When a close friend received his draft notice, we collected a third friend and enlisted in the US Army so that we could go through basic training together.
In February 1964, the Beatles invasion had begun, LBJ had inherited the presidency, Vietnam was still an obscure place to most civilians, and three guys from South Florida boarded a train for Columbia, South Carolina.
There was an empty feeling in my stomach as the train pulled away, but that isn’t what I remember most. Nor was it the rude awakening waiting for us at Fort Jackson. It wasn’t the two mile run each day before breakfast, nor the hand-shredding monkey bars and pushups several times a day. Not even the endless eyelid slamming classrooms, nor the case of measles that almost got me recycled, come to the front of my memory.
It was “The Hill” that I remember most. I don’t remember the exact name of that hill, but it was one of those places with a foreboding name found in every GI training camp; names like “the death swamp”, or “heart attack mountain”; names that tend to strike terror in the minds of raw recruits.
On the day of the bayonet assault course our entire battalion had turned out for the event. One at a time, bellowing and growling, we charged up “The Hill”, to engage the enemy. This enemy was a post in the ground with a tire nailed to it and a spring-loaded 2x4 attached, representing a rifle fixed with a bayonet.
My turn came. I charged upward, shouting at the top of my lungs. Arriving completely drained of wind and energy, I confronted the enemy.
After knocking my foe’s rifle aside and plunging my bayonet into his rubber gut, I was withdrawing my weapon when the 2x4 gun swung back and hit me upside the head, sending my “pot, steel w/liner” flying… and me sprawling in the dirt.
The whole battalion was rolling on the ground. My friends told me later that it looked like my head came off. It was the first and last time that any of us saw our platoon sergeant laugh.
As far as I know, I am the only GI in Fort Jackson history to be taken out by a bayonet practice dummy.
