Carnett: Meningitis was Army’s silent killer

Meningitis.

It was a word that sent chills down my spine.

In 1962, meningococcal meningitis appeared in pestilential proportions at bucolic Fort Ord on Monterey Bay.

I was just getting ready to graduate from Costa Mesa High School. Many young U.S. Army recruits died at Ord over the coming several years.

I remember reading alarming news reports about various outbreaks. Those outbreaks continued until basic training was suspended for a period at the fort in November of 1964. The training regimen resumed in 1965 and new outbreaks, tragically, ensued.

The height of the season for meningitis, I’m told, is spring. I took my basic training at Ord as a 19-year-old recruit from February through April of 1964.

I processed through the Army’s induction center in Los Angeles. I raised my right hand to take my oath on the afternoon of Feb. 14, 1964.

It was Valentine’s Day — irony of ironies — but I scarcely noticed.

Nearly a hundred of us took an overnight train from Los Angeles to Salinas. We belonged to Uncle Sam. We were loaded into Greyhound buses at about 4 a.m. at the Salinas train station and made the 30-minute drive from the station to the Fort Ord reception station.

We were issued temporary bunks, allowed to sleep for an hour (few of us did so) and then rousted to receive our initial taste of Army chow (not bad!).

I spent a week in the reception center pulling numerous details, such as washing and re-washing the windows of World War II-era barracks, cleaning commodes and, of course, pulling KP (kitchen police).

Finally, I was assigned to my basic training company up the hill. It was situated in one of Ord’s “modern” — but austere-looking — concrete buildings.

The clock on my eight-week basic training experience was at last ticking.

I grabbed my duffel bag, climbed into the back of a 2¿-ton truck and was transported to my basic training outfit: Headquarters Company, 3rd Battalion, 1st Brigade.

Drill instructors shouted profanities as we scrambled out of the back of Army trucks. We assembled on the company street and were given our first orders.

“Even as (25,000 soldiers) at California’s Ford Ord were being trained for action against an enemy that might be as distant as Vietnam,” wrote Time Magazine in an August 1964 article, “they were already engaged in mortal combat with an insidious and invisible invader right in their midst. Spinal meningitis has struck down 59 trainees this year and killed nine of them.”

Those numbers would climb higher by year’s end.

A UPI story on Oct. 14, 1964, announced that a 22-year-old Ord recruit died of meningitis two days after the Pentagon ordered strict quarantine procedures at the base to combat the spread of the disease. By then, I’d finished my basic and was posted at Fort Benning, Ga.

In basic, I learned to be alert for symptoms of meningitis: sore throat, headache, stiff neck and high fever. The disease can also include a severe rash and can be transmitted by close proximity, physical touch or inhaling another’s breath.

While I was at Ord, our barracks’ windows were kept open all night to maximize ventilation. As a consequence, we nearly froze. I sleep with an open window to this day.

February through April is cold in Monterey, and damp. For most of the nine weeks I was there during the winter and spring of ‘64, I suffered from a raw throat, cough and runny nose. But I never reported for sick call.

To my mind, it was preferable to risk contracting meningitis than be recycled back to a previous week of training due to illness. I was loath to attach extra days to my prescribed Ord stay. So, I stayed away from the medics.

The threat of being recycled and spending additional time at Ord scared me more than meningitis.

My sore throat vanished that morning at the Monterey airport, when I boarded my first-ever flight for a two-week leave in Orange County.

The flight down the sun-drenched coast was glorious.

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JIM CARNETT, who lives in Costa Mesa, worked for Orange Coast College for 37 years.