Fifty-five years ago today, Dec. 4, is a day that will be lodged in my mind forever. It’s the day I arrived at Fort Polk, La., to begin basic training for the 95th Division Army Reserve unit in Shawnee.
I had signed up for a six-year stint in the Reserve unit on March 7 of that year. I was in my senior year at Oklahoma University.
For whatever reason, I waited 9 months before entering basic training. Well, the reason was that I didn’t receive my orders to attend basic until late November.
The guy who was sworn in right next to me, Mike Hair, also from Shawnee, received his orders to go to basic at Fort Lewis in the state of Washington two months later in May. He was already back before I even went.
There were four of us from the Shawnee unit who traveled together to Fort Polk to begin basic.
The other three included Rick Brown from McLoud, Ron Meek and Larry Gordon from the Oklahoma City area.
Rick still lives in McLoud. I’ve lost track of the other two.
Never will I figure out why the Army sent us to begin basic at that time of year, three weeks to the day before Christmas. They sent us home Dec. 17, 13 days after we had arrived, because the base shut down training for the holidays.
That year, Dec. 4 was a Friday. We arrived Friday evening in the Reception Station area and began inprocessing on Saturday morning. That only lasted until noon, then all the offices closed for the weekend, so we cooled our heels for the remainder of Saturday and all of Sunday.
We resumed in-processing Monday morning and completed that by early Thursday in time for them to ship us by truck to our basic training company, B-4-1, in the afternoon.
What I remember most about those 13 days is when they issued our clothing, they managed to measure my foot for shoes as a size 5 wide. My foot size is a 9 narrow. It was then, still is. Thank goodness I had been issued my correct boot size before I ever arrived at Fort Polk.
We had four days of training before coming home for the holidays. I had been introduced to the low crawl and since basic and AIT haven’t done it since. The exercise I got during the training, however, accounted for my losing 22 pounds in the first eight weeks.
My AIT (Advanced Individual Training) was for a personnel specialist. Gordon and I stayed at Fort Polk, just moving a short distance away. Brown and Meek went to Fort Benjamin in Harrison, Ind., for finance school. Not sure why, because, like Gordon and I, they were clerks.
AIT was spent inside a classroom for eight weeks, with the exception of exercising for the PT test.
It wasn’t hard, just long days. I was quite happy to return home in April to my home unit that was located in the Reserve Center in Shawnee on what is now Airport Road. Six weeks later, Memorial Day Weekend, we returned to Fort Polk for two weeks of annual training.