Caissons Go Rolling

The trip home was uneventful. It was another shipboard experience but now I was an E-2 after graduation from basic training. There isn’t much difference between E-l and E-2, just one notch above the lowest of the low. My pay went from $87.50 per month to maybe $90. It seemed like longer, but the ocean voyage took only six days and then we spent another four days at Camp Stoneman, California before boarding a train for Omaha. I was allowed a delay-in-route on the way to Ft. Sill, Oklahoma since I had some leave time coming by now, and I got about three weeks at home before reporting for class at OCS.

I reported for duty June 11, 1952 and was assigned to a battery which was on a hill removed from the rest of the camp. There were two units on the hill. One was the class coming in and the other just graduating.

The course is 22 weeks long (just longer than the hurried “90-day wonder” training during World War II) but the elapsed time is 23 weeks because the first seven days are used for orientation. “Hell Week,” it is called.

The name is apropos because that is exactly what it is, a week of Hell. The Redbirds, upperclassmen, use a variety of methods to weed out candidates who may not have the intensity to last the course. An example; one morning about 2 o’clock our cadre (regular Army men assigned to our class) and a number of Redbirds (so named because they are identified with red epaulets on their shoulders) rousted us from our sleep and told us to bring our foot lockers outside.

We hustled around, bleary-eyed, got the lockers outside and arranged them in a perfect line in front of the barracks with our poker-stiff bodies at attention behind them.

One of the cadre looked disdainfully at us and sneeringly said, “I didn’t tell you to bring the contents out, just the foot lockers.”

We were then instructed to dump the contents of the lockers in a common pile at the middle of the parade grounds. It took us until almost sunrise to sort out our own belongings and get back into the barracks in time for reveille.

When we did get back inside, each bunk had a blank resignation form on it. The object of the harassment being, of course, to see how far the candidates could be pushed.

For my part, I kept telling myself, “I’ll give it one more day. I’m not going to let those bastards beat me.” There wasn’t a day I didn’t say that to myself and eventually the 22-week course was over. A class mate of mine from high school was in his 12th week when I arrived at Ft. Sill. He dropped out with less that half the course to complete.