September 18, 1967, I had to report in by 0600 hrs. My Dad drove me to Indianapolis, we shook hands, I went in the Army, and he went home. I walked into that AFEES building knowing my life was about to radically change.
A bunch of us new recruits hung around the AFEES center all that day. There was nothing we could do, we hadn’t fully processed in yet as that would happen when we reached our first posting (for me, Basic Training in Fort Campbell, Kentucky), so it was lot of standing around, reading something, and just killing time.
About 2000 hrs, after 14 hours of nothing, they loaded us on a bus and we headed south. Fort Campbell was an 8-hour bus ride, we pulled in about 0400 hrs, no one had slept much on the bus, and they shuffled our busload (and several other busloads of new recruits from around the USA) into a giant, indoor room with a huge screen. It seemed like there were 5,000 new recruits in that room, all sleep deprived, but antsy about what we were getting into.
With some fear of the unknown, nobody was raising Hell and being obnoxious but everyone was nervously talking. My guess is there was maybe three Rambo-wannabies in the room and Rambo hadn't been invented yet!
This was the peak of conflict in Vietnam, we knew why we were here, and it wasn’t going to be a fun ride. This was September 1967. The Monkees were the band. We were in Fort Campbell with Kentucky to the North and Clarksville, Tennessee to the south.
We were worn out, been up 24 hours, on a bus 8 hours, and now we are in this giant room that sort of looked like a theater. What’s next?
(You sort of expected an officer to come out on that stage, call us
to attention or at least get us quiet, and start talking. It didn’t
happen that way. Not at all. Not even close.)
Without warning, on a giant screen, a movie starts showing thousands of new recruits unloading off a train. The camera pans to the train station. You can see “Clarksville”—the name of the town where the movie's train station was located AND the name of the local town just outside the Fort Campbell gate. Next, giant speakers start blasting out the super-popular Monkee’s song,“Last Train to Clarksville.”
Well, all 5,000 guys in the room went nuts. Everyone was standing, shouting, letting off steam, dancing in the aisles, and just de-stressing (before de-stressing was invented).
The place calmed down after 3–4 minutes and then the officer came out and started talking. It worked. Clarksville, Tennessee was just outside of one of the gates. It all seemed to fit.
I was in the Army. Just three years to go.
