Hysterical Jurney to Historic Places

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SOUPY, SOUPY, SOUPY……..



Without a single bean.



Porky, porky, porky,



Without a streak of lean.







The overnight pass I got with my family after graduation from basic training turned out to have dire consequences. I did not return to the company in time to pack my own duffel bag for the change of station to Fort Leonard Wood, MO where Thobe and I were to report to the Engineer School for training as heavy equipment operators. Thobe packed my stuff into the duffel bag for me, but he had to break the lock on my wall locker to do so. Consequently my duffel bag could not be secured. It was looted somewhere during transit and my field jacket was stolen.



We boarded a United Airlines DC-3 at the airport in Monterey and took a short hop in it up to San Francisco International. It was the first time I ever flew in an airplane anywhere, and it was a thrilling experience to be up among the clouds. At San Francisco we boarded a flight to St Louis and then took a bus down to Fort Leonard Wood. By pure luck Thobe and I ended up in the same platoon again. Both of us knew right away we were not much going to like it there.



It was a week or so before Thanksgiving and bitter cold and I had no jacket. Central Missouri at that time of year is a horridly bleak looking place. The whole post stunk like a coal fire because every water heater and furnace on that whole sprawling camp was powered by coal and the stench of it was pervasive no matter which way the cold wind blew. I got my jacket replaced as quickly as I could, but by then I had come down with a nasty head cold. A prudent man would have quickly marched off to sick call for some medical attention, but that man was not me. The cold moved down into my chest and kept getting worse. After a couple of weeks I drew kitchen police up in the mess hall.



Kitchen police didn’t have anything to do with the cops. It was a work detail to help the cooks prepare our meals, wallop the pots, wash the dirty dishes, and keep the dining area spotless. For some reason the army has always used the term “mess” in reference to its meals. The mess hall was where the meals were prepared and where we ate them. The mess sergeant was the guy in charge of the cooks. The officer’s mess was the area in back where the officers took their meals. They were not allowed to eat until after everyone else was finished eating.



Throughout the entire army every mess hall in the entire world gets the same menu every day. Every meal is cooked according to same stern recipe everywhere. Doing otherwise would present a logistical nightmare. Every meal served had potatoes and bread with it. When it was my turn for kitchen police I reported to the mess hall at 4am sharp to begin the day’s duty. I could attend training sick as a dog if I wanted to, but I could not be allowed to handle food served to an entire company. Everyone would likely get sick. The lead cook told me to get out of the mess hall, go down to the orderly room and tell them to find a replacement right away, and then report to the clinic for sick call.



The clinic did not simply give me a jar of pills, pat me on the head, and return me duty as I had hoped. They diagnosed me with Upper Respiratory Infection and sent me to the hospital. They were swamped with URI cases that were not differentiated. I got sent into a room with five other sick guys and before I knew it my cold had turned into pneumonia, whooping cough, and influenza. After four days I was far from full recovery, but could not possibly get any sicker so they finally gave me a jar of pills and released me back to duty.



I returned to training on Friday morning in time to complete the Week Three Test. I had missed that entire week of classes but felt free to take the test anyway. The rules were that if a guy missed three consecutive days of training he had to recycle into another company and start that week over again.



On Monday morning the platoon sergeant told me to GI the barracks, pack my duffel and he would place me into a new unit that was beginning the Week Three Class. I shook hands with Thobe and thought I had seen the last of him. The sergeant took me to wrong outfits twice and finally found the right one and dropped me off at the orderly room. I had not even been assigned to a barracks by the time he had returned to pick me up with the good news that I had scored higher on the Week Three Test than anyone who had completed the training. That, by God, made me feel better; I was going back to my pals to complete the training on schedule. I could not wait, by then, to get far away from Fort Leonard Wood soon as possible. I hated that whole stinking place with firm conviction, but our course of training was still less than halfway over with.



The heavy equipment operator’s course focused on four pieces of machinery: the bulldozer, the road grader, the earth mover, and the front end loader. Training was conducted in a place that was called the “million dollar pit”. It was a place where the bulldozers pushed some dirt into a berm, and the loaders moved the dirt over to another berm, Then the movers hauled it back to the other side of the pit, and the graders made it flat again. The dozers would then begin pushing the dirt back across to the other side. Each trainee was given the opportunity to operate each type of machine and choose the one he liked the best and that was what he would be given advanced training in. The problem was most of us gravitated to the dozers and some had to be dealt away to other machines. I got handed off to the loaders. Thobe was smart enough to realize that a blue stake grader operator made the most money on any civilian construction crew, and was not fooled by the glamour of the dozer. A great many dozer operators got killed in Vietnam. They were easy targets in jungle clearing operations. Nobody told us about that part though. It turned out that the loaders were mostly used at rock quarries in Vietnam. The quarries were actually pretty safe places to work. They were low priority targets because they produced construction materials that were put to good use in developing the infrastructure of the country. The Viet Cong had a certain appreciation for that.



A couple of guys from our basic training company at Fort Ord came with us to Fort Leonard Wood. Dennis Coger and Jaime Kerr were buddy system pals too. Kerr was a fearful looking devil. He got into a fight at a high school party and his face got rearranged with a busted beer bottle. Both of them went into dozers. They probably had made that choice long before joining the army. The weather was nice on the day we picked our machines, but it started in raining and snowing a few days later. The million dollar pit turned into a mud hole. The earth movers, graders and loaders were all wheel mounted vehicles and had little trouble operating in mud. The dozers were track mounted vehicles and the mud would clog up the rollers and gears that moved the tracks. It had to be shoveled out. The dozer operators were soon covered head to toe in good thick Ozark Mountain mud. It was a clay based mud that held water well and was heavy. Coger and Kerr and the other dozer men wore their mud like a badge of honor. It could not have been much fun to shovel though.



Another dozer man was named Marvin Nichols. He was a lanky, raw-boney fellow straight off of the Creek Reservation in Oklahoma. We sometimes had to line up in alphabetical order in order to receive our pay and get more immunizations. Marvin lined up right behind me and had a wry sense of humor that I enjoyed.



Another guy that I liked was named Alan D. Markum. He was another loader guy and lined up in front of me in the alphabetical lines. Alan was in the Oklahoma Army Reserve and joined up to avoid the draft right after he got out of law school. He was one of the smartest, funniest, most engaging men I ever met. He was a few years older than most of the rest of us and had a tendency to nurture. We started calling him Mother Markum. He had a medical problem with his hips and it was painful for him to get around so we started in calling him Chicken Legs. Those monikers both came from the lips of a lively National Guardsman from Alabama named Lomax Wesley.



Lomax was a barrel of fun. Thobe and I would join him for breakfast whenever we could. He was always a grand source of enlightenment to us. One day we were sitting at the table fixing up our mush with milk and sugar; we thought it was cream of wheat. Lomax was aghast with us. He said, “What in the world are you fellas doing to them grits?” Neither of us had ever had grits before. Lomax told us that the way you eat grits is with pepper, butter and a fried egg. No matter how you take it, grits is just grits. It is a poor substitute for a meal under any circumstance. Folks in Alabama seem to be fond of it though.



All through our training, both at Fort Ord and at Fort Leonard Wood, we lived in WWII barracks and slept in bunk beds. I always got a bottom bunk. At Fort Ord the top bunk was used by Mike Burns. He had to jump down from it every morning on sore feet. It was a painful landing for him and that is why he started each day cursing the army and denouncing his attorney.



At Fort Leonard Wood the upper bunk was occupied by Danny Rathbun. Danny was in the earth movers. The poor devil was afflicted with a nose that grew in upside down. His nostrils pointed up to the sky like little coffee cups. Whenever it rained his nostrils collected water. He was fearful of drowning. He had to bend over to blow his nose or pick his nose. Danny was from Azusa, CA and had a girlfriend back home that he loved dearly. Not just any girl would find Danny attractive because of his upside-down nose, but then she did not have many suitors either. She was ugly as a mud fence. They probably raised a passel of fine looking children.



The Christmas Holidays approached and the whole training program at Fort Leonard Wood shut down for two weeks. All of us were sent home on leave. Thobe found out that it was six dollars cheaper to go back to California by bus than it was to fly back on standby in an airplane. He had a girlfriend back home that he could spend the six dollars on, but I didn’t. I thought riding a bus from Missouri to California would be an adventure and it sure was. Every army post in the country shut down on the same day and there were thousands and thousands of soldiers trying to get home. Every airplane and every bus was jam packed with us. Rickety old buses that barely ran were being pulled out of junk yards and pressed into service to handle the overload. Thobe and I got on the same bus at Fort Leonard Wood and managed to stick together until we got to Tulsa. We got off at the station there to take a leak but when we lined up to get back on Thobe got the last seat, and I got shuffled onto a section bus that barely ran and had bad tires. Thobe moved on westward at fairly brisk pace and managed to keep ahead of a fierce winter blizzard. BY the time my slow moving bus got to Amarillo the storm had closed the highway, but Thobe was ahead of the closure.



My bus diverted down to El Paso through Roswell, Ruidoso, and Alamogordo. It was slow going on those icy mountain roads. At El Paso I took up a seating arrangement with a pretty cute girl soldier who was on her way from Fort Rucker to Los Angeles. She slept nestled up against my shoulder all the way to Phoenix. The roads were a little better through the southwest desert but the damn bus finally broke down completely out in the middle of nowhere. We were all stranded there until another bus could be patched together and sent out to continue us on the way. Thobe had been home whooping it up with his six dollars for two days by then. We pressed on to Los Angeles where the girl soldier left with her boyfriend and I had to wait several more hours for a connection to Santa Maria. I got home barely in time for Christmas. The bus trip had taken five days. I was exhausted and wore a severely rumpled Class A uniform by the time I arrived. It was fine adventure, especially the part with the girl, but I didn’t get any Christmas shopping done. My six dollars had long since been spent on greasy Carriage House meals.



After Christmas was over with Thobe and I rode over to Lompoc to visit Frank Hilley. He was a fellow we had met at Fort Ord. His dad got all three of us drunk. The lovely Barbara Ann Victorino was still in a poor state of humor with me. She disapproved of the military for some reason. At the end of our leave we flew back to Missouri. We still had another couple of weeks of training to complete which went smoothly. Danny Rathbun stole my aftershave lotion though. He needed it more than I did. At least he had a girlfriend. On our last day of training the first sergeant called us into formation and announced to us that, “Gentlemen, all of the previous classes at this school have been sent half to Germany, and half to Vietnam. You are the very first class to all get sent to Vietnam. Congratulations, I know you will all serve your country with proud distinction”. Another adventure was about to begin.

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Photos

AIT
Waiting for a taxi in front of the orderly room. Alan D. Markum (front row left), Frank S. Oliver (front row right), Jimmy Wallace (back row left), Mark B(NMN) Thobe (back row right). Jimmy was our platoon guide. He was an Appalachian coal miner from Pennsylvania. The picture was taken after our Christmas leave because we didn't have any civvies before our leave. We were on our way to see a movie on a Sunday afternoon.