After graduating from high school in 1959, I enlisted into the U.S. Army in January 1960 without a clue of what I was getting into.
The first rude awakening was the welcoming committee as we got off the bus at the reception center. Talk about in-your-face sergeants - wow.
After that, one of my memories is getting caught chewing gum in formation. Sgt. Bill Jones saw me and told me to spit the gum out. Next he had me get on the ground in push-up position and pick the gum off the ground with my mouth. Then I had to stand up, swallow the gum and open my mouth to prove I swallowed it.
One of my worst experiences was getting bronchitis and having to spend five or six days in the hospital. There, I had the worst food ever while in the Army. Fortunately I was a day or two short of being recycled back to another company. I was sent back to my original company, and some of the sergeants and one of the young officers caught me up on the training I had missed. One day, for some reason, we had to fall outside with our footlockers; now this was from the third floor of our concrete-block barracks. We had to get in our bunks and show our bare feet from under the blanket. Then we had to get dressed and haul our footlockers outside.
Of course we didn't do it right the first time, so we did it at least one more time.
Another time we were doing something in the barracks while the sergeants watched us. I had to go to the latrine and do a No. 2. I requested permission from Jones; he stared at me with those penetrating eyes and said to bring a smear to prove I went. After I wiped myself I took a smear, folded it neatly in a tissue and put it in my shirt pocket. I didn't dare show it to him, and he didn't ask for it. But I did leave it in my pocket for another day or so.
For our bivouac, we marched all day out to the boonies and set up camp. It was possibly about a 20-mile march, or it felt that way. I had to pull guard duty around 0100 hours and then went back into my tent. When they woke us up there was about 6 inches of snow on the ground. They fed us breakfast and decided to march back to our barracks instead of staying out in the snow. When we started our march back, we turned left as we left the bivouac area. I thought we had come in from the right, but since when does a lowly recruit question the all-knowing sergeants? Well, about 45 minutes later, the road had turned into a path and then a dead-end. They said we went the wrong way so we about-faced and marched another 45 minutes back past the bivouac area. To this day, I think they knew what they were doing but wanted to put us through the wringer. Now, as we continued to march we got strung out - trucks started to come out and pick up the stragglers. My 135-pound body on a 5-foot 11-inch frame was straining to stay with the last ones. Finally a medic in a jeep piled the remaining handful of us into his jeep. We were told that out of two companies (total of 100 recruits) only a dozen marched all the way back to the barracks.
We all graduated from basic and went our many different ways. My career was as a weather observer with the Signal Corps at Yuma Test Station in Arizona and Greenland near Thule Air Base. I do look back at my Army service with fond memories. It gave me a chance to grow up, gain confidence and break out of my shy shell.