Ft. Sill

We arrived at Ft. Sill and went to Battery B, 2nd Battlion, and reported for 8 weeks of basic training.  There were 223 of us.  We were divided into four Companies.  Mine was B Co.  

The usual things happened.  They would get us up and outside at 3 am to stand at attention and get yelled at.  Then they'd send us back into the barracks and have us bring out a full foot locker.  I was on the second floor so that was a problem.  They gave us so many minutes to do this and if you were late you had to do push-ups over a 5 ft. wide rock walled drainage ditch 4 ft. deep. Sometimes they made everybody do it because someone smiled when they shouldn't have, or for any reason they could think of.

One week we had no eggs for breakfast all week.  Come to find out the mess Sgt. took all the 30 dozen egg cases downtown and sold the eggs.

The guy sleeping in the bunk above me had a bad heart.  It shook the whole bunk.  Finally they sent him home.

One of the guys was getting married on Christmas eve.  There was an ice storm and his best man couldn't get there so he asked me to stand up with him, which I did.

Darlene came down just after Christmas and she and another soldier's wife got rooms in a lady's house in town.  I was still in basic training so I could only go in on weekends.  Later we two couples rented a house together.

During the first week of Advanced Survey Training a friend of mine told me they needed 2 mechanics in the motor pool.  George (of the couple we rented the house with) and I went to our 1st Lt. Battery Commander and told him that George had a mechanic shop and I worked for him. He told us "I'll call over there and tell them you are coming".  George had no mechanic shop but we were both farm boys so we handled it just fine.  

People would walk through our shop and pick things up off of our work bench.  We would charge up condensers and lay them on the bench so when they picked them up they would get shocked.

We had a Coke machine in the shop.  At that time Coke bottles had the name of the town where it was originally bottled on the bottom.  At break time everyone would put a quarter in the "pot" and whoever had the bottle with the name farthest away from Ft. Sill got the money in the pot.  Also, we would stick a wooden handled screwdriver in a pop bottle, take an air hose with a chuck on it and we could take the screwdriver out of one pop bottle and put it in another one just by the air blowing over it.

One of the mechanics in our shop was originally from Germany.  He was in the German army and fought against us in WWII.  He came to America and became a citizen because we (U.S.A.)  went over there and freed them from Nazi-ism.

We had a Warrant Officer we used to play tricks on.  We'd jack up his car and put it on blocks just enough that it would spin out.  We would hear some choice words from him.  When he got out of the service we were taking inventory and came up short on a lot of stuff.  They discovered it in his garage in town so they sent us to go load it up and bring it back.