The next morning wasn’t pressing for a change. We woke up after the sun had started to rise and were greeted by its rays beaming through the barracks windows. This place was no longer our home. We had to leave. The drill sergeants came through and told us our bus schedules and where they would be. Mine was leaving around nine or so and Lawrence’s was leaving shortly afterward. We finished packing our gear into our duffle bags. Dressed in our class C uniforms with a slight chill in the air now from the November weather we walked over to the mess hall one last time and I made sure I signed the correct roster. I didn’t want to mop the supply area one last time before leaving, but I don’t think that would have happened anyway. We ate our breakfast, and then got our duffle bags out to the waiting area by the street. It wasn’t long the buses turned the corner and slowly ambled their way to a stop in front were all the remaining guys had gathered. It was a civilian carrier. Perhaps Greyhound or Trailways, I don’t remember. I, and several others, got onto the bus. It appeared as I got on that this bus had already stopped at a few places on base. Remember, this was a large base and our company wasn’t the only one graduating boots the day before. The bus was about full. I waved goodbye to Lawrence and asked him to keep in touch. He and I had exchanged home phone numbers just in case. This also led to a kind of kinship between my mother and his. They kept each other informed of our whereabouts from then on.
The bus made a couple of more stops and was full by then. We were a bus load of guys heading for the same place, but to different schools there. The bus driver informed us this would be a fairly long drive to Oklahoma through Texas by way of Dallas-Ft Worth. So the trip began taking me to my new home for another eight weeks of training. It was the latter part of the week. Thursday, I think. We traveled through Louisiana where the terrain was much similar to home. Pine trees, small towns and such along the way would lend to making me homesick in a way, but I was excited about finding new people to meet as well as being a bit apprehensive of what this new training and all would be like.
Once we got into Texas the view started changing and it eventually went from thickly populated forests of pines to open plains with small bushes and jack rabbits. I’d never seen such large rabbits in all my life. The only other animal I hadn’t seen before came along as we traveled. Armadillos were spotted occasionally and some were of the flat variety. The bus driver told us they tended to get run over often enough. The sun started going down as we approached Dallas. We had to go through or around Dallas. I don’t know exactly where we were. But I do remember this. As we were going along this street we came to a light and the driver had to stop. The bus shut off and would not restart. The batteries were dead. So there we were. We guys asked if we got off and pushed the bus would it restart that way. The driver seemed to think it would. So we all got off and as we gathered on the sidewalk waiting for the rest of the guys to get off we looked down this hill and we saw this football team playing under the lights down there. The driver came over to see what we were looking at and he then told us that that was the Dallas Cowboys practice field and that must be the team doing some practice time. Wow, I thought. I never watched football, but this was amazing to be seeing a national football team firsthand albeit from a bit of a distance away. They were at least a couple of hundred yards away.
After this fascination was over the job at hand had to be done. So all of us got along beside and behind the bus and the driver got behind the wheel and we started to push. Fifty or so guys grunted and the bus slowly moved forward and gained speed. Fortunately it was a slight downhill grade and the bus started to roll and in a short distance the engine came back to life. We all shouted victoriously and climbed back aboard and we continued our journey into the night heading north now to our destination.
Sometime before midnight we arrived at Fort Sill, OK. It was sort of like an oasis in the desert. It is still there and I figure it hasn’t changed that much, but it sits in the open plains amongst small mounds rising up from the flat ground with what I called fair sized bushes. I later learned that people around there called them trees. What I meant about Fort Sill being an oasis was that the base was the only place I saw real honest to God trees. They lined some of the streets and yards surrounding the buildings. But for the most part once you left the base the starkness of the terrain came back.
The bus driver dropped us off at this huge building and we were all herded into it. It was much different than when we reported to Fort Polk. We were now treated differently. We were processed in by our orders into groups. I found myself with a group of guys over by the way who were waiting for a bus to pick us up to take us to our new home. When the bus finally arrived it was midnight, but we had been processed and had something to eat so all we wanted to do was find a bunk and pile in. We knew we wouldn’t really start training till the following Monday. Now it was Friday morning as we arrived at our new home. It was a much nicer barracks than the previous one I lived in. It had linoleum floors and individual showers on both floors. Finally. Something with a bit of privacy. The bunks, stacked two high, had mattresses that were twice as thick. We had closets instead of trunks at the foot of our beds. And one other thing I noticed that was different. Our bunks were parallel to the wall. I thought it kind of odd really. There were clean sheets and blankets on the bunks so we made our beds after a brief encounter with the Charge of Quarters sergeant and went to bed.
The next morning bright and early here came this new drill sergeant through the building clamoring around to get us awake. After eight weeks of being awakened in such a manner gave us to a quick response to his method of getting attention. I’ve tried to remember his name, but I can’t. I did research, but as of to date I can’t find anything. What we did know about him after his introduction was that he was tough as nails, black, and was known as the “singing drill sergeant”. Later we found from a news article that he was also a night club singer, performing on weekends in town and even back in Korea when he was stationed there. He started in on us that morning and the next day, giving us only Sunday to let our wings down to rest. We couldn’t understand why all the hard core stuff. We’d been through this already and thought they’d ease up a bit now, at least. During that weekend we introduced ourselves to each other and learned who our bunkmates were, but this class was not full, so there were empty bunks in the building of which I had one of those. I found a smart way of doing things now. I made one of the bunks so tight you could literally bounce a quarter on it. It was the top one. I slept in the bottom one and when I got up in the morning I stripped the bed and locked the bedding in the empty wall closet that would have belonged to my bunkmate. This way I never had to make my bunk in the morning. That cut some time off of my getting ready time. We all spent our weekend putting our gear in order, hanging our uniforms in the closet, folding underwear, rolling socks up and such. During this time the drill sergeant handed out assignments to each of us. Certain things and areas in the barracks were given to us for the duration of our stay. Mine was to keep the down stairs shower stalls spotless. Now that didn’t seem to be such a hard thing to do, but all of us had to wax and buff the linoleum floors every Saturday and if necessary take a toothbrush to the seams around the tile to get the dirt out of the cracks. So this is how it all started.
Come Monday morning, the lights came on at five and we hauled ourselves outside. It’s cold outside now so we got into our fatigues and field jackets and got into formation in the parking space toward the side walk behind our barracks. Here we are huddled in the cold and the drill sergeant comes out in his fatigues all starched up and no jacket. We all kind of glance over at each other wondering what that was all about. Not totally knowing who this man is yet, we don’t dare ask. All we’ve experienced thus far didn’t lead any of us to ask questions of him. One thing was for sure. He was about to turn us on a column left and start marching. As he did so he said he’s going to sing his cadence and he expected us to follow him in tune or else. What else are we going to do? Learn to sing, I supposed. I only knew how to play drums. Anyway, there we go down the street and he starts singing and we attempt to do the best we knew how and he “encourages” us, so to speak. We got louder and continue to march and then we did a bit of running, but not much else. The running was just to keep us on our edge. I didn’t want to lose what I had going on here too soon. Running in the cold didn’t really last long anyway. Not with field jackets on anyway.
After the run we went to breakfast we got back to formation and we marched to a huge building inside a fenced in area about three blocks down the street from the barracks. There were a lot of trucks, trailers, containers and the like outside. The lights were on inside the building. The drill sergeant halted us and told us to walk inside single file and find a seat. Inside was a large open area and chairs in a classroom order, so we took our seats and that’s really the last we saw of the drill sergeant for the morning. Instructors for the classes came out and ran us through the drill we would be going through to become missile crewman. In the brief moments when no one was directly speaking to us we could see civilians working on some components that appeared to be about the size of a small trash can only not round, but more like curved on one side and flat on the other. Everything, as you can imagine, was olive green, like us.
Not to get too much into the technical stuff I’ll just introduce you to my next eight weeks. All the classes pertained to the missile. I’m sure this missile has been decommissioned now, but even at that anything I’m writing about here is really superficial information. I learned that the missile we were to be manning was an inertially guided missile. The guidance system had to be programmed by a computer in a compartment probably 12 feet wide, 8 feet deep and about six feet high. It sat on the back end of a trailer with a launching boom on it. The computer ran around the walls inside leaving just enough room to get in and sit with a small table shelving around the seated level. The missile was transported to the firing site in three containers on a trailer behind a deuce and half tractor. The computer box and boom trailer was pulled behind a five ton tractor. Both trailers were thirty feet long. There was one remaining trailer that was a box trailer carrying spare parts for the missile. The rest of the crew would be in a jeep or three quarter ton vehicle.
This missile could be fitted with a conventional warhead, CBR or nuclear. As you can imagine we were being sent to areas in either Korea or Germany. Both places were guarding against a communist country. You do the math on which warhead we used. Let me just say I was very careful about the idea of what we loaded on the front end of that missile.
To one unanswered question that you may have at this point. Where was I going for my duty station? When we arrived at the battery we learned there were two batteries in training and the routine was that one battery would always be four weeks into training when the other arrived, so it was staggered for training facility purposes. When we arrived we found out the unit four weeks out from us when we arrived was going to Korea and our battery would be sent to Germany. I was so happy for that. I always wanted to go to a European country. My mom’s dad was German as I’ve said and I wondered what it was like there. This is something I looked forward to. I had no idea where in Germany we’d be, but I was ready to go.
