Remember basic training? Yes! And looking back to the fall of 1949 and early 1950, I am so thankful for all of it.
November 1949, I badgered a recruiting sergeant in Kannapolis, N.C., to get me into the Army even though I was only 16 ½. He was slick and must have been as crooked as a dog’s hind leg, because he pulled it off with forged papers and told me to be a good straight-faced liar and insist that I was born in 1932 instead of my real birth year, 1933.
At Charlotte, N.C., I was grilled to the point that I said to the captain that “if he didn’t want me in the Army, just give me back all the papers and I would just go join the Navy.” At this point he signed a paper, shoved it to me and said to get my butt into the next room. I was sworn in and an hour later I was on my way to Fort Jackson, S.C.
We processed through that very night, got measured up and received all our clothing and gear. A couple of the guys from West Virginia were drunk when they enlisted and when they sobered up and realized they had joined the Army, they were mortified!
We received 16 weeks of intensified infantry training and this tough little wirey farm boy went through it without any trouble at all. At the beginning of training the old sergeant said they were going to try killing all of us on the training grounds and the survivors would make “damn good soldiers.” One of my better memories is of my buddy O’Berry, from the Okefenokee Swamp area, when we went out on a night dead-reckoning cross country, no moon, no stars, we were given a compass, paired up and told to go on a certain heading through woods, briars and swamp and to come out on a road to our checkpoint. O’Berry grabbed the compass, stuck it in his pocket and said “let’s go." The distance was about 3 miles, and we came out 100 ft. or so to our checkpoint! That “swamp boy buddy” was my best friend all through training!
After basic training, I was sent up to Fort Monmouth, N.J., to become a radio operator, Morse Code training, etc., and after that all summer long, I was shipped off to the war in Korea. Serving with the 25th Infantry Division, 8th Field Artillery BN, returning home December 1951. The remainder of my enlistment was at Navy Pier, Chicago, with an anti-aircraft artillery gun battalion with the guns near the naval armory.
My worst memory of all of it was the bitter cold we suffered through in Korea and of seeing the truckloads of dead American soldiers being brought back from the Battle at the Chosin Reservoir Nov. 27 through Dec. 9.
