In the late 1960’s I was a weekend warrior. Several factors had led me to become a citizen soldier in the South Carolina National Guard. I was a junior in college and the war in Viet Nam was raging. I was directionless. I knew that I was not cut out for business but had not yet summoned the nerve to tell my entrepreneur father that I would be a miserable failure if I eventually took over his business. I thought I might want to teach and despite a lackluster beginning as a college student, I knew I loved to read the great writers and to share what I had learned. I loved ideas and I loved the language…I just lacked a direction.
I had seen friends join the military just out of high school. When the war in Viet Nam began, there was a surge of nationalism that led these friends to become soldiers in the cause of liberty and freedom. By 1969, I had also heard that several of these brave classmates would not return to the comfortable small-town life they had left. I admired their bravery and questioned my own. This was a time when boys my age were thrown into terrible situations and faced unimaginable terrors in a place as remote to them as the moon.
I was not cut out for the kind of heroism I saw in my friends. I was a head-in-a-book, disorganized dreamer. My dreaminess took a hard hit when, on December first, 1969, America held the first draft lottery and it was nationally televised. A member of the House of Representatives stood beside a glass fishbowl filled with 366 blue capsules. Each capsule contained a month and date. The order of those called up for the draft was determined by the order in which their birthdate was drawn from the bowl. The dates were written on a board behind the selector.
I sat in a dorm lounge at St. Andrews College in North Carolina surrounded by forty of fifty anxious young men who listened as each number was called. A friend from my dorm, who was a senior and a small college All-American soccer player, groaned at the first number…September 14. It was a lottery no one wanted to win. His name is one of over 58,000 etched into a long black wall on the Mall in Washington.
As numbers were called, there were sighs and curses. The war was not going well and the enthusiastic pride of those heroic early volunteers had given way to frustration as the nightly news reported troop losses and ever increasing opposition to letting our best and brightest die in an unpopular war. The room would thin out as one or another student heard his birthday called. It would be a long night. The rumor was that anyone whose birthday was called after about one-hundred and fifty would not have to worry about being drafted into service. My luck held about half-way to the magic number. “Number 84 is December 25”.
I cannot remember all my thoughts at the announcement but I know these things. My student deferment was in jeopardy if my grades did not improve radically. I am the son of a WWII Marine so patriotism was a big part of the code of ethics he had worked to instill in me. I was heartsick and ashamed to admit that I was afraid I would lose my life or the person I hoped to be if I faced the horrors that some of my friends were facing in the jungles and rice paddies of Viet Nam. They were and still are, the bravest souls I ever knew and I believed I was not capable of such look-death-in-the-eye gallantry.
I found what was for me, a compromise. I was able to gain a slot in the Fort Mill National Guard. I am sure that it helped that I was a legacy and my father had been an officer in the company. It was a compromise that let me feel better about being alive but that would never assuage the haunting guilt I feel every time I talk to one of my veteran friends. When the opportunity presented itself, I dropped out of college in the summer of 1970 for a year and was called up for Basic Training at Fort Bragg, North Carolina.
Our barracks were wooden WWII structures which were so dangerous that we had to have fire patrols working every night. Bragg was the home of the 82nd Airborne and our Drill Sergeants were suitably tough. Sgt. Springstead, our DI, was 1st Air Cavalry. Drill Sergeants were nicknamed “Smokey the Bear” because of the campaign hats they wore. Sgt. Springstead was a big black man with a round face and a deep voice. He would never escape the comparison.
While I was thin in high school, I had let myself get out of shape in college and entered Basic Training at 220 pounds. On the first day in the mess hall, Springstead stood at the end of the chow line and denied dessert to the “fat boys.” I was one of that unfortunate number. Some of the troops in our platoon were National Guard, like me, but many were Regular Army. The training was grueling during this time because the Regular Army soldiers were on a path which would lead to Viet Nam. The discipline, conditioning and training received at Fort Bragg could, and I am sure did, save lives in combat. In the fifth week of training we were having chow in the field. When I passed up the dessert, the Sergeant asked why. “Because I am a fat boy, Sir!” I answered. He laughed and said, “Have you looked at yourself in a mirror, Hill?” I had lost thirty pounds and from that day on never missed a dessert, an unfortunate habit that continues to this day.
Sgt. Springstead, during one of our last training days, sat us down and talked to us. He asked each of us where we were from and to tell about ourselves. He was also from South Carolina and was an English major. My perception of him was changed. Don’t think he lightened up on us. His gift to us as a good class was to teach us how to roll a poncho for our belts. His greatest compliment to me was while I was in line for the last dinner before we shipped out to advanced training.
He stopped me in line and said, “Hill, You’re a pretty good trooper. Too bad you are a f***ing National Guard.”
My next stop was what the army calls “Advanced Individual Training” AIT is the specific training that each soldier needs for his/her duty assignment. The Fort Mill Guard Unit was 2nd Battalion, 263rd Armor so I was sent to Fort Knox to train as a tank crewman.
At Fort Knox, outside Louisville, Kentucky, we were unloaded at the front of a three-story brick building named “Disney Barracks.” We were divided into dorm-like rooms with eight soldiers per room. The atmosphere was also very different. When the Drill Sergeant in charge of our platoon entered our room for the first time, someone yelled, “Good afternoon, Drill Sergeant!” and we all jumped to our feet. Sergeant Knox told us to sit down and quit that.
Wilson Sutton from our guard unit was appointed platoon sergeant and I was appointed his assistant and acting buck sergeant. Our job was to lead our platoon to any training exercises and make sure they stayed out of trouble as much as possible.
This was 1970 and the military was finally adapting its gear and weaponry to the Viet Nam War. We trained on M-16’s in basic training but at Fort Knox, when we arrived, they were still training on M-14’s. We wore the black leather boots that had been standard issue since Korea while the cloth “jungle boots” were worn in Viet Nam. Our training was on M-48 Patton tanks which were developed during the Cold War and proved very capable. They were still used in Viet Nam but being slowly replaced with the remodeled M-60.
We learned all aspects of the Patton tank and had classes on skills specific to being a tanker. Much of our time was spent in the motor pool learning how to troubleshoot any mechanical problems. “Movement is critical. If a tank can’t move,” we were told, “You are a stationary target and cannot be much help in combat.” We learned to repair tracks and keep the engine running. Real mechanical issues were left to repair crews.
In a follow-up class we learned how to operate the in-tank radio. Cell phones and transistors were a thing of the future and the radios were clunky microwave-sized devices full of vacuum tubes and wires. We learned to troubleshoot problems, a training I am thankful for to this day. “Communication is essential in combat. Tanks have limited visibility and radio contact is critical to any mission,” we were told.
The third class was gunnery. Along with the main gun, which had been upgraded to fire a 105 millimeter round, a Patton tank had a 30 caliber machine gun mounted and sighted inline with the main gun and a 50 caliber mounted in the tank commander’s cupola. The importance of gunnery was pointed out the first day by a training sergeant who told us. “I know they told you in those other classes how important movement and communications are but the fact is, if you can move and communicate but not shoot, you are essentially a 52 ton portable radio.”
Move, Communicate, Shoot. Using shoot in a metaphorical sense, I have found that the three are as essential in civilian life as they are for military survival.
Life is not static and what is true today may change before tomorrow. Jobs can be lost, people can die, the world can change. In order to survive and thrive, we must be able to move our plans and aspirations and even our physical selves to cope with new realities. If we are not moving, changing, adapting, we will be left in a past that no longer needs nor wants our skills.
While schools have had to adopt remote learning and more and more jobs move from the office to virtual commuting, communication is vital in today’s workplace. We are expected to be able to use standard English in most job settings and it is unquestionably a determinant in promotion. We are also expected to be fluent in social media speak and OMG if we use it incorrectly, LMAO!
The final critical skill is Shoot. I am not talking about actual gunnery. That is a subject I will leave as your personal option. To survive and thrive we need to know how to make a decision…when to pull the logical and emotio
nal trigger. There are always people who are glad to decide what we should do and advice is plentiful, cheap and often useless. There are points in life where a decision must be made and we often hem and haw as long as possible until someone else decides for us. We end up resentful and disappointed at living out someone else’s choice. My father, never at a loss for advice, always told me “Make a decision, even if it is wrong!” Adapting to changes and communicating with our associates will take us far but standing tall and making the tough decisions is the mark of being an adult.
There we have it. All in one writing we have a little history, a long-festering confession of guilt and pinch of good advice. May your days be lived out in peace.
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