for several nights. We could never get it right and we definitely never did anything fast enough to please Corporal Allen. I was beginning to dislike my fellow East Tennessean who wore those two little stripes on each arm. He was a tad too damn picky for me and his idea of a military uniform definitely lacked something. The medics gave us our shots, lots and lots of shots. I discovered that the army has a shot for just about everything and that some army medics were sadistic. One medic was giving the recruits in his line four shots simultaneously. He held two syringes in each hand and jabbed them into both shoulders at the same time. Naturally, the guys in his line were shaking like leaves on a tree in a wind storm. This jerk seemed to take great pleasure when one of his recruits would faint and fall on his ass and that was quite often some fainted before the shots and some brave hearts fainted afterwards. If you fainted before the shot, you were lucky because he gave you those four shots while you were out. My mama didn’t raise any fools that I know of¾I changed lines. I very quickly developed a dislike for tyrants and there always seemed to be at least one somewhere in my chain-of-command. Right then, I vowed that I would never become that type of person regardless of the circumstances. [During the next few years, I noticed that power affects many people adversely, especially those who have 100% control over another group of people. The personality of most of the people in control tends to change and they become more domineering and more violent. Some become more despotic and sadistic than others. But I learned that power did not affect everyone the same way. I also learned that the quickest way to salvage the average goof-off is to put him in charge. If he’s worth saving, the responsibility will bring out his good qualities. Most goof-offs were goofing-off because they were bored. They were bored because they were not challenged enough with their normal army life. Boredom is the military’s biggest enemy — not fear and not the enemy — just plain boredom.] When we were taking PRI [preliminary rifle instruction], they double-timed us to and from dinner. "Double-time" is the army term for jog. The army terms for meals are, "breakfast", "dinner", and "supper": there is no "lunch" in the Army¾nor in my neck-of-the-woods back home. Most GIs simply refer to any meal as "chow". Heck, we even double-timed in-place while waiting in the chow line to get into the mess hall. We double-timed through the front door, by the serving line and the tray turn-in point and out the back door. We double-timed in the front door and straight out the back door. We even double-timed in-place while we were waiting for the servers to put food on our tray. If you wanted to eat dinner during PRI training, you had to hold your tray with one hand and cram food in your mouth with the other hand before you reached the garbage cans. The military serves ice cream in tiny individually-wrapped paper packages. Thank God for small favors. We just stuck one end of that ice cream package in our mouth and squeezed hard enough for the contents to squirt out the other end. That company wasted a mountain of food on noon chow during PRI, but they didn’t waste much on me. Some guys just dumped their trays because they couldn’t stand the thought of eating like that. However, you might be surprised how much chow an East Tennessee boy can consume between those two doors under those conditions. I even had desert. Hell, I always had desert. The country boys made out just fine; even during this time, most of them were gaining weight while most of the city boys were losing weight. My 6’ 2" frame was finally beginning to fill out. One reason that I was thriving under those conditions was because I had spent several summers working on Red Small’s Dairy Farm and on Uncle Edgar and Aunt Jetta Truan’s Dairy Farm. Another reason was high school football. When I stayed with Red and Lola Small, we always ate breakfast together and it was always before daybreak. Their son, Jimmy, became like a brother to me during this time and to this day I think of him and Wayne Boatman, my other childhood buddy, as brothers. We all ate dinner with Red’s parent’s. Their home was also on the farm. Mrs. Small set dinner on a long table on the porch that had a bench down each side. That table was fifteen feet long and absolutely full of steaming hot, delicious food all prepared from scratch. Usually, we had biscuits, corn bread, green beans, pinto beans, onions, corn on the cob, creamed corn, two different kinds of meat, at least two different kinds of potatoes and greens. We drank iced tea or spring-cold milk straight from the cow: no pasteurizing and no homogenizing. They always had a yummy dessert saved for last. Most of the beans and greens were cooked with a thick slice of fatback in them for flavoring and the chicken was fried in homemade lard and man, it was lip-smacking good. The only person in the bunch who had any fat on them was Grandpa Small. That was only because he was just too old and frail to do much work on the farm anymore. The Smalls, like my grandparents, were very religious folks, but their hired hands were a tad less religious. Like most church-going southern folks, we had to say the blessing before we could eat. [The only prayer that I ever said before dinner on that farm was when I whispered a prayer for a short blessing.] Well sir, the first time that I ate a noon meal there, I looked up after the blessing and almost all of the biscuits had disappeared from the biscuit plate. Somehow those missing biscuits had relocated to the hired hands’ plates. This nearly caused me to panic because I’m real partial to scratch biscuits and Mrs. Small was every bit as good a cook as my Mama Valentine. Well, I wised-up real quick. From then on, I kept one eye open and one hand busy during the blessing. It was simply a matter of self-defense. That big table was crammed so full of food there was barely room for plates, silverware, and glasses, but there were very few leftovers. Hopefully, I did my part to make the Small women feel appreciated for working so hard at cooking all of that delicious food. Those country gals don’t mind cooking for a man or a boy or a female for that matter that has a hearty appetite and I have to tell you straight out, no cook has ever found me lacking when it comes to a hearty appetite. Most times, I’m even hungry when I’m feeling poorly, which isn’t very often. That mess hall back at Repple-Depple looked better everyday, even if King Kong was still on duty at the back door. At least we had been allowed to sit down and eat like humans while we were there and the food had been good. Each time that we held formation on our company street, we faced the Regimental Judge Advocate General’s [JAG] office. JAG was the army’s law office and it was directly across from our barracks. Periodically, they reminded us that it did not take very long to court-martial a recruit and to put them in the stockade. Some jerk would dart from the JAG office when we were in formation and ask Sergeant Walker, "Do you have any business for us today?" He would then announce, "If you do, we can have them court-martialed and locked up inside of an hour". The post stockade was just down the hill and across a small valley from us and we could see it from our company street. We could also hear the prisoners drilling every morning while we were still in bed. That’s how we knew the stockade prisoners had it even worse than we did. If the guys in that stockade had it worse than we did, we wanted no part of that damn stockade. Nobody in Hotel Company went to the stockade. Our cadre had a strange sense of humor. During formation one day, Sergeant Walker announced, "We need three volunteers. One for some excavation work we have to do and we also need a couple of guys to ride the range. If you have any heavy equipment experience operating shovels or if you are a cowboy or if you can ride or have experience riding the range, raise your hands!” Sure enough, three dumb asses raised their hands. One of the volunteers had operated heavy equipment in civilian life and the other two claimed to be cowboys. The sergeant handed the former heavy equipment operator a D-handle shovel and put him to work digging a 6’ x 6’ x 6’ hole. These holes became affectionately known as "six-bys." He sent the two cowboys to the mess hall to "ride the range." The mess hall crew cooked on several iron, coal-fired stoves during those days and those stoves had to be cleaned spotless inside and out every night. Those stoves were the "ranges" that our two cowboys volunteered to "ride/clean." To our credit, we never fell for the same trick twice. Soon, we stopped getting requests for volunteers because they discovered that none of us would volunteer for anything regardless of how they worded the job description. We were each issued an M-1, Garand Rifle that we kept locked in racks in our barracks. We quickly discovered that you did not call your rifle a "gun". The army, especially corporals from East Tennessee, frown on that term being used to describe rifles and pistols. Only "weapon", "piece", or "rifle" are allowed. One poor, unfortunate soul called his rifle a "gun"; he was forced to run about ten laps around the company perimeter holding his rifle above his head in one hand and his penis in the other hand. He was only wearing his stylish GI shorts at the time. As he ran, he had to yell, "This is my rifle. This is my gun. This is for killing. This is for fun". Each time he said "rifle" and "killing", he had to shake his rifle and each time he said "gun" and "fun", he had to shake his penis. He was the only recruit in our company that made that mistake. Like I said, we learned fast. We also discovered another no-no — dropping your rifle. If you dropped your rifle, you slept with it that night — not beside it — on it. You field-striped the rifle and spread the parts over your bottom sheet then you hopped into bed and slept on top of those parts. Most of the guys pushed the parts to one side of their bed after the corporal lovingly tucked them in bed at night. I never insulted or dropped my "rifle". I had already decided that I would always try to learn from the mistakes of others. It just seemed like it would reduce the wear and tear on my body, not to mention my brain. [Somehow, I could never seem to apply this wisdom when it came to women.] Except for the ammunition clip, the M-1 was a fine weapon and I came to love it. The clip held only eight rounds and the weapon automatically ejected the clip after you fired the last round. When the rifle ejected the empty clip it made a loud "ping." In combat, that very distinctive "ping" would tell the enemy that your weapon was empty. The combat veterans said that was when the enemy soldiers would charge you. One of our company cooks, a black corporal, slept in a cadre room upstairs in our barracks. He also was as "queer" as a three dollar bill and unfortunately, he had the hots for me. It took me a while to figure this out. He made me aware of his attraction the first time that pulled KP duty. They assigned me as the pots and pans man. As the title implies, I was responsible for washing all of the huge pots and pans. Sometime in the afternoon, this jerk sent me into the pantry to get something for him. That’s when he followed me in there and made his move. When I turned around to leave the pantry, there he was — right in my face. He moved in against me and breathlessly whispered, "I can’t take my eyes off your beautiful body. Having you is all I think about." I pushed him away from me and told him, "Keep away from me! If you come near me again, I’ll break your damn neck." Later, I heard a saying that went something like, "Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned." Apparently that jerk thought he was a woman because that was exactly his attitude. He sent every pot and pan that I washed back to be re-washed again and again. I finally finished the pots and pans late that night and was put to cleaning the floors with the rest of the KPs. He ordered all of us KPs to line up behind the big coal-fired stoves that had just been lit for the night baker. There was only about two feet of clearance at most between the wall and the rear of those stoves. That son of a bitch had an evil grin from ear-to-ear as he watched me — just me. My hillbilly mind was set, I was ready to stand behind those damn stoves until I went up in a cloud of smoke before I gave that son of a bitch the satisfaction of seeing me so much as blink. Apparently, the other KPs weren’t rock-heads from East Tennessee or the sweetie-pie cook hadn’t approached them as yet. Anyway, they started squirming and begging to get out of there. That sorry son of a bitch finally let us out from behind those stoves and released us. If I live to be a hundred, I will never forget the look in that son of a bitch’s eyes when we were behind those stoves. It was the epitome of evil and I strongly suspect that same expression was the last thing that the unfortunate victims of Speck, Gacy and Bundy saw on this earth. That was the last time that I pulled KP while I was in that outfit. Crawling on my belly buck-naked through a barn yard full of cow manure would have been a pleasure compared to how I felt about pulling KP duty. You could pay another trainee $10 to pull KP for you and you went through that day’s training with the rest of the troops. That was allowed then; it isn’t allowed now. Ten bucks was a hefty fee back then because we only drew a grand total of $78 a month to begin with. Ten bucks amounted to about four days pay. Lots of guys pulled extra duty to pick up some extra money; but not me, I never did it. [When I look back on that horrible experience, I realize now that I should have reported that cook to my Commanding Officer. When you are a raw army recruit and just barely seventeen years old, you have to be nearly killed before you will do something like that and I strongly suspect that is how those son of a bitch’s stay in the military.] During basic training, my company commander called me into the orderly room at least twice, maybe three times to try to convince me to apply for OCS [Officer’s Candidate School], but I refused: I knew that I was a naive country bumpkin and I also knew that I would never become a yes-man. Besides, I had already decided that I wanted to be a First Sergeant because even Corporal Allen and Sergeant Walker jumped when the first soldier spoke. [First Sergeant is the highest enlisted rank in a company. There were also many slang names for First Sergeant such as: First Soldier, First Shirt, First Pig, Top, and Top Sergeant are a few that I recall.] We also learned lots of new terminology, such as "midnight requisition", "GI Party", "Police Call", "field-stripped butt" and "butt can," For some strange reason, the army only issued each company one floor buffer. They issued each platoon one mop, one straw broom, one wood handle brush, and one push broom, if you were lucky. We could not properly clean a fifty-man barracks within the time allowed us with the equipment that we were issued. So, we learned to make "midnight requisitions" from barracks outside our company area. We also learned to padlock the rack where we hung our brooms and mops to protect them against soldiers from other units who were making their "midnight requisitions". Every morning, we swept and mopped the floors, cleaned the latrines, and pulled police call on the grounds in our company area. Police Call means to pick up trash in the yard: the trash usually consisted of cigarette butts that had not been field-stripped. When the sergeants lined us up for police call, it usually sounded like this, "Alright move out and pick it up! I don’t want to see nothing but assholes and elbows. If it moves, salute it! If it don’t move, pick it up! If you can’t pick it up, paint it!” That police call command pretty well sums up the army’s general attitude on everyday army life. By the way, in case I haven’t told you already, everyday army life is boring. We were required to either field-strip our cigarette butt or place it in a butt can [ash tray]. To field-strip a butt, you tore the paper, dumped the tobacco onto the ground, rolled up the paper and put it and any filter tip into your pocket. Butt cans were usually #10 cans that you got from the mess hall and partially filled with water. Every post in the barracks included a butt can hanging from a nail. Of course all of the nails had to be the same size and the same exact height above the floor. God forbid that you should be caught throwing a cigarette butt onto the ground without first field-stripping it. If you were, you spent the night digging a six-by in which you would bury the butt. Then, as soon as you filled the hole back in, you would be asked, "What brand of cigarette did you just bury soldier?" If you didn’t know what brand it was, you heard, "Well dig it up and find out! Start digging meathead!” If you told the sergeant what brand it was, you would hear, "I don’t believe you! Dig it up and prove it! Start digging meathead!” Either way, you couldn’t win. You still had to bury that butt twice. If you were lucky, you got to dig with a round-nosed D-handled shovel from supply. If you were unlucky, you used your entrenching tool. If you were considered a serious fuck-up, you used your mess kit spoon. In each latrine there was an ammunition can painted white. This can was mounted on a rack on the wall. On the side of the can was printed the words, "Pro-Kits"; I had absolutely no idea what that meant. Finally, one day Corporal Allen explained what pro-kits were and how to use them. "The pro-kit will be used after you have sexual intercourse to disinfect your dick inside and out. You squeeze some of the medication inside your dick and you rub the rest over your dick. If you get a pass while you are here, you must show your pro-kit to the CQ when you pick up your pass — no pro-kit, no pass." [I don’t remember anyone from our platoon getting a pass.] Every Friday night in basic training was GI Party time. When an entire unit cleans their barracks from top to bottom, inside and out, it is called a GI Party. Naturally, every Saturday morning in basic training is inspection time. The two go together like ham and cheese. That’s why on Friday nights we cleaned everything to include waxing and buffing the floors. Some of those old barracks still had exposed wooden floors which you had to sweep, scrub, mop, and bleach, but the barrack floors in our company had all been covered with linoleum. The rafters, beams, and braces were exposed and naturally, they too had to be washed down. The linoleum floors were cleaned, waxed and buffed. The platoons took turns using the one company buffer ¾ we rotated who got it first. If you weren’t the first or second platoon to get the buffer on Friday nights, you could forget using the buffer. Instead, you used your blankets to buff the floor. The easiest way that we found to buff the floor with a blanket was to put one guy on the blanket and have two guys in their sock feet pull him around the squad bay. Naturally, the larger guys got to pull and the smaller guys got to ride. Other men moved the bunks and lockers to make room for the buffer crew. The old wooden barracks were two story frame buildings. On the first floor there were two small cadre rooms at one end and a community latrine at the opposite end with one large open room in between. For some reason, the big room was called a squad bay, but actually two rifle squads were usually assigned to each squad bay. The upper level was similar except there was no latrine. A coal-fired furnace and water heater were located in a small room on the outside of the building next to the latrine. Cadre rooms were intended for use by the Platoon Leader, Platoon Sergeant and Squad Leaders. The troops slept on each side of the squad bay in metal folding cots that could be used individually or as bunks with the use of four metal "bunk adapters". Basic Combat Training is where most soldiers first learn military time. That’s where they also learn there are three ways to do everything, the "Right Way", the "Wrong Way", and the "Army Way". If you were in the army, you always did everything the "army way" which includes telling "army time." Once you get accustomed to military time, you discover that it is a much more efficient way of communicating the time than the civilian method. Military time uses all twenty four hours in the day thereby never repeating an hour. If you express Six AM or Six PM as Six O’clock, you can be misunderstood, but the same times expressed in military time are 0600 hours and 1800 hours, respectively. There is no way on God’s green earth that you can confuse those two. When expressing the time using the military system, you express it in hours from 0001 hours, which is one minute after midnight, to 2400 hours which is midnight and 1200 hours is of course noon. When a recruit is first exposed to army time, he usually resorts to counting on his fingers and toes. Most of us enjoyed bivouac week and rifle range week, all except for marching to and from the range ¾ that was a long march — at least it seemed to be a long march at the time. That was the first large caliber weapon that I had ever fired, but I qualified as an "expert" with no problem. Learning to shoot my .22 rifle must have gave me a good start. Before we marched to the boonies for our bivouac training, the company commander talked to us, "Men, some of you have never camped in the woods before and you therefore have never before bared your ass to the elements. You will shit while you are on bivouac. Don’t be afraid to bare your ass to the wind and wildlife. Constipation is the biggest problem with recruits during bivouac. You will shit while on bivouac damnit!” To a fellow that had long ago learned to shit under a tree or near a bush that produced large soft leaves, that speech was hilarious. The infiltration course was a different story. The purpose of this course is to expose the recruit to the sound of bullets flying over his head or to scare the crap out of you, I'm not sure which, maybe both. The trainees are marched into a long trench at one end of a field and at the other end of the field were several sandbagged machinegun positions. The machineguns were evenly spaced along the length of the trench. The gun barrels were sandbagged into a fixed position so that they would fire waist high and so they could not possibly slip and shoot any lower than that. In between the machineguns and the trench where we crouched were several rows of military style barbwire fencing. My squad was in the first wave to "go over the top" and crawl under the wire towards the machine guns. We climbed up out of the trench and went over the top of the parapet when the cadre blew their whistle. The machine guns had already begun firing over our trench about one minute earlier. Just as I reached the first of the wire, I remembered one other tidbit of information that Uncle Glenn had shared with me about the army. "When we went through infiltration training in Texas, we lost several men because they met a rattlesnake and jumped up and were shot." My eyes were constantly sweeping back and forth ahead of me while I crawled under that wire¾I was looking for a damn snake. We finally finished our basic training and were assigned to AIT [Advanced Individual Training] with two weeks furlough enroute. All of the recruits that were classified as "Airborne Unassigned" drew Advanced Infantry Training and we were assigned to A Company, 506th Infantry Training Regiment. Because everyone else was taking two weeks leave and going home first, I took my leave also. The total time that had passed since I had left home was less than three months, but for some strange reason, I just no longer seemed to fit-in anymore, not with my relatives, not with my former high school classmates, not anywhere. They all seemed to have changed a great deal in that short period of time so I reported in early to my next duty station. As I recall, A Company, 506th were all "Airborne Unassigned" volunteers. We did not have platoon drill sergeants like we did in the first eight weeks. One of our trainees was a corporal in the reserves and he was put in charge of our platoon. The promotion went to his head and he became even more chicken-shit than Corporal Allen had ever been. He threatened to have us crawl through police call on our hands and knees, if he found a single cigarette butt on the ground behind us. That did it for one recruit, I believe that his name was Marshall, he had taken all he was going to take. He was in the front rank and swung at the corporal, but the corporal ducked. With a loud, "clang" the kid’s fist hit the corporal’s steel helmet instead of the corporal’s jaw and that was the end of that fight. Private Marshall finished training with one hand in a cast. It was about this time that I began to learn about "goof-offs" and "eight balls." Goof-offs were the clowns that worked harder at not working than they would have, if they had just followed orders. It was a challenge to them. When the sergeant would count off men for a detail, he would have them load the truck when he tapped them on the shoulder. They would do as ordered and climb onto the truck. Then about half of the men, maybe more, would immediately crawl right out the front of the truck between the canvass siding and the truck cab and disappear. This continued until the sergeants finally wised-up and started writing down the names of the men that they assigned to a detail. Eight balls were soldiers who wouldn’t do anything right. They would deliberately do everything wrong. Eight balls are the guys who just seem to have been born to lose. The typical soldier knows when a sergeant yells, "Find a broom and don’t come back without it,” the sergeant does not mean it literally. An Eight ball knows that also, but he will take advantage of that remark and use it as an excuse to desert the army. You can rest assured the eight ball will make a feeble effort to find a broom, just to cover his ass, but you can also rest assured he will not find one and he will desert. An eight ball is always a goof-off, but a goof-off may not be an eight ball. A goof-off is merely an unchallenged or bored soldier that only requires a busier work schedule, a more challenging assignment, or more responsibility. No amount of supervision, no assignment, no amount of work load and no challenge can turn an eight ball into a soldier. About the middle of this training, we heard that several paratroops in the 11th Airborne had been killed when the anchor line cable in their plane had broken and their parachutes had not opened. We then heard about a large number of jumpers in the Eighty-second that had been killed not long before that. It seems that an airplane full of Eighty-second paratroops had lost power and fell to the ground right though a host of paratroops who had already jumped from the lead planes of the formation. Some of the jumpers were chopped to bits by the propellers while they were still hanging in their chute. Other jumpers were dragged down with the plane when their chutes were snagged by the falling plane. [After I arrived in the Eighty-second, I learned that the jumpmaster in the plane that crashed had gotten all of his jumpers out of the plane. He then realized that the plane was only about two hundred feet above the ground. That’s too low for the static line to open your chute before you hit the ground. It normally takes about 150 feet for your parachute to open. So the jumpmaster stood in the door and pulled the rip cord on his emergency chute which is worn on your chest. The wind stream (prop blast) caught his emergency chute and immediately popped it open and jerked him out of the plane just before it crashed into the ground. The jumpmaster survived. All of the crew died in the crash. The crew chief was wearing a chute and he could have followed the jumpmaster’s example, but he was more afraid of jumping than crashing, so he died.] The next morning after news of the disaster spread through our company, guys lined up in front of our orderly room in droves to waiver their application to become a paratrooper. At that time, I didn’t even know what an anchor line cable was and I didn’t care how many guys were killed parachuting. My only thought was that I had enlisted for the paratroops and I’m going to be a paratrooper, come hell or high water. In case you are unaware, let me take this opportunity to inform you that hillbillys have a head like a block of granite, trust me on that. We went to the boonies for two weeks during the middle of the winter. We did not have winter field equipment. The winter of 1954-1955 just happened to be the coldest winter for the Fort Jackson area in many, many years. We were issued paper-thin "summer" sleeping bags. Whoever sold the army summer sleeping bags should have been shot and the officer that approved their purchase should have been stripped buck-naked, covered with jelly and fed to piss ants — feet first! In warm weather, you don’t need a damn sleeping bag and in cold weather, summer sleeping bags are worthless. Every night we were in the boonies, I covered up with everything that the army had allowed me to take on that bivouac and I still shivered all night long. For two weeks, I was chilled to the bone and shivered almost non-stop. Everyone was cold, but that didn’t help me. Sharing misery just doesn’t do a thing for me. [It still doesn’t. However, it seems to be Dorey’s (my current wife) favorite medicine. Dorey seems to dearly love passing misery on to someone else, but most especially me.] Some of the trainees were able to sneak out of camp and return to the barracks because no one pulled guard at nights and no one bothered to take headcount or roll call for several days. When our National Guard Corporal inquired as to the whereabouts of a recruit, someone else told them that they were on this detail or that detail. The only ones that were missed were the ones who were still gone when we packed up to return to the barracks. Their tents were the only ones left standing. That was a bit obvious. The cadre in the second half of training aren’t as efficient at controlling troops as the cadre in the first eight weeks [BCT]. At first, I thought that they were not as dedicated to their job, but it was more likely because there were fewer cadre. In BCT our company had four or five cadre not including the 1st Sergeant or Company Commander, but in AIT our company only had one cadre, the Field First Sergeant. Our Field First Sergeant was a tall, lanky, black, airborne-qualified staff sergeant. When I got back to the barracks and into a hot shower, my hands and feet really hurt. They felt like they were full of pins and needles, but I would not go on sick call. Most of the guys who went on Sick Call were not really sick, they were goof-offs. I did not want to be labeled a goof-off. [Unfortunately, this attitude stuck with me through out my military career.] We nearly froze on that bivouac. In all honesty, I can not recommend living in the eastern part of the Carolinas, especially the Fort Bragg, Fort Jackson or coastal areas. Their weather is unbelievable. [This experience still adversely affects me to this day, especially during cool weather. For no obvious reason, the blood will suddenly rush out of my fingers and toes. It mostly affects my fingers and sometimes this happens when the temperature is only in the 70s. This really caused me problems during the winters for the rest of my military service and still bothered me even after I retired. Apparently the army must have had a considerable number of other GIs who had this problem because the doctors finally gave it a name, Raynaud’s Disease or Raynaud’s Phenomenon and Walter Reed Hospital even came up with a treatment that supposedly cures almost 90% of the cases. I really don’t fully understand this disease. The best that I could understand what causes it is I had been so cold for so long, my brain decided that I was trying to freeze my body to death. So my brain took emergency action on its own to save the body for which it was responsible. Maybe that’s just a nice way of saying that I was crazy.] When I was still in AIT, I figured that the army was a good deal because every day in the army is like Sunday on a farm, especially a dairy farm. An infantryman’s job during peace time could be made comparable to a dairy farmer’s life though. Let’s see now, you would have to eliminate the infantryman’s annual vacation, weekends off and holidays off. You would also have to eliminate his pension and medical benefits. You would have to change the infantryman’s duty hours-he would have to work from 0500 hours to 2000 hours on Monday through Saturday. Then on Sundays, he would have to work from 0500 hours to 0800 hours and again from 1600 hours to 1900 hours. That is milking time. Those cows don't care what day it is, they need to empty those sacks twice a day every day. Last, but definitely not least, the infantryman would have to conduct all of his training in fresh, ankle-deep, cow shit.
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