THE ARMY YEARS 4

We soon fell into a routine of getting up way before the sunrise and marching out for training in the first light.  We were kept busy all day and into the evening every day except for Sunday.  Sunday we could sleep late and, if we wanted to skip meals, we could sleep all day.  That is, until "The Letter".  It seems that one guy's mother wrote and asked him if he was attending church.  He wrote back and told her that they kept him too busy with all that army training stuff on Sundays to go to church.  Bad move!  Well, she wrote the company commander a letter stating that her son should be let off long enough on Sunday to go to church.

 You guessed it.  No more sleeping late on Sunday.  Up before dawn and then fall in before going to chow.  Then back to the barracks and dress in class A uniform and a quick inspection in ranks.   It was still too early to go to the church so we had classes or something and then fell in to march to church.  After church we were marched back to the company area and allowed to change clothes before they thought up various duties for us to do.  We never knew who wrote the letter and I guess it's a good thing because it would have been pretty rough to be him.

The barracks at Ft Knox were in a high area and all the training areas were way down two hills fondly known as "Agony hill" and "Misery Hill."  If you marched down one in the morning you marched up the other one in the evening.  The training areas all had dirt and gravel roads that were used by tanks and were not in very good shape.  (Fort Knox was the Armour training center.)  Of course, we were always very well armed with a rifle with bayonet affixed but no ammo and sometimes a full field pack and usually wearing that steel pot.  Hey, you never know what you may run into out there. 

Our first hour of C.B.R. training was first thing one morning (Chemical, biological, radiological ).  They had issued our gas masks that morning before dawn as we were ready to move out to training and gave a quick demo of how to put it on.  We marched out to the training areas for our first class.  We fell out in a cleared area front of a podium and set down on the cold ground.  A lieutenant was standing at the podium and welcomed us to his class and said that he didn't see any pencils and paper out to take notes with.  Guys were unzipping field jackets and dragging out paper and not paying attention to the Cadre. ( Another army word that means staff.)  The sergeants were all fanning out around us with tear gas grenades and started to throw them all around.  The tip off to what was about to happen should have been when the Lt. put on his mask.

After WWII war surplus equipment was dirt cheap and I was the proud owner of a gas mask, pup tent, pack, entrenching tool, jungle hammock, trench knife, canteen, and a mess kit.  Most of the surplus stuff was used many times going camping in nearby woods but I will have to admit that the gas mask didn't make much sense.  Don't ask why, it seemed like a good idea at the time.  Anyway, I already knew how to put the mask on.  As the tear gas billowed from all around us some guys put their mask on and cleared it in the proper way.  I saw one guy unsuccessfully trying to put it on over his steel helmet.  Another crawled into a ditch.  He later said that he thought that the gas would just go over him.  Sorry, it didn't.  Most of the company had panicked and ran into the woods while knocking some sergeants down.  It took a little while for them to restore order and get the guys back and the class started again.  Anyway, it was a good object lesson. 

After that lesson we had to go into the gas chamber with our gas masks on and learn to trust the masks.  After a short while they made us take the mask off and get a good shot of the gas by giving our name, rank, and serial number to the sergeant as we went out the door.  One poor guy got a big dose because he had a mask without a filter on it and had just a big hole to the outside.  He figured it out and left the chamber quickly and showed them what happened.

After the tear gas we had the same thing with chlorine gas.  Yes, that will kill you but we didn't get much. It was a good thing that the guy realized he had no filter before the chlorine chamber.

(All images from the internet.  I didn't have a camera with me.)

It is not the employer who pays the wages. Employers only handle the money. It is the customer who pays the wages.
Henry Ford 
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