Military Draft -- part 3 -- Basic Training

We left off leaving Reception Station at Fort Jackson, South Carolina. The month was still November, and the year was still 1964, but some time on that bumpy Army school bus trip to Fort Gordon, Georgia, I realized how far a little over a week had taken me from civilian life. No hair to speak of. My few civilian clothes stuffed in a gym bag in the bottom of my duffel bag. Baggy OD (stands for Olive Drab) fatigues, stiff new combat boots, funny OD baseball cap. Name "BROWN" emblazoned on a white strip of cloth (the color of the strip of cloth changed to OD just about the time I was getting out of the Army -- a concession, evidently, to the fact that the white was visible to snipers) above my right shirt pocket, and "U. S. Army" in a sort of bronzish-gold on a black strip of cloth above my left. Nothing had been laundered yet, so everything we wore was still stiff with sizeing.

We looked, individually and collectively, like a real bunch of sad sacks, losers, green recruits. And, it also occurred to me on that bus ride, nobody back home had a clue where I was, except that I was "in the Army". They probably thought I was at Fort Dix, New Jersey, where most people from the northeast were sent for Reception Station and Basic Training, but here we were on an Army school bus going from one Godforsaken southern red-dirt state to another, from one set of Army yellow barracks to another. In Reception Station we had not had access to phones (this would continue in basic training as well) and we didn't have an opportunity to write letters home -- further, we were informed that it wouldn't do any good anyway, because people would not be able to write back to us where we were with any expection that the letters would be delivered.

Lest anybody read this and not realize that this represented a fundamental change, it did. I was -- everybody was -- suddenly not anyone's property but Uncle's. Not mom's, not girlfriend's, nobody but Uncle owned our OD asses, Uncle didn't have to tell anyone where he was keeping us, and nobody could do a damned thing about it. (We had heard at Reception Station about what happened to guys who were so foolish as to attempt to get their elected officials to intervene in their behalf -- I don't recall what it was that was supposed to happen, but it was dire beyond belief.)

I have to admit that I have no recollection of any visual difference between Fort Jackson and Fort Gordon. Furthermore, since this was November, there was a strong bond of smell between the two places. In both places the barracks were heated with soft coal furnaces, and both camps smelled strongly of soft coal smoke. The smell was sort of a perverse petit madeline for me, and it took me several days to figure it out, but the odor of the smoke was very reminiscent of tear gas -- and it permeated the places.

I think I will beg forgiveness at this point on the basis both of advancing age and the fact that the events I'm writing about took place more than 40 years ago, I didn't keep a diary while they were occurring (dumb mistake), and I never thought we would reach a point as a nation where more or less universal military service was not an assumed rite of passage, at least for males. An awful lot of my basic training memories really are no longer in the sequence they actually occured in. It's clear that the product of basic training is different from the raw material, and there are stages in the process that are discernible, even after this many years, but the details will occasionally be scrambled.

I do remember that we were assigned to Company F, 3rd Battallion, 1st Training Regiment: F-3-1. We began to learn the phonetic alphabet by being advised that we did not refer to our company as "F Company" but as "Foxtrot" -- the phonetic word for the letter F. Within the company we were sorted into four platoons of four squads each. With the last name of Brown, I was in the first platoon along with around five other guys named Brown, who were with me in the second squad. We met our Drill Instructor, SFC (stands for Sergeant First Class -- a five-striper) named Sergeant Nitzche.

He was actually a surprise. I had been expecting someone more in the drill instructor mold -- in fact the other platoons had sergeants who were more in that mold -- but Sergeant Nitzche was reasonable soft-spoken and aside from occasionally reminding us that we were both the scum of the earth and "American Fighting Men" he was a pretty good guy. I guess he was in his forties or early fifties. In retrospect, I suspect he was a Korean War commissioned officer who had been RIFed (Reduction In Force) who had decided to stay in the Army as a non-commissioned officer while retaining his Reserve commission and continuing to accrue retirement benefits on that basis. There were a few of these guys around, and they lent an air of gentility to an otherwise rough environment.

It occurs to me that I still haven't said anything about what we DID in basic, but this is background, and I guess once you grasp the image of these pitiful, ill-costumed, bald-headed recent-civilians in new Army suits struggling with huge and heavy duffel bags a quarter of a mile from where the bus dumped us to our new barracks, to be greeted by our Sergeants, who would have considerable control over our lives for the next couple of months, it may be time to end this post and come back with more details.

Military Draft -- part 2

Well, so long Woodstock, hello Nam!

That, I suppose, would be what anyone hearing that I had been drafted back in late 1964 would think the next words out of my mouth would be, but they would be wrong.

First of all, the United States had at best a very limited presence in Vietnam at the time. Second, in a two year draftee hitch, lots actually has to happen before you become cannon fodder -- if you ever do.

Back in Liberty, NY, on the morning of November 18, my parents drove me to Monticello, the county seat, where the local draft board was located. There were a few other males in my age bracket there, perhaps five or six.

I found myself sitting on the Short Line bus with Phil Ardito, a guy from Roscoe or Livingston Manor whom I hadn't met previously. He seemed like a pleasant enough guy, although it was pretty clear that he had not been to college and had never heard of Woodstock as anything except a spot on a map. I seem to recall that he did some kind of work in the manual trades, but I don't remember exactly what. We talked a little bit on the bus ride to NYC about whether we would get passes to go home from Fort Dix (NJ, where we both assumed we were headed) for Christmas, and about factory work, where I now had a little background to talk from.

When we pulled into Port Authority Bus Terminal, I found myself more or less in charge of our little group simply because I had lived in NYC for a couple of years and could find our way down to the Whitehall Street location where draftees were processed. No problems. They had provided us with subway tokens in Monticello, and we used them without mishap.

We each had a little gym bag with us to hold our limited personal effects (mainly toilet articles as we had been encouraged to bring no extra clothes, but which also did include a New Testament we had each been handed (regardless of religious orientation, if any) before we boarded the bus in Monticello. We followed the signs in the Whitehall Street building that directed "inductees" -- our current status -- up the stairs, through some perfunctory paperwork (since they already knew whom to expect) and a physical exam.

Not much excitement yet. It was a second physical exam for all of us, since we had been subjected earlier in our lives to a pre-induction physical at the same location. We noticed that we had become part of a larger group -- perhaps 30 to 50 of us -- as the day went on. Not all of us were draftees. Some had enlisted, and some were reservists or National Guards people who were also signing in at this time for their six months on active duty.

A bored-looking lieutenant swore us all in as a part of a not particularly impressive ceremony, and the first surprise of the day came as they told us that we would be travelling by train that night to Fort Jackson, South Carolina, for "Reception Station".

I think we were all expecting to go to Fort Dix, NJ, so this was a little bit unsettling. I remember being somewhat unhappy, since I had met a girl who went to Bard College at my going away party in Woodstock, had hoped to see her on weekends, and clearly would not be able to do so if I was in South Carolina. There was not a lot that could be done about it -- other than walking away from the group while we were enroute to Penn Station, which would not have been particularly difficult to do, really -- so soon we were on a passenger train headed South.

These were pre-Amtrak days, and the train was pretty shabby. No question, it was old enough to have carried troops in World War II and had carried many civilian passengers since those days. Phil Ardito and I had acquired a third guy to hang out with, and I led the three of us into the train car and claimed what used to be called a private room. Not bad: three berths, four seats, evidently a loo under one of the seats through which you could watch the tracks roll by.

The rest of the guys filled the other private room on the train and most of the rest of the car, which later was made up into sleeping car berths. Just like in the movies from the 1930s, except the dining car, such as it was, was not fancy, was not particularly clean, and we got sandwiches for dinner. There were some jokes about Army food, but we all realized that we were being treated just like any other overnight travellers on our nation's railroads, and, in fact, a lot better than some, because we actually had beds to sleep in. Okay, berths.

It seems to me that we sat on the train, going nowhere, for about six hours in Rocky Mount, NC. Then we were hooked to another train, and finally we stopped in Columbia, SC. Here, it became a bit more like the Army and a little less like a recreational train trip in a third world country.

In South Carolina, there were sergeants in fatigues to hurry us off the train and into some military busses (like school busses, except painted olive drab), and, as soon as the roll was called and it was determined that none of us were still on the train, to yell at us a little.

Even this was pretty mild. We had all seen lots of movies about Army life, and were aware that the Army employed sergeants to yell at recruits. Okay, I guess I was a little suprised that the sergeants used "fuck" as a noun, a verb, a participle, an article, an adjective, an adverb and a conjunction when addressing us, but I definitely knew the word and I can't say that I or anybody else was much shocked by it. At that point I realized that I should have brought a pen and notebook so I could record some of the expressions. They were gramatically creative as hell, and I really wish that I remembered some of them.

By the time we assembled at Fort Jackson, I realized that our little band that had left Monticello a couple of days earlier had now grown into a basic training company of around 240 men. We were sorted alphabetically, so Ardito and Brown ended up in the same platoon. Predictably, we were the first platoon. However, there were now at least five guys named Brown -- perhaps more -- and I discovered that our squad included people from Rhode Island, the Florida Panhandle, upstate New York, and a dozen places in between.

We were all still in civilian clothes, and I have to say that we must have smelled pretty bad by this time, since it was now three full days since we had left home wearing them, and no matter how low stress the whole process had been, it was still unfamiliar enough to all of us that there had been a little bit of nervous perspiration.

We were put into barracks -- two story wooden structures left over from World War II, heated by soft coal furnaces -- told to find a bed and sack out. They got us up at 4 AM, not surprisingly, and we were then exposed for the first time to one of the most important lessons in Army life: the fact that we were sufficiently unimportant in the larger scheme of things that we would be expected to hurry up and wait.

We did a lot of that during the four days we were at Fort Jackson. There were tests to take -- very important tests if one was concerned where one was going to end up during one's Army life, but I think I was one of the very few who intuitively realized that it was as important -- maybe more important -- to try hard on these tests than it had been to try hard on the college boards. Most of the guys basically blew the tests off. Some, no doubt, actually died as a result. But that was much later on.

There were uniforms to draw. Four sets of fatigues, two web belts, two pairs of combat boots, one pair of low quarter black shoes, six pairs of boot socks, four pairs of socks for the low quarters, six sets of white boxer shorts, six white tee shirts, a fatigue jacket, two baseball caps, two dress uniforms, what was called a "cunt cap" (in polite conversation, this was to be called an overseas cap but absolutely nobody ever called them that), a flying saucer hat (the round thing like marching bands wear), an overcoat, four white terrycloth towels, two white terrycloth wash cloths, a laundry bag, a duffel bag, an overcoat, a rain coat.

We finally had clean clothes, and I have to say I was very, very happy to be wearing a uniform. I really stunk by that time.

We got military haircuts -- probably before we got the uniforms -- and I found that I, with my longish hair, and a guy named Jack who had gone to the Rhode Island School of Design and had hair that was more than longish -- were sorted out of the unit while the barbers flipped coins to see who would get to shave our heads. I was only the second prize; Jack was the first prize. Still, except for the feeling that these barbers did not expect any tips, it wasn't that unpleasant. Considering that we also had not bathed in several days at this point, I have to admit I wasn't all that sad to be rid of my very greasy hair.

We were also given dog tags. The process worked like this. In a large room, perhaps a dining hall, a sergeant would scream out your name. ("Geoffrey" was not a possible name in an enlisted Army setting in those days, something that actually worked to my advantage, so I got to guess when I was being called. Fortunately we were always called in alphabetic order so I knew who I was.) We would yell our service number (US51550342, in case anybody wonders. You never do forget that number, even thought I don't think they use service numbers any more.) and the sergeant would confirm the number against the paper on his clipboard. Then he would yell "Religion" and you would yell your religious preference back.

The responses were interesting. A large percentage of the guys yelled "Catholic". A good many yelled "Baptist". I had been raised as a Methodist, although I had not had anything to do with organized religion for around seven years at that point, but rather than improvise on what to yell, I yelled "Methodist" when my time came. As the list rolled on, a couple hollered "none" for religion. Heads turned the first couple of times. A couple of guys yelled "Jewish" and heads turned for that response as well.

It turned out to make no difference. When I got my dogtags, the line for religion said "none". I took that as a sign of divine intervention. Anyway, I already had learned not to rock the boat by telling the Army a mistake had been made. I also learned that I had type B blood, and that I was the only white guy in my platoon with type B blood.

We finally got to write a letter home, but we were cautioned not to assume this was where we would be staying, and in fact we did not stay there. There was considerable speculation among us about where we might be going. A few optimists allowed as how we would surely be going to Fort Dix now. The guys from the Florida Panhandle seemed to feel that Fort Polk, LA, was a sure thing. The true pessimists said we were sure to be sent to Korea as a unit, to be stationed on the 38th parallel, especially now that winter was closing in. Nobody mentioned Vietnam.

At any rate, with the tests done and the uniforms acquired, we were done with reception station. We had been soldiers now for around seven days. Somebody pointed out that "we" had only 723 days to go -- and discussion erupted as to who was smarter: the draftees, who had 723 to go, the National Guards and Reservists, who had about 173 days to go, or the Regular Army enlistees who had so long to go that I don't believe they actually even calculated their time left. They just looked really sad at this point.

With that, we staggered under the load of our new duffel bags onto military busses for the trip to Fort Gordon, Georgia, where we would spend basic training.

Now, here is the reading comprehension part of this test. In the preceding material, identify three experiences that would be beneficial for anyone presuming in later life to lead this nation or a portion of it. (Hint: any moron can find at least five.)

Basic Training comes next.....

Military Draft -- part 1

Geezers are supposed to think about their Army days on some day in their military lives when something dramatic happened, or, lacking (as I did) much dramatic to think about, on nationally sanctioned days such as Memorial Day.

It's kind of interesting. Back in the 1960s, if you were a guy, your life decisions revolved around the draft. Concepts like finishing college on what my daughter refers to as the "five year plan" weren't viable unless you were physically infirm or psychologically deviant because taking a couple of semesters off would blow away your student deferment. So you started college the autumn after you finished high school, and with the exception of summers off, you marched right through and graduated in four years, ready or not.

Then a new set of issues arose. Grad school? Well, that meant the possibility of more student deferments. However, if you did get grad school deferments in something like business, nobody would hire you when you got out until you had "completed your active military obligation" as the corporate recruiters put it. Getting a graduate degree in the humanities was presumably even worse -- and I didn't even investigate that alternative as a consequence.

So, you got your MBA and watched the infirm and elderly among your classmates start work for the hot companies at what in those days passed for inflated salaries. A few got as much as $20,000 a year, I think! I was a little deviant politically (at business school I had done my master's essay on the decline of union singing, performing my presentation on the guitar, wearing a blue work shirt and red tie with my business suit) but was physically in good shape. With no more convenient deferments, I had anticipated that the draft would catch me instantly, so I went to stay in Woodstock, NY to wait with friends for the axe to fall.

I guess I need to put a month and year on this now so that the even-then fast-moving world situation can be correlated to what was happening to me, so this was June 1964.

Expecting the draft board to be in touch with me immediately, I pursued pleasure as my objective for a few weeks. At that point, someone suggested that I contact an Army Reserve unit about joining it "just in case something broke loose somewhere in the world" so I did. They told me that they would be glad to have me but that they didn't know when they would have a vacancy. Imagine that today: an Army Reserve or National Guard outfit at full strength that was actually turning away applicants!

Having done that, I returned to Woodstock and started working short-term jobs. Honestly, this was a real learning period in my life, and I don't begrudge a moment of it. Let's see. I was an expeditor in a machine shop for about a month. (That didn't last because I lacked subject matter knowledge of machine work -- last contact having been 8th grade shop, and business school does not equip you for work "on the floor".) Then I teamed up with a guy to paint a house. Then I washed some dishes at the Cafe Espresso on Tinker Street. Then I got a job assembling injury moulages (I'll write something separately about this experience. It was pretty esoteric) part time. Around the same time I got a night job operating a surface grinder in a small, non-union machine shop.

During my non-working hours I had as much fun as I was physically able to have. That fun would fill several blog articles, and a public discussion of it would likely make quite a number of ladies now in their late fifties and sixties upset. I guess it would anyway.

Around September, the summer crowd began to drift away from Woodstock. The college students went back (for the guys it was to keep their draft deferrments, and for the girls, I guess it was because the college guys were going back) and I found myself drinking with an older crowd.

Honestly, it was a good crew. The abstract expressionist movement had partially colonized Woodstock, and several of the luminaries of that movement were still there. Even if they were too prominent to display at the Woodstock Artists Assn anymore, they were still at the openings, and still participated in the social life of the town. Where there were painters and sculptors there always seemed to be poets, actors, and musicians as well, and frankly, that whole group knew how to raise hell. At some point we got a jug band together, called ourselves "VanWinkle's Rippers" and started playing wherever people might be willing to listen.

It was late September before it occurred to me that time was passing. The Reserve unit had called to say they had a vacancy for a truck driver, and I had declined the offer simply because some young lady whom I can barely remember now had my pretty much undivided attention at the moment and I would have had to leave within a week to do my required six months on active duty had I joined the Reserves. That was a sacrifice I was not prepared to make at the moment.

Finally, in October, more out of curiosity than anything else I called my draft board to see if they had forgotten about me. They said they had not, but that there were a couple of hundred guys ahead of me, and I wasn't likely to be called before March or April the following year. They mentioned as well that I could always volunteer for the draft and get taken within the month, but that sounded a bit, well, immediate. I thanked them, hung up, and decided to think about alternatives to the draft.

I discovered almost immediately that I could become some sort of priest candidate in a small denomination called the Old Catholic Church that had a diocese centered right in Woodstock. The Bishop was a good guy, I thought, and aside from the fact that I had no religious inclinations at all at the time, it sounded like a pretty good deal, especially since it would make the military go away as a prospect permanently. The Bishop noted that the military did not call on his denomination to provide Chaplains.

Around the same time there was talk of going to Canada to avoid the draft entirely. I guess I never pursued that option because I didn't know anybody in Canada, and as Summer ended in Woodstock, it occurred to me that Canada was likely considerably colder. I also was really having fun.

One evening in early October I was sitting with some of my acquaintances, mostly men in or on the periphery of the arts who had been in World War II, in Buckman's, one of Woodstock's two bars at the time, discussing what men who had been soldiers, sailors, and members of the Merchant Marine talked about in those days. (Interestingly, the conversation was no different from conversations I had been involved in at bars in American Legion posts with steamfitters, truck drivers, and house painters.)

The fact that the men in Buckman's were all on the extreme left end of the political spectrum did not distinguish either their recollections of their military days or the way they talked about them from the guys at the American Legion post, who generally fell at the other end of the spectrum is a coincidence I'll talk about later. (Actually, I'm still not sure I understand it.)

Anyway, there were some new faces at the table in Buckman's that night, and I didn't pay much attention to who they were. A girl I was occasionally seeing at the time came in, recognized one of the men, and spoke to him. Later, the girl and I and the man had another drink at the bar and I learned in that conversation that he had been romantically connected with the mother of another girl whom I had found fascinating, perhaps. And the mom definitely gave great parties!

A week or so later I had decided to stop by at Buckman's to see if anything was going on. The older guy from the preceding paragraph was sitting at the bar, and I recognized nobody else, so I sat down to have a drink with him.

It was a quiet evening, and we drank and talked for several hours. We talked about his experiences in World War II as a Marine in the South Pacific (I later was to learn that he had been very, very modest in recounting his own exploits) and the subject of my impending draft call came up. I told him that I was uncommitted and had been thinking about getting out of the draft.

We talked some more. I learned that he had spent a good part of his youth in Woodstock, and was an actor -- when he could find work. I learned that he had not been finding much work of late, and that he felt he was probably drinking a little too much. Maybe a lot too much.

He had plenty bad to say about the military. Most I had heard before. Yet there was a strange sense that as bad as it had been, it was not an experience he would have given up. I do remember asking him what he would do if he were in my situation.

"I'd go." he said. He didn't add any qualifications to the statement.

At some point later in the conversation, I realized that I had made the decision to call my draft board and ask to be drafted as soon as possible.

"I think I probably will." I had said.

Finally we both staggered out of the place and went our separate ways.

The next morning I called my draft board through my hangover and asked them to move me up in the draft. They were very obliging.

A month later I was the guest of honor at a great party hosted by the woman with whom the guy in the bar had been romantically involved. I have to say that for assorted pacifists, anarchists, fellow-travellers, and others on the left end of the political spectrum, they gave me a great send-off to go be a soldier.

The next time I saw the guy in the bar it was on a movie screen. Lee Marvin, decorated Marine war hero of WW II, had made an acting comeback, cut back on his drinking, and married the mother of the girl I had my eye on who was also the woman who had hosted my going away party. If I had ever seen him in person again, I would have had to tell him that he was absolutely right.

Dropping Lee Marvin's name was not the point of this post. What I wanted to do was suggest the place the institution called the draft held in America back before the Vietnam war heated up.
There is nothing like a misguided military adventure to discredit an institution that in itself probably on balance is a benefit to society. I am wondering what institution will suffer from the adventure in Iraq.