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.