OUR HEROES
Drill instructor had another dimension.
Camp cartoonist
After saying my goodbyes in Detroit in February 1957, I boarded a plane bound for Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio, Texas. I had six weeks of basic training before I would be sent to air traffic control school at Keesler Air Force Base in Biloxi, Mississippi.
The training was physically and mentally demanding, and recruits all tried to avoid getting extra duties such as scrubbing the barracks floor with a toothbrush—which
I had to do—or cleaning the 10 latrines.
During rare moments of downtime, I liked to sketch. In high school I’d gotten pretty good at drawing cartoons and caricatures of the people I observed. At the end of one exhausting day of exercises and drills, I was relaxing in the barracks. I was making a sketch of one of our drill instructors barking orders and calling us unmentionable names.
The other recruits gathered around and were laughing at my cartoon when the drill instructor walked in and demanded to know what the ruckus was about.
Fearing for my life—or at least the fate of cleaning latrines for a week—I showed him the caricature.
Silence.
“Is that supposed to be me?” he asked. Then, to my amazement, he laughed, and asked if he could have the drawing.
After that, word of my sketches got around, and soon the other drill instructors were excusing me from daily regimens so I could fulfill their drawing requests. In fact, an hour before I graduated as an airman third class, I was putting the finishing touches on my final caricature!
I gave away all of the drawings I made in boot camp—it would sure be fun to see one of them now.