Basic training was thirteen weeks of a hot sweaty blur of activity. Close order drill; a combat conditioning course with machine guns firing overhead; hand-to-hand combat; double timing everywhere; field stripping and cleaning weapons; barracks scrub down with GI soap and brushes; lectures on everything from personal hygiene to military courtesy; KP; obstacle courses, especially one with an aptly-named final obstacle, "puke hill"; guard duty; written exams; bayonet drill; orientation movies; fatigue detail; manual of arms; village fighting; KP; days on the firing ranges, firing for record with the rifle (a pre-World War I Enfield bolt action rifle), light machine gun, 45 caliber automatic pistol, Thompson sub machine gun, hand grenade, and M-3 "grease gun" ("Rebel" Erwin was a crack shot and scored Expert on everything); written examinations; guard duty; gas mask drills; bivouacs; KP; digging foxholes; KP; inspections; night problems; attack and defense; ---(everything done "in the following manner" and "by the numbers"); more guard duty; still more written exams; and dirty fighting and booby trap school (one of my favorites).
Our bayonet and dirty-fighting instructor was a cocky strutting 1st Lieutenant, who wore snug custom-tailored shirts, machine-stitched with sharp military creases, three down the back and two in front. He swaggered about waving a riding crop that he slapped against his riding breeches (there was no horse to be seen anywhere) when he wanted to emphasize a point. He wore leather cavalry boots and tight yellow pigskin riding gloves. He clenched his fists open and shut as he lectured. After a few dirty fighting classes he quickly earned the nickname "Blood and Gloves." He lectured from a raised platform about six feet off the ground with his audience seated on the ground looking up it him. He was an imposing authority figure, looking down at us like that, and this was his personal theater in the round.
In one dirty-fighting lecture, he asked a volunteer to show, in slow motion, how to poke his eyes out. The volunteer jabbed his separated first and middle fingers straight at the instructor's eyes. The Lieutenant put his right hand in a position in which he appeared to be thumbing his nose at the volunteer. As the volunteer's separated fingers straddled his hand, he closed his hand around one finger and bent it upwards and backwards, bringing the volunteer to his knees. Blood and Gloves then came up with a knee that would have crushed the volunteer's face if this had been done at normal speed. As it was, the volunteer got a badly swollen lip.
"OK, We are not playing kids' games here," yelled Blood and Gloves. (He prefaced almost everything with, "OK.")
"OK, In a real combat situation he would have more than a fat lip. He would be dead. When you go for the enemy's eyes, go scratching and gouging with all fingers of both hands. When you get fingers into both eye sockets, hook them around the eyeballs, pull them out on the cords, twirl them around and around and then plop them back into their sockets. It will make them so dizzy that you can kill them any way you choose. Personally, I would gut them or slit their throats, but if you like some other way, use it."
"O.K. I want another volunteer. You!" He pointed his riding crop at a GI who was nodding off in the front row. "And bring your rifle and bayonet."
The "GI volunteer" apprehensively climbed up onto the platform. "OK, fix bayonet and try to stick me."
We practiced bayonet drills with our scabbards on the bayonets for safety so the GI volunteer fixed his bayonet but left the scabbard on.
"Bare that blade soldier, I want to see cold steel."
"But, sir ----."
"No buts soldier. Get that scabbard off and stick me."
Blood and Gloves pulled his leather gloves on tight and assumed a defensive posture.
"OK! Stick me! Don't take it easy on me! Stick me, damn it, stick me!"
The GI lunged, tentatively, at Blood and Gloves with a long thrust. The Lieutenant sidestepped and neatly parried the bayonet with his gloved hand. Quicker that the eye could see how he did it, the bayonet speared into the deck of the platform and the GI flipped high into the air coming down awkwardly. With a sickening snap his left leg broke midway between the knee and the ankle. He cried out in pain. The knife-sharp end of the bone penetrated the muscle of his calf and punched through his skin and the fabric of his fatigues and partially penetrated his thick canvas legging. His wound was bleeding profusely.
The rifle rocked slowly back and forth on the flexing bayonet blade imbedded deeply into the platform.
Blood and Gloves looked briefly at the GI's leg and shouted, "OK! Call the meat wagon --- and give me another volunteer!"
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The dirty fighting course was not all lectures and demonstrations. We got a lot of hands-on training as well. During these sessions we would line up in two facing lines and pair off. At his signal we would charge at one another screaming, "Kick 'em in the balls!"
If it wasn't done to his satisfaction, he would come down from his platform and show you how to do it.
Blood and Gloves was a frightening opponent for raw recruits but we always wondered how he would have fared against a real enemy, like a Jap trained from birth in the martial arts.
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It was a hot steamy day when we had a demolitions lecture and demonstration under a grove of trees. It was good to get out of the sun for a change. We learned how to safely handle and properly use dynamite, blocks of tri-nitro-toluene (TNT), Composition "C," primacord, blasting caps, fuses, and flashless fuse ignitors. Here we learned that dynamite, a very stable explosive if properly stored and handled, is nothing more than sawdust or a fine clay soaked with nitroglycerine (by itself, a very unstable explosive). Teams of us unwrapped dynamite sticks and stuffed GI socks with the raw dynamite and composition "C." Nitro, absorbed through our sweaty skin, gave us nasty headaches. We smeared the socks with heavy axle grease and jammed fused blasting caps into them.
The finished product was called a sticky grenade. GIs had two other names for it, a "blivit" (derivation unknown) and "two pounds of feces in a one pound bag." The idea was simple. A GI armed with a sticky grenade would crouch in his foxhole as an enemy tank approached, light the fuse with a flashless fuse ignitor, and throw the grenade against the body of the tank. If all went well, the grenade would stick to the body of the tank long enough to explode before it fell off the tank. If it stuck to the tank body, at the moment of explosion it would blast a hole in the tank and the occupants would be killed by shrapnel ricocheting around inside the tank. (No one explained how we would just happen to have a spare GI sock, several pounds of dynamite or composition "C," a blasting cap, a fuse, a fuse ignitor, and a big can of axle grease in our foxhole but the point was ---- improvise!)
The class ended with a practical demonstration. One person from each team got the honor of throwing his team's grenade at a crippled beat-up old half track, from the shelter of a previously prepared trench.
The one thing we worried about was the wisdom of staying in a foxhole as it was about to be run over by a tank. The next day we had an exercise designed to relieve our fears. We marched out to an area where foxholes had already been dug. Each of us was assigned to a hole and given a GI sock to fill with sand, simulating a sticky grenade. As we crouched in our holes, a light tank came straight at us. Someone yelled, "OK, let's see you nail that tank with your blivit."
Most of us threw prematurely and missed the tank completely but "Rebel" Erwin waited until the last second and threw his right at the narrow slit that the tank driver used to see where he was going. It hit the sharp edges of the slit; the bag ripped open; and the tank driver got a face full of sand.
The tank driver saw "Rebel" duck back into his foxhole and headed straight at him. The tanker ran one tread of the tank directly on top of "Rebel's" foxhole and idled for a few seconds then he spun the tank on that tread pouring dirt in on top of him. Bert had a lot of dirt down his collar but eventually emerged unharmed. The demonstration was probably much more effective than originally intended. It became clear to everyone. Stay in your foxhole and let the enemy tanks run over you. You'll be all right.
Every day was a new adventure. Events all ran together in the frantic attempt to make soldiers out of raw recruits and, through it all, I had only one pair of fatigues that got caked with salt and mud and had to be washed every night and put on wet the next day. The supply sergeant at North Camp Hood insisted that Camp Blanding should have issued them and refused to issue another pair.
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Two of the most popular items in the Post Exchange (PX) were Chapstick (to protect against the merciless Texas sun) and Kotex. The latter was pinned inside fatigue jackets to protect delicate shoulders against the bruising kick of those Enfield rifles during the long days on the rifle range firing line.
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Since our last names were, alphabetically, close together, John Donlan, "Rebel" Erwin, Bob Enterline, Gustav Enyedy, Harrison Griffin, and I often wound up in the same groups organized for one purpose or another. As a result, our friendships grew and we helped one another through the tough parts.
Weekend passes were rare but when they came, two or three of us usually went to "Big D" (Dallas) together and just hung out at Fair Park, a huge amusement park next to the Cotton Bowl. Rebel would wear his Expert marksmanship medal with bars hanging half way down to his waist to impress the girls. After breaking the ice, he even managed to line up a few dates for himself for the following weekend but usually gave someone else's name, rather than his own, because he knew his chances of getting passes two weekends in a row were nil.
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During all of this we caught a lot of flack about the Army General Classification Test (AGCT) scores we had made. An AGCT Test score of at least 110 was needed to qualify for Officer Candidate School (OCS) but a score of at least 120 was required for ASTP. We were called the "Hi I's" and must have heard at least a hundred times, "So you guys are supposed to be ten points smarter than an officer --- Well, we'll see about that."
Our Company commander, Capt. Broyles, once dressed us down after a badly performed night reconnaissance exercise, and ended his tirade with, "You are the smartest damn men but the dumbest damn soldiers I have ever encountered in my entire military career."
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We were frequently brought in from the obstacle course caked with mud, seated at a desk in an oven-hot barracks, and given additional exams covering every conceivable subject.
At one of those exams I was given a form to pick the college that I wanted to attend.
I picked Duke University.
Our ranks started thinning out as guys were shipped out to parts unknown. Eventually, what started out as a full regiment had dwindled down to less than a battalion and we began to wonder if any of us would make it to ASTP.
After thirteen weeks of hell, basic training ended abruptly. We went on a three-day bivouac and at the end of it we all got our orders. A fairly large contingent including me, "Rebel" Erwin, Harrison Griffin, and some of my other buddies from the first day at Camp Blanding and some new ones from Camp Hood, including John Donlan, Bob Enterline, and Gus Enyedy were going to ASTU 3890 the ASTP Unit at North Texas StateTeachers College in Denton, Texas.
North Texas State Teachers College?????????????
What happened to Duke?
They said I could pick the college I wanted to attend and I had picked Duke University.
I should have read between the lines. They said that I would be permitted to pick the college I wanted to attend, --- but they didn't say that they would actually send me there.
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