THE RECRUITING DEPOT

The recruiting station in downtown Los Angeles was another adventure. When I arrived, it was very crowded with young men and women and there were some nice military people in crisply starched uniforms to greet us. At this point I was still Mr. Fink and had not taken the oath. I was given instructions to be at the main depot early the next day, given some meal tickets and a room in a cheap, but clean hotel. The night in the hotel was exciting for an 18-year old on his first night away from home!

There were almost 100 recruits in the hotel and almost all of them had never been away from home before. Some were “worldly” and wanted to “show their pals the ropes” in the big city. Los Angeles is a big noisy place full of all the excitement a person could stand. As I said, I was young, but not foolish and I didn’t look for trouble, just stayed in my room and tried to get some rest.

I was also scared, although I wouldn’t admit it. There was a lot of yelling in the hallways and some of the military police came up to calm everyone down. Most of the noise was party type noises, I guess the other guests, if there were any other guests, and those unsmiling military police didn’t appreciate happy people.

The next morning it was obvious that some of the young men had gotten very drunk. Some didn’t feel to well at all! Our first task was the physical. We were stripped to our shorts, inspected, poked, prodded and basically made to feel inferior to other humans in the building. The medics drew blood, checked for bugs, made noises in my ears, showed me a chart full of unpronounceable words, took another inventory of my parts and pronounced me in good health.

REFORMING YOUTH

Finally, we arrived early one morning about sunrise. The Air Force boot camp was quite a surprise. We had not been on a military post before so the groomed lawns, shinny cars, freshly painted buildings and strait-as-an-arrow streets were a big change from what we had just left. Not a piece of scrap paper in sight, no overflowing trashcans and no one lying around the streets. There was lots of room between the buildings and no parking problems.

Because I had watched so many movies I was expecting John Wayne and instead we got Barney Fife! We were bused from San Antonio to Lackland and a diminutive sergeant in a smoky-the-bear hat met us at the bus. The first thing he did was yell in a squeaky voice to “get off of the bus and form two rows”. He then pulled out an old wooden clipboard and began calling our last names. He tried to get us to march as a group, but we were un-trainable at this point and the best we could do was walk without falling down.

It was November and all of the Sergeants really wanted to be home for the holidays. It was 1960 and the pay was miserable for career men who were trying to raise a family. The only thing they had going for them after the Korean experience was a house on base and a nice family to spend time with. We were interrupting the good times they had planned, but they didn’t hold it against us.

Two sergeants were assigned to change us from an unsightly, disorganized group of long-haired teenagers into a razor sharp fighting machine! Well, at least that was the theory.

The first thing that happened was to purge anything “civilian” from our minds and bodies. All those “valuable possessions” I was so careful to bring along were the first to go! Pack them up and send them home. We had to stay in our civilian clothing for a couple of days before we were issued uniforms, but they did give us a haircut. The civilian clothes seemed to really bother the two sergeants, but we really didn’t care. We were given half-a-months pay ($38) in advance to cover “expenses” over the next few days.

The barbers were kind and asked the men with really nice hair dos’ how they would like it cut. After the men replied with the style that suited them, the shears cleaned those skulls off slick-as-a-whistle in about 15 seconds. To add insult to injury we had to pay $.25 for the haircut! Next came a 5-minute trip to the exchange to purchase our essential items. Shaving gear, marking pens and letter writing materials were recommended. No candy, sodas or magazines were allowed!

The sergeants gave us a big break due to the holidays. Somehow we had been sent to them by mistake! It was a long-standing rule that the drill Sergeants would be off duty between thanksgiving and the first of the New Year. But, the cold war was in full swing and the Russians were acting up in Europe. Vietnam wasn’t far away either, Cuba was only 90 miles away and Uncle Sam needed some fresh troops. Somebody forgot to tell the sergeants what the plan was I guess.

Our group was composed of about 30 guys from LA, 30 from the Detroit area and five from Iowa. Three completely different cultures trying to live together! One of the guys from Detroit told us the way to escape the Sergeants eye was to “blend in”. “We all have uniforms so we all look alike”, the fellow from Detroit said.

Blend the uniforms with our new haircuts and his plan could have worked except that the Air Force was in the process of changing uniforms (from olive drab to silver-gray) and guess who got the only olive drab coat in the whole group? He was a big man, about 6’ 3” and weighed about 230 pounds. The rest of us were 6’ or under and no one weighed over 175 pounds. The poor guy from Detroit never had a chance!

Uniform issue was another jolt to our civilian minds. All 65 men in a mothball haze filled small room, trying to get fitted by three overworked clerks. What a joke, one size fits all, almost. The only items that really fit were the shoes and hats, everything else just sort of hung there. As I said the Air Force was changing uniforms, so I got two of everything, an old style and a new style. The clerk mentioned how lucky I was to get a double issue for the price of a single issue; yes, we had to pay for our uniforms too!

All it meant to me at the time was that my bag was twice as heavy as the next guys when we carried them back to our barracks. Of course, technically we were given an allotment of about $300 to buy uniforms, but we didn’t see a penny of it, we just signed a form indicating that we had received our clothes.

On one of our many marches back and forth across Lackland the sergeants stopped us and pointed to a fence and a busy highway. They said that if anyone wanted to leave that they should climb the fence and hitch a ride to town. Then catch a bus and go home. No one did, but the idea was discussed for the next few evenings in the barracks.

Basic training is an experience that everyone should be exposed to. We “lived” in two-story wooden barracks that were built during World War Two. You could see outside through the cracks between the wallboards! There were 15 double tier bunks down stairs and 15 upstairs. The drill instructors had a private room and one was required to sleep with us each night in case there was an emergency.

The military was very much afraid that these buildings could catch fire and kill several of us. Many had burned quickly to the ground throughout the history of Lackland AFB. We had several fire drills the first couple of days to teach us how to escape and how to be accounted for. Fireguards were exchanged every hour on the hour throughout the night with terse instructions to “blow the whistle three times and yell FIRE-FIRE-FIRE”. Of course I always thought it was just another way to force us to accept the military way of thinking!

The sergeants were also afraid that they would get dirty. Of course there were no maids and we were expected keep the place spotless. All this cleaning and shinning was accomplished after the normal duty day and before “lights out”. The people selected for this duty were those who collected the most demerits during the course of the day. The bad marks were issued for anything that came into the sergeants’ mind! When it was all over, we decided that everyone had a chance at the crappy jobs at least once during our 40-day stay so I guess they really had a plan after all.

We learned to march, the military code of conduct, military history, how to shoot an M-1 rifle and how to eat in less than 10 minutes from the time we entered the mess hall until we left! It was winter in Texas, and as I said before, John Wayne was not at our boot camp! We accomplished a lot of our weapons training where it was warm and dry right in the barracks! Guess the drill instructors didn’t want to get wet or cold.

The “confidence course” was rumored to be a man killer. The more experienced (about two weeks in the service) recruits told us that “many men didn’t make it all the way through”! Of course we had no idea what lay ahead, but we were eager to find out. By this time those of us from California had figured out that this was just a big “head game” that they were playing with us. All of the marching and yelling was designed to make us conform to a rigid protocol in just a few weeks. So, when we finally got to the “confidence course” we were ready for anything.

As I said, it was winter in Texas. Rain, snow and freezing temperatures were the norm. Ice was on all of the thousands of mud puddles and hypothermia was not out of the question. So, the “confidence course” became a true case of survival. We were told that we would be required to complete “two trips through the course, no excuses”! This was to prepare us for field deployments. Well, since it was the holidays, since it was cold, and since we weren’t supposed to be there anyway the instructors only required one trip through the course and the “gas house”. Damn the luck!

Read more Basic Training...