The second half started out a bit rough with that march to the field that Monday, but at least now we were on the downhill side of boot camp. We were beginning to realize the front the drill sergeants were putting on. It was part of the training to get us to become a team. Instead of being a bunch of individuals operating on our own to get through we had now become a team helping each other to make it so all of us made it through. Our morning runs were now going longer distances. We were averaging four to five miles in the morning most days of the week in combat boots and fatigue pants and t shirt.
All the map reading classes, shots, gas chamber and learning our standing orders and such were becoming easier or done with. Now we were moving on to rifle qualification, learning to throw a grenade properly, without blowing ourselves up. And then the infamous bivouac was coming up.
But first, we’d been trained enough now to trust on guard duty. For one night a handful of us were picked to do guard duty around the base. This was one time being a driver didn’t pay off if I wanted to go to bed at night. The guys did two hours on and four off, but I was up every two hours to drive the replacements out to their posts. One of the posts proved to be a boon for two or three of our guys. They got to guard a barracks with girls in them. I caught one of them coming out a window when we went to post one time when I went out to change the guard. I hope he had fun. I didn’t.
One event worth mentioning was a form of group self disciplining. We had one young black guy who would not bathe. He was lazy and we could tell not a good upbringing. He slept on the top bunk in the third squad upstairs midway the left side of the room. One night he woke up and had to go pee. Instead of going to the head, he slid his legs off the side of the mattress and just peed down, unfortunately into the boots of the guy who slept below him. As you can suppose that set off a firestorm between the two of them. We broke it up, but the next day we all got together and agreed he needed a lesson. We decided he needed a good scrubbing. So that night after everything got quite the fire guard woke us all up and we got our very rough bristle brushes and drug him out of his bunk. We muffled his mouth to keep it quite and we took him down to the showers. We turned on the shower, got him wet and soaped up and each of us in groups took turns scrubbing him hard with those brushes until he was turning red. Needless to say he was very sore the next day, but we never had any more trouble out of him. When it came bath time he was there and his clothes got washed regularly from then on.
I’m not without my own little trials. One Sunday morning I went to the mess hall for breakfast and while I was eating one of the drill sergeants came in and looked around. There was almost a room full of us. He shouted out that as soon as we were done eating we were to report to the company area outside and stand formation for police call. Well, I was not to be out done. I was already dressed in my class C’s and didn’t want to get caught in this detail, so I slipped out quickly, looked around and didn’t the drill sergeant, so I took off to the backside of the barracks and made it quick step towards the opposite direction of the company area, but after about three or four barracks I looked down towards the other end of the barracks and low and behold, there he was. The drill sergeant saw me skip out and made it posthaste down the other end of the barracks opposite me and was hot on my trail. We our eyes met it was over. He came down between the barracks and met me on my end yelling at me and made me get down and give him twenty pushups, but it didn’t end there. I was right back to that company supply area with a mop bucket and mop, mopping that floor again. This was my second time doing that stupid floor. But when I was done I was off to find something to do for the rest of the afternoon and the drill sergeant never mentioned it after that. I wasn’t going to bring it up either.
More often than not my driving the ambulance had its up side. I only had to take one guy out of the field to the hospital for heat stroke. He looked bad, but I enjoyed turning on the flashing light and speeding my way along the trails back to the main base.
When we started qualifying with our rifles I had mine in tip top shape. We practiced on groupings at 25 meters and then went on to 50, 100, 250, 400 and 500 meters targets. I got pretty good at it. The M-16 was a recoilless rifle as noted previously with a twenty round clip. A banana clip would hold a lot more, but twenty was standard. The day finally came and there I was on the firing line. One target after another. We had 100 rounds and 100 targets. I hit well into the expert range of my targets, so I’d gotten the medal for and Expert Rifleman. I was proud. I could hit a 500 meter target without the aid of a scope. Hunting back on the farm paid off.
Then the day came for bivouac. I dreaded that because it meant getting out in the field, setting up a pup tent with another guy, eating, going on patrols and crawling through the machine gun obstacle course. But wait! I was a driver. Hey, when they called my name and said I would be driving a dual wheel stake bed truck hauling chow to the field that meant only one thing. I wasn’t going to stay in the field. I’d be sleeping in the barracks at night while the rest of these guys were out there in the woods with the snakes and bugs. The only bug I might find would have been a bed bug. And on top of that the second night it began to rain. HAH! I talked to some of the guys and they said they forgot to dig a small trench around their tents and when hit began to rain the water ran right through under the tent and wet their sleeping bags. When it got dark they had them out in the rain running around in the brush hunting the enemy. They were told this was good for them. To me. . .I was sleeping away in my bunk. Not a care in the world. God must be smiling on me for sure. The closest I ever got to what they were experiencing was one of those days we were in the field for fire training and it rained about all day. Keeping your weapon dry was enough of a chore, but they brought our chow in large cans and served us up our food in paper plate with plastic forks. The food? Soup. I’ve never been so frustrated as trying to eat soup on a paper plate with a fork.
But back to the field. The last night of bivouac was the big night. I actually got to sit on the hood of my truck and watch live 60 cal and 50 cal machine gun fire with tracers rat-a-tating over the heads of the guys while they crawled under barbed wire in the mud. I just sat and smiled to myself. Nobody ever said anything humorous about me volunteering to drive anymore after that. They all wished they’d stepped forward. I remember one night I was lying in my upper bunk when my squad leader on the bunk below me made fun of me and kicked my butt through the mattress. He kicked so hard it raised my bunk up off the corner posts and I fell down on top of him. He got his comeuppance on that. He was the first to not make fun of me anymore.
I have to come back to something right quick here. At mid training we lost our drill sergeant. He went out into town and got into that fight I think I’ve mentioned and we lost him and then we got SSgt Cifelli. He tried to start on us like we’d just started boot camp, but it didn’t last long. By the sixth week we got an off base pass. He just took us aside and gave us the keep it safe and stay out of trouble talk. I was ready to see the world again.
It was an interesting weekend. The bus to town would come through the base on its run and as many of us as could would board the bus and ready ourselves for a new adventure. This was our first time as budding soldiers to venture into civilian territory where we once roamed about freely. We’d learned discipline, self control, respect, yet we were about to test those new found integrities we were taught. Well, you’ve seen the movies. Soldiers go to town on leave and end up in the brig from drinking and brawling. It could have ended up like that, but I personally had other intentions. What struck me sorely was the abject poverty of the outskirts of town where the bars existed. The sidewalks were still literally boards cut and nailed crossways running a line down the street in front of the buildings and that were nothing more than run down shacks. People looked at us from those boarded sidewalks as though we were fresh meat for the pickin’s. I thought to myself that I dare not get off the bus at any stop along this way. My hard earned pay was less than sixty dollars and I wasn’t parting with it or letting someone help me part with it. The bus rolled on through to a much more civilized section of town. The streets were paved with concrete sidewalks finally. I kind of breathed a sigh of relief when the bus stopped in front of the town’s USO. This was a safe place. It always is, I assumed. And right I was. Once inside I found many soldiers much like myself playing games, watching TV, scarfing down hot dogs and hamburgers made by civilian hands instead of the mess hall cooks. One plus I found was that particular day there was a troop of performing girls had come to town to entertain the guys at the USO. They sang and danced and there were several of them. Enough of them that I got a chance to finally talk to a female for the first time in weeks. It was nice and I was respectful, to be sure. I didn’t want any trouble that would get me into something back at the company. So, all in all, the weekend turned out nice for me and from all counts the rest of the guys got back to camp without incident. Dull, huh?
That next week while in training the Senior Drill Sergeant came and pulled me from training. He said I had family visiting on their way through and they had asked permission to see me. Now here I am twelve hundred miles from home and I had family come to see me? What on earth is that all about, I wondered. The Senior Drill Sergeant was going to give me an overnight pass to visit with the family. I was shocked that he would do so, but I didn’t have an inkling of who had come to see me. Well, I was led to the picnic area down to the end of the block from the company area, which was next to the chapel. There stood Rufus Walker and his wife, Edna. I knew him, but in all my life I never knew I was related. I’ll say more about that later. I did know him as a preacher and his sons Dalton and Webster Walker. Anyway, he and Edna greeted me like a son and we walked down under the trees in the picnic area after I told the Senior Drill Sergeant I didn’t feel the need to stay away overnight and I would be back in a bit. The two of them looked me over and commented on how well I looked and began to tell me how everyone missed me and such. I really had no personal connection with them other than they were from back home and I saw them at church or community gatherings. When I was in the 4H club Dalton and his wife, Robena were the organizers and overseers of the club and we met at their house just down the road from Rufus and Edna’s. But, I stray, so let’s get back to this moment. At some point Mr. Rufus as I called him got serious with me and told me Vickie was running wild and causing a lot of trouble for herself and I needed to distance myself from her. He told me she was bad news wrapped in a pretty package and that was all. I couldn’t yet agree with him. The process of parting with her wasn’t yet complete. Once our visit was ended he and his wife prayed for my safety and we parted and I went back to becoming a soldier and they went on to visit relatives that lived in the Lake Charles area as I understood it. I did appreciate their visit very much. I just didn’t want to let the other guys think I was getting special treatment.
We were winding down now. We had just a couple of weeks till graduation. The press was on now to make sure we were able to pass the GT test. This was the several exercises we were to take to prove we were physically able. Some of these things were simple, such as the grenade throw and such, but we did have to run an obstacle course. The hardest part I didn’t look forward to was the one mile run. We were told we had to do this in no more than six minutes and three seconds. Three seconds? Oh well. Maybe it was our hedge on the six minute mark.
As this time neared one bright sunny morning we were all at our fittest now, we donned our fatigue pants, t shirt and combat boots and got into formation. We did our column right into the street then column left and walked down to the corner of the block and did a column right again and once the company had completely gotten onto that street the drill sergeant called double time and then into a run. That day we ran seven miles non-stop. All of us were repeating cadence without a one of us hardly breathing hard. I remember this day so clearly even to this day. I remember it because the guy who dropped out in the beginning of our training had lost close to eight inches in his waistline. He was as fit now as the rest of us. Fit to the point when we turned back onto our street he ran out ahead of us to the company area where the drill sergeants couldn’t see him do so. So, when we got back to the company area, there he stood waiting on us. But since the drill sergeants hadn’t seen him run ahead, they made him run around the block one more time. It was kind of ironic our training was ending for him much the same fashion as it had started.
Then the unheard of happened. One morning around two or three the lights in the barracks came on. We were all called out of our bunks to attention by our foot lockers. Remember “Full Metal Jacket” with Pyle eating a donut? We all stood there in our boxer shorts and t shirts. The drill sergeants in all the buildings of our company were doing the same thing to those platoons. Then the announcement came. A weapon was missing from the cage. A missing M-16 that belonged to one of the soldiers had gone missing the day before and now they had determined it wasn’t misplaced and they called all of us out of a dead sleep in our underwear to tell us this. But that wasn’t all. The barracks were all setting on brick pier with no underpinning as you may be able to see in some of the pictures. We were all marched outside and commanded to search for this missing weapon. We were looking everywhere including crawling under the four barracks buildings in skivvies. After about a half hour to an hour of this we were called to formation, dirt and all. There we stood. We took a verbal beating for another half hour to see if anyone looked guilty other than the individual who was responsible for that weapon. But nothing turned up. And we were allowed back to bed for about another hour or so after we cleaned up. We were all scared to death that none of us might not graduate because of this.
