As I was reading through the "Who is Ryal Haakenson?" web page, I thought to myself "I'd like to write more about my two years in the Army". I believe that it was during those two years I made the transition from boy to man. While most make this transition during the last years of high school or shortly thereafter, I believe I made the major part of this transition while serving in the Army. I was what is called a "late bloomer". Except for a few "arranged" dates, I didn't date at all in high school until the Senior Prom, three days before graduation, and the Senior Formal, three days after graduation. I did date during my first two years in college, but I really didn't get a feel for what male-female relationships were all about (no pun intended) until I was in the Army. For this reason, I feel that those two years were a significant part of my life.
After completing two years of college at Iowa State University, I felt that I needed time to mature before completing my education I was working at a summer job as a draftsman when I decided to volunteer for the draft. Volunteering for the draft is a procedure where one voluntarily gets moved to the top of the Selective Service draft list. This was used to eliminate uncertainty and to get the military obligation over with.
Early one September morning, a bunch of us met at the post office and were sent by train from Sioux City, Iowa to the army induction center in Omaha, Nebraska, about a hundred miles. In Omaha we were joined by dozens of other guys from all over Iowa and Nebraska. We had physical exams and were sworn into the army.
During the physicals, about two dozen of us were standing naked in a line while a doctor moved down the line, briefly examining each of us. As the doctor approached me, I felt weak and the next thing I knew I was on the floor and the doctor was holding my feet elevated. I was embarrassed at having fainted, but the doctor said that it happens often, especially to those who haven't eaten in a while. That evening a few of us went to a movie in Omaha, and one guy was ragging on me for fainting. Another guy said to him that at least I hadn't fainted while pissing in the bottle. Apparently the guy who ragged on me had.
After having spent the night in a hotel, we departed by train for Fort Bliss, Texas, just outside of El Paso and across the border from Juarez, Mexico. We were joined by many other guys in Kansas City, and by the time we got to Fort Bliss, there were several hundred of us. We spent a couple of days processing in and were assigned to Basic Training Companies. I was happy to learn that I knew two people in my Company, (1) Chuck Heldridge, with whom I had gone through grammar school, junior high, and high school; and (2) Alan Erickson, who was a year or two behind me in high school. We lived in five man huts, and Erickson was in the same hut as me until he got sick and had to re-start Basic Training.
Basic Training (called Boot Camp in the Navy and Marine Corps) is where you learn discipline and various skills needed for combat. The cadre (drill instructors) were there to break you and to build you back into the kind of soldier that would survive in combat. Orders were to be obeyed without question. Commissioned Officers were always to be addressed as "sir", and Non Commissioned Officers were always to be addressed by their rank, e.g. Sergeant or Corporal. I was well prepared for this because my dad had told me many times about how military life would be and how we would be expected to perform no matter how unfair we thought the orders were. We also had a lot of forced marches, rifle range practice, and threw hand grenades and fired bazookas. The M-1 rifle was our main weapon and we were each issued one. Toward the end of Basic, we had to crawl through an infiltration course, under barbed wires and with live ammunition being fired over us three feet above the ground.
In all of our field training we carried and were responsible for M-1 rifles, except when we were being trained on other weapons, such as hand grenades, bazookas, and carbines. Our rifles were loaded with blanks, except when we were on the shooting range, where of course they were loaded with live ammunition. We had to clean our rifles and pass inspection with them, and when we were in the field, we had to sleep with them. We were all required to qualify on the rifle range. Qualifying score included "expert", "sharpshooter", and "marksman", expert being the highest and marksman the lowest qualifying scores. I qualified as a sharpshooter.
One of the more humorous incidents occurred on the rifle range. One of the trainees seemed to keep getting nose bleeds each time he fired his rifle. It took quite a while before they figured out what was causing this. It turned out that, although he was firing the rifle right handed, he was using his left eye to look through the sight. Each time he fired it, the recoil caused the heel of his right hand to jam hard into his nose.
Training with other weapons also provided interesting experiences. We fired carbines on the rifle range and found that they were lighter, but not as accurate as the M-1 rifles. Firing a bazooka was frightening. One person held the bazooka on his shoulder, while another loaded it with ammunition from the rear. We were trained to stand to the side and stick the ammunition in, because if we stood directly behind it, the blast could kill us if the weapon was fired too soon. We aimed the bazooka at an old tank about 500 yards away and became reasonably accurate.
Throwing hand grenades was also scary. Once you pull the pin, it is programmed to go off in about 5 seconds, although it won't go on as long as you're squeezing the lever. We were first trained with "dummy" grenades, which contained no explosives and therefore could not go off. Then we were trained with "practice" grenades, which had a small amount of explosives, but not enough to cause the grenade to explode and kill or maim people. The small explosion was like a small firecracker and was intended to give us an understanding as to how long it would take for the grenade to explode.
The "practice" grenade was used by the training officer to play a practical joke on us. You've heard of wartime heroes who dive on a grenade to save his comrades. The Sergeant told us that a grenade, which was really a "practice" grenade, was a "live" grenade. He pulled the pin and tossed it amidst us. We all scrambled for cover. One guy, a huge Texan named Tommie Johnson, tried to dive under other people to shield himself from the grenade. He was never allowed to forget that.
Finally, we had to throw "live" grenades. We were taken to the grenade range, where we were on a hill, and tires were located on the field blow us. These tires were targets that we were supposed to aim for. We stood next to a 5' x 5' hole, about '12' feet deep. This was because if someone dropped a grenade, it could fall into the hole where it would be easy to get away from. The training officers who taught hand grenades said it was the most dangerous job in a training unit, because they never knew who would panic and drop a grenade. When my turn came to throw the grenade, I walked up to the spot where the others had been, and the Sergeant handed me the grenade and gave me instructions to pull the pin, count to three, and throw it. The first thing I did was tell him that I threw left handed and needed to go to the other side of the hole. When that was done, I pulled the pin and threw the grenade immediately. I wasn't about to count to three. We were supposed to watch the grenade hit the target and then duck behind the ridge. I ducked right away. It seemed as if it were taking forever so eventually I started to get up and see what had happened. The Sergeant pulled me down and the grenade exploded. I suspect these training grenades were set to explode in ten seconds instead of five, as a precaution.
One night we had a field exercise where we played "war games". We were armed with our rifles and blank cartridges and went through the hills seeking out the "enemy". The sound of rifle fire was everywhere. After about an hour of this, I realized I could just sit and relax in one spot and fire my rifle in the air once in a while and nobody would know the difference.
One of the most exhausting days (actually two days) was our forced march. We were loaded up with full field packs and rifles, a total weight of about 60 lbs. We then marched about 10 miles to a remote location and set up two man pup tents to sleep in. This was particularly tough on me because the evening before I was at the PX with a bunch of guys and proceeded to consume about a pitcher of beer, which I was not used to. I felt horrible when the march began but after pushing myself for 10 miles and sweating a lot (fortunately we had plenty of water), I actually felt pretty good at the end of the march, except for being exhausted.
Just about the time we got to sleep in our pup tents, we were awakened and had to go on an exercise to train us in gas warfare. We marched about a mile and were told to sleep in the sleeping bags we had as part of our equipment. Again, just as we were falling asleep, they threw tear gas at us. We were supposed to put on our gas masks until the gas subsided, but my head was inside my sleeping bag, and I couldn't get at my gas mask fast enough, so I experienced the discomfort of tear gas. We had been trained earlier on the use of the gas masks; but that didn't help when you can't get at yours.
We then marched back a mile to our pup tents, had to clean our rifles and finally were allowed to get back to sleep. We had had three meals along the way, all field rations. The next day we marched back to our company location, again in full field gear.
Toward the end of Basic Training we had to go through what is called an infiltration course at night. This is a course 100 yards long with a barbed wire fence about every 15 yards. The lowest strand of the barbed wire was about 18 inches off the ground. We had to crawl the length of the course with our rifles, crawling under the barbed wire fences on our backs. All the time rounds of live ammunition were being fired over our heads. We had been told that the bullets would be 36 inches off the ground, but I suspect they were closer to 72 inches from the tracers I saw. Nevertheless, it was the scariest experience I had in Basic Training.
In addition to all the field training we had, we had occasional classroom courses. Being somewhat sleep deprived and tired from all the physical activity, it was a nice change of pace to be in a quiet classroom. The down side of this is that it was very easy to doze off. The policy was not to punish anyone for dozing off, but instead to punish the guy sitting next to the offender. This resulted in a lot of elbows and nudges being exchanged between us, keeping us from dozing off. I must say it was an effective policy.
The Field First Sergeant in charge of our Basic Training was a grizzled old John Wayne lookalike. I believe his name was Cuzzhort or something like that, but he called himself "Old Watash". At the beginning he said that we might learn to hate him, but that we would remember him for the rest of our lives. He was right about being remembered. Stories went around about Old Watash, like the story that he had earned his stripes at least twice, having been busted down to Private during World War II for shooting at a French whore. One day we were on cleanup duty, called "policing the area". We were supposed to pick up trash such as candy wrappers and cigarette butts. I joked to him "We're all fucked up aren't we Sarge, looking at our feet when we're marching and looking at the sky when we're supposed to be picking up trash". Without missing a beat, he replied "Yeah and you go to bed hungry and to dinner with a hard on". He was a colorful character and tried to act mean, but had a good heart beneath it all.
Other interesting cadre included a Sergeant First Class who had just returned from the Korean War. He was all business - not into the harassment of the troops so much, as most of the others were, but into teaching combat techniques that may some day save our lives. About half way through basic training, I had jammed my rifle and turned it into Ordnance for repair. I never got it back, so I had to go through the motions in the last half of my training without a rifle. In some ways I was lucky in that I didn't have to clean it and when asked where it was, I could always reply "It's in Ordnance". During one inspection, they had decided to find something wrong with everybody's rifle and "gig" them, but they didn't find anything wrong with mine because I didn't have it. In the middle of a field exercise I was running around without my rifle, and this Sergeant asked me where it was. I gave my usual answer that it was in Ordnance, and he asked if I were in Korea, what would I do. Being at that smart ass age, I replied that I would find a dead Sergeant and take his rifle. He just walked away muttering something like "What's this Army coming to?".
Another of the cadre was a Corporal who at first was an uncharacteristically nice guy. He was friendly to everyone and didn't even seem like the others that were continually harassing us. Then he went to cadre school for one week and came back a changed man. He became the meanest and most unfair of them all. I wonder what they taught him there.
Probably the least qualified cadre was a 17 year old kid who had just finished basic training himself. He played the role and was always screaming at us, but he was hard to take seriously because he was younger than most of us. On one occasion we marched in columns of four from our Company area to a building where we would be getting some classroom training. I had been designated as guidon, which meant I would be in front of the rightmost column without anyone else in my row. When we arrived at our destination and did a right face, it left me all by myself to the left of the Platoon. Nick, the 17 year old cadre, screamed at me for being out of formation. I screamed right back "I was guidon". He looked embarrassed and said "Well you don't have to yell!".
I also remember another guy, who was not actually a cadre, that is he was not involved in the training of the troops, but was one of several people attached to our training company for administrative purposes. The attached people had jobs on the base and were attached to training units because they had to live somewhere. This one guy, whose name was Hernandez, was particularly nasty. Most of the attached personnel had nothing to do with the trainees, but Hernandez took it upon himself to harass us above and beyond what our training officers did. He would wake us in the middle of the night, usually drunk, and make us dig ditches and other unnecessary stuff and was often physically abusive. On the day after we completed basic training and most of us had moved on to furloughs and new assignments, Hernandez was found in the latrine severely beaten. No one was ever charged with the beating, and it was apparently in revenge for what he had done. I suspect some of the bigger, tougher trainees, and those who had been particularly abused by him, were responsible.
Our Company Commander, who was a First Lieutenant, was a black Puerto Rican who spoke English with a Spanish accent. We had little contact with him, except for the weekly inspections, as we were nearly entirely trained by non commissioned officers. I sensed a little less that high respect for the young Lieutenant from the senior non commissioned officers, and that is common. Older, career enlisted men often don't respect young officers fresh out of college until they prove themselves. They were respectful to his face, but sometimes grumbled about something he had or hadn't done when he wasn't around.
A few of the other trainees were interesting people. Of course they came from all walks of life, all ethnic groups (especially Latinos, since Ft. Bliss is in Southwest Texas on the Mexican border and many recruits are from South Texas), many different parts of the country, different levels of education, and different economic backgrounds.
We were confined to the fort during off hours for the first four weeks, but thereafter got weekend passes and could go into El Paso and Juarez. In Juarez we were exposed to the seedy side of border towns, and the Army had lectures on such things as sexually transmitted diseases and drinking water and other beverages across the border. They recommended that drinking be limited to bottled soft drinks and bottled beer. Juarez also had markets where their goods were severely overpriced and customers were expected to negotiate the price. My friend Chuck Heldridge was proud that he had talked a vendor down from $35 to $12 for a purse he bought for his fiancee. That was until he found the same purse in an El Paso department store for $9.95.
One of the other trainees, who was also from Northwest Iowa, got himself into trouble. He had gone to Juarez and used the services of one of the many inexpensive prostitutes there. He wrote a letter to a buddy back home about his experience in Juarez. Unfortunately for him, he also wrote a letter to his fiancee back home and somehow the two letters were mailed in the wrong envelopes.
A couple of Sundays, I went to an Episcopal Church in El Paso and went to a meeting of their youth group. I also attended a college football game one Saturday night. I also remember having dinner in a restaurant with a couple of other guys and, being somewhat of a smart ass, I ordered horseradish and ice cream for dessert. The waitress brought it, but insisted I eat every bite. I did.
Before being inducted into the Army, I had by chance met Major General George I. Back, who was from Sioux City and was the Chief Signal Officer. In other words he was the top officer in the Signal Corps. When he learned that I was going into the Army and had two years of Electrical Engineering in college, he said I would be a good addition to the Signal Corps and asked me to write him a letter mid way through basic training, so I did. A couple of weeks later I was having lunch and was told that a Captain wanted to speak with me. The Captain was in the Signal Corps and had been asked to talk with me. We sat in his car for about ten minutes while he asked me a few questions. I was struck by the casual atmosphere in contrast with the structured discipline of Basic Training.
About a week later, I learned that most of our Company had been assigned to stay at Fort Bliss for advanced artillery training. My orders had been cut for artillery training, but were revised to send me to Fort Monmouth, New Jersey, which at the time was the headquarters of the Signal Corps. I later learned that many of them had spent the remainder of their tours in Alaska. I always wonder if I would have been better off there.
Food at Fort Bliss was OK, but the cooks were mean, just like everyone else was to the recruits. But due to transportation problems, I had to stay a couple of extra days at Fort Bliss before heading home via train to Sioux City. With only seven or eight people to feed, the cooks went all out. My last two dinners there were made to order and excellent. I haven't had better meals in some of the best restaurants in America. The cooks were proud of their cuisine when they had time to prepare it for a limited number of people.
Finally the transportation problems had been resolved, and I took a train back to Sioux City where I had a week's furlough. After that week, I proceeded by train to Fort Monmouth, New Jersey. The first leg of the trip was from Sioux City to Chicago. Then I boarded another train from Chicago to Newark, New Jersey. I sat with a gal whom I recognized as having dated a friend of mine, Jim Smith, at Iowa State. She was heading home to Indiana for the holidays. Jim Smith, by the way, has recently retired as Chairman of the Pathology Department at the University of Indiana School of Medicine. In the sleeper car, there were several women who were heading east to spend the holidays with their husbands, who were in the military. This was the most enjoyable leg of the trip. After arriving in Newark, I boarded a commuter train to Red Bank, New Jersey and then proceeded by bus to Fort Monmouth.
