Rekindling Boot Camp Memories : Recollections: A return visit to boot camp sparks vivid flashbacks. It also shows that things don’t change much in the military.
Ft. Leonard Wood, a military base planted deep in the stubby hills of southern Missouri, was established as a basic training center in 1940. Camp “Lost in the Woods,” as residents call it, occupies 63,000 acres of forest and includes a desolate encampment of buildings sprinkled upon vast marching fields of dirt and concrete.
One sunny autumn day, I climbed the steps of a chartered Greyhound, waved weakly at my parents and girlfriend through the window, and began a journey toward Ft. Wood and the anachronistic rite of manhood known as “basic training.”
Nothing before or since has been like it.
The time was 1969. Twenty years ago this fall. And I had just been drafted.
Six-thirty on a velvet morning. Life is about to change for the shivering recruits of the Delta Company who are lined up outside the Ft. Leonard Wood processing center. Yelling out their assigned numbers to a scowling sergeant with a clipboard, the recruits blink as they enter an auditorium washed in light and trot to wooden benches.
The sergeant spots a dawdler.
“You people better get some fire in your moves or it’s gonna be a loooooong day!” he shouts.
Actually, days weren’t particularly long when, as an unaware 22-year-old from a small Midwestern town, I entered the Army at the behest of my draft board. The remaining eight weeks were filled with dehumanizing abuse, fear, depression, flashes of elation and brief moments of glory.
When it was over, I discovered I had been transformed from an individual into just one more segment on a gigantic, green centipede. Later, I would be trained in aerial reconnaissance and sent not to the crucible of Vietnam, but to a peaceful intelligence unit in Munich, West Germany.
The need to sample the modern Army’s version of basic training was more than mild curiosity. But exactly what the pull was, I didn’t really know.
Passing the strip malls filled with tattoo parlors and pawnshops on the way into camp, I was dumbfounded to feel again the dreary loneliness that permeated the grounds during my time there. Nowhere had the absence from things familiar been so visceral as in this alien landscape. The ache was constant.
Some of this feeling can be seen in the faces of the youngsters this morning, but mostly there is the fear. Neither years nor the volunteer army have changed the rituals of “basic” it seems. Intimidation is still the preferred method of crowd control.
The recruits’ fate is quickly outlined. All remnants of civilian life will be packed away.
A new soldier’s first trip to the barbershop, especially in 1969, was a delight for the veterans who were watching. The longhairs were shorn like sheep.
“Want to keep your sideburns?” the barber would ask. “Sure,” the unwary recruit would reply.
Zip. Zip.
Two lumps of hair would be thrust in his face.
“Well, here they are,” the barber would say with a howl of laughter.
Those of us awaiting our own humiliation laughed just as loudly. This was one of the first lessons of basic training. Weakness and pain revealed before large groups was not something you sympathized with: It was something you laughed at.
In seconds, a golden-haired Bon Jovi becomes Ivan Lendl. Those in line roll their eyes as they watch.
In the next room, each trainee is handed a duffel bag and told to strip to his shorts. An older man tiredly calls out body sizes, then flings pairs of sturdy green socks and mud-colored T-shirts through the air at raised hands.
Afterward they file past a counter, where they are tossed fatigues, fitted with caps and stuffed into new boots. Their names will be printed on tags and sewn into their clothing. The scene brings back my own clothing issue, the sergeant explaining that we would be given blank name tags upon which we would print our names.
“And make sure it’s eligible,” he barked.
It was a heady time back then. Neil Armstrong had just pounced on the powdery surface of the moon. Woodstock evaporated peacefully, and actress Sharon Tate died brutally. President Nixon withdrew 25,000 soldiers from Vietnam and described it as a “significant step forward” toward peace.
Draft by lottery number began soon after my selection. Conscription, the process that had provided millions of men for World Wars I and II, was abandoned for the all-volunteer concept in 1973. Most who sign up now do so for careers or educational benefits, they say.
“I won’t knock them for that,” says Sgt. Thomas Jones, a “D.I.,” or drill instructor. “It’s the smartest way to get college money.”
Clomping into the infirmary, today’s troops form a line that passes slowly between two doctors who simultaneously pump a shot into both shoulders of each recruit. Several trainees pale and slump against a wall.
Next, gathered in one last assembly area with their new gear, they thread long, stiff laces through boot eyelets, their shaved heads bobbing up and down in the morning sunlight.
My life was reduced to basic elements at Ft. Leonard Wood. You slept when possible because you were always tired. You ate quickly because you were always hungry. At night, the water that washed away the grime from firing ranges or obstacle courses was a welcome embrace. Black mornings were spent pulling blankets to drum tightness and arranging spit-shined boots beneath bunks.
The scene at 4:30 a.m. in Delta Company is a time plateau into which I could step with perfect ease. Now in the seventh week of training and faced with only a final PT (physical training) test and a last inspection, the group is well-drilled and confident. Even cocky.
Once again, shapes are hurrying with practiced routine in the dark barracks before the lights come on. Gleaming dress shoes and boots are placed beneath beds as smooth as candy wrappers. Suddenly, coming down the hall is the platoon father figure and Mephistopheles, Sgt. Jeff Holbrook.
“Get up! Get up and smell the coffee, gentlemen!” the D.I. shouts.
Quickly, a tide of men crowd the hallway, M-16s slung over their shoulders. By now, they know the routine, the way and the truth.
“Let’s rock and roll,” they say.
Marching past new troops, they thunder out chants in perfect unison.
This is how it’s done, they are saying. Watch this.
After exercises, they march in cadence to the mess hall--now the “dining facility.”
Memories flood back.
There I am two decades ago. One among a number of pushing, shoving, hungry animals. There I am gulping milk in desperation. Packing food into my mouth faster than my teeth can mash it. There was no indigestion. The body simply accepted, said thanks and asked for more.
The line of gaunt men this morning could have been my eating buddies of then. Silently, they push forward in line. Silently, they eat. Comments are terse.
“Gonna be a long day today, man.”
It was the physical challenges that drew us together, and the trueness of action that revealed us one by one. Under the hard, slanted sunshine, you learned things about yourself you didn’t know.
As I watch today, most of the men in full battle gear negotiating the obstacle course have leaped and thrown themselves along the trail with little difficulty.
One of the overweight members is not with the program, however. Time after time he hurls himself at a wooden wall with the force of a tractor-trailer, each time “whoomping” to a stop. To the drill instructors watching, this is high humor.
“S’matter,” yells one. “You never had to run from the cops?”
The recruit tries again, slams into the wall and hangs plastered there with one foot hooked over the top.
“Look,” screams a D.I., collapsing with laughter. “It’s a fly! A human fly!”
Finally, one comes over and boosts the recruit to the other side, where he lands with a thud.
“Go on, get out of here.”
Evening in Delta Company barracks. Shapes move in the dimly lit hallway. Shoes are being turned into black glass; freshly rubbed belt buckles are held to the light as if they were rubies. In a nearby office, Sgt. Holbrook, a whippet-thin man with short, wiry hair and aviator glasses on a leathery face, awaits the end of night duty. He puts down a half-eaten sandwich as a soldier knocks timidly.
“Speak!” shouts Holbrook.
The soldier enters to say he just received word in a box of cookies that his mother was in an accident and requests permission to call home.
Another comes to say he has dropped his glove out the window and asks to go outside to retrieve it. Holbrook shakes his head as the door closes.
There is time for the trainee to change, Holbrook says. And this is the place to do it.
“It’s funny,” he says. “There are things people might think are sins, but we make real fine soldiers in eight short weeks. You watch them when they come off the cattle truck, and they don’t know what to do. Then it’s the first week and then the second week and all of a sudden it gels. It’s a beautiful thing to see. They’ve changed into something they don’t even realize. They can’t see it, but their parents see it and their girlfriends see it. They’re grown up.”
It is the afternoon of my last day. Through inquiries and a little walking around, I have located my old Bravo Company barracks. My old room is there, presently unoccupied.
Where are all the burr-headed men who occupied those bunks 20 years ago? I wonder. Are they selling insurance in Ohio? Are their names ground into the black marble of the Vietnam Memorial in Washington? Would they look much the same as they did then, straight and hard?
But this is dumb, I think. There were no life-threatening experiences shared here, none of the deadly bonding of Vietnam. This was nothing, only a shove on the way to adulthood.
There is nothing particularly glorious about the military. Only its concepts of sacrifice, unity and faith are worthy of the adoration we pay it in movies. Despite easy cynicism on one side and cheap flag-waving on the other, these remain our best traits as a species.
Of course, the men who occupy this room now, these greyhounds with hot skin and elastic lungs, do not realize this. Nor would it do any good to tell them.