The Guards

Since I was inducted on Oct. 29, 1951, that made it four days short of two years service. For a long time I kept thinking I might get called back in because I had not served my full time. That may have been the reason I signed up for the Nebraska National Guard when I got out. I was required to be in the Army Reserve or the Guard for at least six years but I thought belonging to the latter would give me less chance to be called up.

Convoluted thinking? Probably. It is obvious I hadn’t learned my lesson about trying to out-guess the Army. At any rate, I missed all the call ups while I was still in the active reserve.

Many years later, in talking to other veterans who were discharged about the same time I was, I found out I missed a benefit because I was so anxious to be out of the Army.

Prior to the Korean war, soldiers were insured for $10,000 but were charged a premium. When I went in we were automatically covered for the same amount but paid no fees. We were given an opportunity to convert the policy on discharge and pay the premiums but I either didn’t feel it was worthwhile or simply passed it by in the rush to go. Listening to veteran friends years later, I found they were getting up to $400 dividends yearly from their converted policies.

Shortly after I got home I took a job as news editor of the weekly Wahoo Newspaper at Wahoo, Nebraska, published by the third generation of the Ludi family. Darrell was the managing editor and his brother, Tom, handled a large job printing shop at the newspaper.

I was a one-man staff and handled everything on the news side except society, which was written by the women in the office. Sports, breaking news stories, and editing copy from country correspondents came under my jurisdiction. I had to make up the front page when we went to press and perform the dark room work for the pictures, mostly taken by me. I had taken a course in photography at UNL, but the hands-on experience in the dark room was more practical.

With my residence in Wahoo, I was able to train with the National Guard there in order to fulfill my reserve requirement. My service in the guard was not memorable from a military standpoint but there were some instances worth recalling.

The Nebraska Guard was scheduled for two weeks at Camp Ripley, Minnesota for my first summer of duty. A friend who was pilot in the air arm of the guard offered to let us fly to camp when he ferried his plane up there for training. That was much preferable to riding in a convoy of six by sixes.

We had some free time before camp opened because of our early airplane ride and took advantage of some of the local bars in town. We were rather late getting back to camp and were still sacked out the first day of duty when the battalion commander stuck his head in our tent and woke us up.

He had little to say at that time but at a battalion officers’ meeting later that day he closed his remarks about camp procedure by saying, “Those who want to dance must pay the fiddler.”

He didn’t single us out but the message was clear as we continued to get the less attractive assignments for the rest of the two-week camp.

Another matter caused some concern but fortunately did not bring injuries to anyone. I was on a hill directing fire when I heard a tremendous explosion. It sounded to me like a 105 Howitzer had blown up.

We were told later what happened. Because of limited time for training, gun crews were split during a mission so everybody would have at least some first hand experience.

In this instance, at the point where the number two man was told how many bags of powder to load, the crews were changed. Seven bags are available but I’ve never heard anyone using that many. The more bags, the longer distance the round will travel. The procedure is for the number two man to remove enough bags so the required number is left. In other words, if he is told four bags, three are removed.

After the first crew had left the gun, the second number two man mistakenly thought the bag number had been taken care of and removed none. When the 105 was fired, it had seven bags of powder and the round in the breach had enough power to go out of the firing range and completely across a small town adjacent to the camp. The sound generated was what I had heard on the hill.

One can imagine the stir that mistake caused. At least the error produced enough distance to go over the town. One bag less and it might have slammed into a home. From that point on the practice of changing crews in the middle of a mission was abandoned.