From AIT, I moved to artillery officer candidate school at Ft. Sill. I was serious, but I was influenced by the general anti-war feeling in the country, so that I was not inclined to put up with a lot of foolishness, and it seemed like there was a lot of foolishness at OCS. I was pretty constantly in trouble, and the main penalty for being in trouble was being forced to run something they called the JARK . It consisted of running 4.2 miles up what they said was the highest mountain in Oklahoma (a medium sized hill) with a full pack, combat boots, etc. However, I did it so often that I could pretty much do it with my eyes closed, and it probably meant that I was in the best physical shape of my life. In addition, I could knock off twenty-five or fifty fairly decent pushups several times a day.
About half way through OCS, there was a big celebration of the first Air Force “Ace” who had shot down the requisite number of enemy planes. It turned out that he had a mustache, which until then had been banned by the military. Because the publicity said that mustaches would now be allowed, I started growing one. It took a few days for anybody to notice, but when they did, all hell broke loose. I did enough pushups and jarks that I could no longer be blasé and my muscles began to notice ---, not to mention my response to cleaning latrines and doing any other terrible things that the OCS instructors could think of. But I was still in the program.
That ended, however, when a few weeks before graduation our whole company was restricted to the barracks during a three day weekend on some general principle that we weren’t good enough to deserve any free time. I decided to take food orders and get everybody burgers and fries from a hamburger stand on base. I thought that if I did not leave the base, I would get in trouble, but not get thrown out of OCS. I was wrong. I got thrown out, along with about ten of my colleagues. One ended up being one of my best friends. His offense was to go outside the barracks to speak to his wife in the company parking lot while she sat in the car. When we started OCS, there were several candidates from Ivy League schools, one from Cal Tech, and my friend who had finished one year of law school, as I had. I don’t think anyone who had gone to an elite school or who was working on an advanced degree finished OCS. I think this was at least partly due to the fact that the war was starting to wind down. When we had signed up for OCS about a year earlier, it had looked like the US would need more officers than it did as graduation approached. So, the class took a big hit about a week before graduation. For most of us it was not entirely bad, because we reverted to a two-year service obligation.
Getting kicked out of OCS was a guaranteed ticket to Vietnam. My law school colleague and I ended up with basically the same orders, sending us to Dong Ha, Vietnam, near the DMZ (demilitarized zone). We ended up as “chief computers” for two different batteries in the same heavy artillery battalion. Chief computers were specialist-5 section chiefs who ran the fire direction centers of the artillery units. The fire direction center talked to the troops in the field and figured up the data to send to the guns to shoot the fire missions requested by the troops in the field, or more often from some intelligence officer back in the rear. Since artillery usually cannot see what it is shooting at, the fire direction center figures a direction and elevation that the guns apply from a fixed reference point to hit the target. It is basically an exercise in trigonometry that could be done easily and instantaneously by a calculator or computer today, but was more difficult back then. We did have computers to figure the data, although we always had to double check them by figuring the data by hand. The FADAC computers were about the size of a footlocker, ran on several car batteries that had to be charged continually, and displayed their results in old nixie tubes that contained light bulb filaments shaped like numbers.
©
No comments:
Post a Comment