College, military service a launch into adulthood
In 1959 I started college and turned 18 just as Vietnam was heating up. I registered with the Selective Service (seems an odd name) and became eligible for the draft.
Anticipating slogging through a steamy jungle with a rifle, I opted for ROTC, figuring that being an officer might make Army life easier. After two years of in- struction in cleaning rifles, shining shoes, marching, and the complete writings of Beetle Bailey, I was ready for advanced ROTC, which happened to be in Armor — tanks and stuff like that. We learned military terms like “advance,” “shoot,” and “not that way.” For that I got $30 a month.
In the summer of 1962 I went to ROTC camp at Ft. Knox, home of the U.S. Bullion Depository with tons of gold behind a 22ton door. I lived with a platoon of cadets whose morning routine began with running around the barracks in combat boots to someone saying “hup hup”; we sang nasty songs to drown him out. Then we got inspected to make sure our shirt buttons lined up with our flies. I still do that. After breakfast we would be lectured at while perched on wooden benches in some stuffy building with soporific temperature and humidity. Usually several of us dozed off, generating a “stand at attention, Cadet Van Winkle.” Ever try to sleep at attention? What kept us awake was shooting stuff — tank cannons, rifles, machine guns, bazookas — and throwing hand grenades. Target practice with a tank gun consisted of trying to hit a bedsheet two miles away. I don’t think I ever did.
When I graduated from college I was commissioned a Second Lieutenant. The officer who swore me in asked what branch of the Army I wanted.
Even though I trained to be an Armor officer, I said no thanks to tanks and chose the Medical Service Corps. I swore to uphold the constitution, got my gold bars, and figured the Army might not get around to calling me up until sometime in the distant future. A month later I was at Ft. Sam Houston, Texas, learning how to be an officer and a gentleman. Frankly, after four years of hard studying in college, we new lieutenants weren’t particularly motivated to learn the esoteric rubrics of military justice, map reading, or latrine sanitation. Carousing the bars of San Antonio and weekend trips to Mexico were higher priorities.
On Nov 22, 1963, a few days before the end of our training, while attending a lecture on sewage systems, we were told of President Kennedy’s assassination. It was a very somber time for the country. Leaving basic training only a few days later, a fellow officer and I drove through Dallas on our way home to Chicago. Having Thanksgiving dinner at a chain restaurant in rural Missouri didn’t exactly improve our mood. Shortly after I arrived home a letter arrived assigning me as company commander of the 582nd Ambulance Company in Bad Cannstatt, Germany. A week later I was on a train from Chicago to Ft. Dix, N.J. I was the only officer on the train with hundreds of soldiers and sailors. In the middle of the overnight trip, a GI and a swabbie got in a fight. Guess who got called to break it up? My first official duty — and they actually obeyed me.
Ft. Dix was basically closed down due to Kennedy’s death so I spent 10 days or so languishing in a stark barracks playing cards with several other second lieutenants while we waited for our overseas flight. One day we were ordered to accompany a fleet of buses, each carrying about 50 GIs being shipped overseas, to the Port Authority of New York. My second official duty. After we dropped off our charges, a dozen of us newly minted officers found ourselves in N.Y.C., so we visited the Empire State Building, the United Nations, and rode the Staten Island Ferry.
We eventually ended up that night in Greenwich Village. Our first bar stop was full of women. For some reason none of them were interested in us handsome young guys. So we left and visited another bar, this one full of men; some of them did seem interested in us. My real education had just begun.