Dad took me to the airport and saw me off to Charlotte. That was my stopping point to Columbia SC, home of Fort Jackson. Charlotte was a fair sized airport at the time. It was much bigger than Raleigh’s airport by far. I didn’t have long to wait and I was off again. Fort Jackson reminded me somewhat of Fort Polk. It was old, yet I don’t believe as old and Fort Polk.
I found my reporting area on the base and was assigned to a barracks. Some of the guys I went to school with showed up and we got ourselves a corner in the barracks from the others so we could kind of watch our stuff. This was before pee tests for drugs and soldiers coming in were apt to be from any level of live. The draft wasn’t discriminate in who it chose. You got there primarily because you had a birthday. We spend several days there waiting and processing. Most nights we spent at the movies or writing letters. We’d do most anything to keep ourselves busy and our minds off of our impending trip across the Atlantic. Probably my most memorable moment there was when I came in one afternoon and one of the guys going with us was sitting over on the left from our group with a brown paper bag clasped over his mouth and he was breathing in and out hard enough to collapse and expand the bag a bit like there was something in it. The sheet on the bed had a big spot of black on it. As I got closer I saw a box and a bottle. It was Kiwi shoe dye. On his other side was a partial roll of toilet paper. It was then I experienced my first encounter of someone huffing, and of all things it was shoe dye. I looked at this guys face and he looked like he was having a heart attack. His face was ashen and his lips were blue. I had no idea huffing could do this to someone. I supposed that this practice was to bring you to the brink of death and once you pass out you stop the madness of killing yourself and your body takes back over and brings you back from stupidity. For some reason I remember being quite angry with this guy, but he was too far gone to understand why I was angry with him. All I’d ever experienced to that day was drinking liquor or beer. I’d never been around anyone “doing” drugs, so to speak.
The day finally came. We’d gotten our marching orders telling us where we were going. All of us in about three barracks were loaded onto buses and were told we would be taken to an air base in Charleston. There we’d be boarding a civilian charter airline and would fly non-stop to Frankfurt, Germany. What we weren’t told then was how long this flight would take. Something else I wasn’t aware of was how far this bus ride would take either. I wasn’t much into geography, so I had no idea Columbia was a ways from Charleston SC. We rode on until after dark. When we got there our flight was waiting on us. We checked our duffle bags and took our carry-on with us and eventually after our orders were checked we boarded the plane for our flight.
Once we settled into our seats and the plane took off the captain came on to tell us the usual. When he got to the flight time and said we’d be flying for seven and a half hours my mind went into gear. How does a fully loaded passenger jet fly that long? Can it really carry that much fuel? I must be good on mileage. My analytical mind was buzzing. But what can I do about it if my figures don’t add up. We’re going anyway, so I started to settle back. We hadn’t been in the air hardly fifteen minutes it seemed and the pilot came back on and said if we look to our right, as he dipped left a bit, and said we could see Wilmington Delaware below. Hummm. Now I knew that wasn’t right, but thanks for letting me see Wilmington NC one last time as we wing our way to a foreign land.
I did do a little calculating though. We left Charleston on a seven and a half hour flight and we were something like six hours behind where we were going. That means night would get over with pretty quick. Having left around eight in the evening meant we’d be getting there about ten in the morning their time. The flight was pretty much uneventful. I slept as much as possible, because I knew I’d probably be up a while once we got there. I did have at least seven hours to sleep. Well possibly anyway.
It didn’t seem like long before the sun was up and I could look down from our lofty 36 thousand feet and see land below, so that was good. We were told by the captain that we would be landing soon. Everyone on the plane was now starting a buzz. The excitement of being in a foreign country was becoming reality to us. It wasn’t long before we were told we’d be landing in a few minutes and we had been given clearance to land. After a bit we began descending and we went below the clouds. As we broke through below it was amazing. We could finally see the city of Frankfurt and Rhein-Mein Air Base. The approach to the landing strip went over the autobahn and the morning traffic was very heavy. Our plane was very low. Low enough we could make out the cars on it very easily. Being that we are in the time frame of 1971 you can imagine what the most popular car might have been. Some of the guys were showing their ignorance of cars while they were looking out the window and commenting in such excitement that this country must love Volkswagens because there were so many on them on the road. The more informed of us began laughing at these guys for not knowing that this car was practically the nation’s standard car for the people aside from the Mercedes Benz. At least that took our minds off of the moment temporarily as wheels squealed as they hit the ground and began to roll us down the strip. We were now on terra firma in Germany. My first thought was I can start the countdown to going home as of that moment.
We unloaded from the plane and there were military people waiting to direct us. We were to start processing the next morning, so we were led to billeting so we could drop our bags. Once this was done we got back together and told we had freedom to go into the city that evening, but we were to be back before eleven and be in our beds. So a bunch of the guys I went through school with took off for town. We wanted to see what it was all about. This is where I started a more avid drinking policy. Our first stop was a small bar. Of course it was German, so we ordered up beer. My first beer ever was a Beck’s beer. By the time I had finished it I already had a buzz on. This stuff was powerful. Of course I wasn’t a full fledged drinker and I don’t want to make anything of this except to say I was young and wanting to try new things. I had always been the nursemaid to all the guys in the gang back home. I was always what we call in this day as the designated driver. I was the one who sobered everyone else up before they went home so they didn’t get into trouble. Now, I wasn’t responsible for them and I didn’t have a car to drive, so I was good. No DUI’s to worry about getting, either.
The next day we were processed and I remember it well. They got us that had been trained for the Sergeant Missile together. They told us the missile was being phased out and all of us were not needed to fill slots around the country for this missile. So, they called some names and I wasn’t one of them. Drats. What and where was I heading now? Those of us that were left they started asking questions about any other skills we might have besides what we were trained for. I spoke up that I could type and do office skills and looking down their list they stopped at a spot and marked it. They said, okay, we have somewhere for you and by the way, it’s a missile unit, only not the one I was trained for. One other guy whose last name was Burlage was told to get together with me, that we were both going to the same battalion. This is my first hearing of the 6th Bn, 52nd Air Defense Artillery. It was a command under the 69th Artillery Group of the 32nd Army Air Defense Command. It was a NATO unit. Their missiles were Hawks. Hawks were surface to air missile designed to shoot down enemy aircraft. Most of the units were stationed not far from the Russian buffer countries. Mine was twenty minutes fly time from Czechoslovakia in the Bavarian area. The headquarters battalion was right next to the 69th Arty Group in Wurzburg. This city was about a two hour train ride south of Frankfurt. Okay! Now I get to ride a train. I’d never done that before.
So Burlage and I got another nights rest and early the next morning we got our bags and someone took us to the Bahnhof. Okay, let’s learn German. After all we’re in Germany now. This is the word for train station. We were directed to the correct loading area and got onto our train. This was not only an adventure of a train ride, but I don’t think Burlage and I were about to be wowed with the countryside along the way. It was magnificent. There were mountains, valleys, villages, towns along the way and all the people. The people were different than in America. They worked the fields differently, they dressed differently. We were still in our uniforms for traveling purposes so we stood out like sore thumbs. They were polite enough to us, though. I really hadn’t thought about what to expect from them.
When we arrived in Wurzburg we found ourselves in a very large city. Oh and one other thing. We had yet to have seen the sun. It had been overcast since arriving and it was a bit dreary, but I was so enthralled at the country the weather hadn’t been something I thought was unusual.
We caught a cab to the kasserne called Emory Barracks. Kasserne is another German word of course which translates to barracks. What the United States did after WWII was establish our presence in Europe by using the same barracks that were used by the German Army during the war. So, here we were inside a completely walled in fortified compound. That was my assessment anyway. The MPs directed Burlage and myself to the battalion headquarters and we walked into this building to the left of the main gate. It was a two story building that had been completely redone inside, yet retained its old exterior. The first floor was like an open foyer with stairs to the left leading to a balcony with offices across the back section of the building and to the left and right of the open areas upstairs. Downstairs was much the same. The commanding office was directly center the second floor balcony. Names escape me now, but he was a Lt Colonel and he was kind of wimpy looking to me. He didn’t seem to fit the character I expected of his rank. Now the Executive Officer or XO as we called them was a Major who was overweight, but looked more the part. From there the only one I remember was the chaplain. He was from Dunn North Carolina and was Baptist. He was on gung ho guy. When he came in everyone knew he was there. His office was down stairs to the right just as you go into the hallway.
Well, we reported to the CO and the XO came in with the chaplain. They looked us over and determined that Burlage would go to a battery and upon finding I could type, they asked me what I did in high school. I told them I worked on the high school newspaper. The COs eyes lit up for some reason and after rubbing his chin a second he said something to the effect that I would do till they got an Army trained PIO. I had no idea what that meant. But they gave me the office across the hall way from the chaplain on the front side of the building downstairs and told me to read up on my new temporary duties. So I spent the rest of the day sitting in my office finding out I was responsible for gathering news about the battalion, photographing events, and typing it into newspaper format and printing it. I had no idea how to do photography at all. Little did I know about gathering news. But I did know how to put a paper together and printing it on a mimeograph machine. I certainly knew how to do the artwork. So there I sat as the command’s new Public Information Officer or PIO. It seems I had some work cut out for me.
