It was the winter of 66/67 at Ft. Campbell. We never seemed to get enough sleep or enough to eat in the Mess Hall. Us big guys got the same amount to eat as the smaller guys. I decided to sneak out of the barracks one night and buy a pizza. I got back to the barracks, but did not dare to bring it inside. It would have been shared with many hungry trainees or confiscated by a Drill Instructor. I hid behind some of the shrubs near the barracks and had one of the best pizzas ever.

I was going to make a candy bar run one night and a bunch of guys handed me money to get them some too. I made it down to the nearby PX and bought enough candy bars to almost fill a paper grocery sack, no plastic back then. When I got back to the barracks, a Drill Instructor confiscated my sack of candy bars, so much for the Christmas spirit.

We were ordered to bring our footlockers outside one day. Then came the order, right shoulder, footlocker. Then came, forward march. Then we heard, double-time, march. When we got back to the barracks, we were told to get ready for a footlocker inspection. Who said DI's had no sense of humor. A-10-2 rah.

We were at the infiltration course at the starting point. I could see the tracers going overhead. They appeared to be 8 or 10 inches off the ground. I must have been breathing pretty hard, knowing my life would soon be over because one of the DI's asked if I was OK. Once we were over the wall I could see that the tracers were a few feet off the ground. We even got up on our feet and crouched down and walked. We made better time that way, as opposed to low crawling. It was pretty dark, but the DI's could see us and we got yelled at. I noticed that the tracer trajectories were actually parallel to each other, so if you stayed between them, you were quite safe. It turned into an almost party atmosphere.

One DI had not shown up by the time our group had started training, so we were told that this guy would make Lee Marvin look like Mary Poppins. For a week, all we heard was "Florez is coming!". One day, the unthinkable happened and we knew we were doomed, but then this little old guy was in front of us with a megaphone. It was cold and this guy was shivering and could not hold down the button on the megaphone. All of a sudden, we were not quite as terrified.

There was one DI with an glass eye and he was a bad dude. Not only that, but because of his handicap, he could look two different trainees in the eye while chewing them out.

Meningitis was an issue back then. When it came time for lights out, all the windows had to be open. Yes, it gets cold in Kentucky in January.

I'm still trying think of a fond memory.