MEMOIRS OF A CAJUN BOY

MEMOIRS OF A CAJUN BOY

by Allen John Rogers

CHAPTER FOUR - OFF TO THE SERVICE

It was a time when I had reached another fork in the road. One day in March of 1951 I was playing pool in one of the pool halls on Railroad Avenue. In walked an army recruiting sergeant intent on getting me to join the regular army. I told him that I would take my chances with the draft. I was naïve enough to think that the army would never take me - I felt that I was too unhealthy. It was the time of the Korean War.

On April 21, 1951 I was drafted into the army. We were sent to New Orleans by bus where we stayed overnight and then they shipped us by train to Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio, Texas. We spent a week there getting processed and then we were shipped to Camp Breckenridge, Kentucky. One of the first jobs we had when we got there was to set up the barracks. Some of the buildings we opened up had not been lived in since World War II. The weather and the food there were miserable. We trained there for six weeks and shipped out to Fort Bliss, Texas for 8 weeks of advanced training on 90 mm anti-aircraft artillery (AAA). It was tough training in the desert dryness after so much rain and moisture in Kentucky.

I was in my last two weeks of training. They finally let us go on leave for a weekend and some of the other men and I went across the river to Juarez, Mexico. Although I did not know it at the time, in Mexico I encountered another fork in the road. On the following Monday we went out on a forced march, about 20 miles into the Franklin mountains. Although many of the guys dropped out and had to be brought back in trucks, I surprised myself by surviving the trip out and back. The next day, I started getting sick and to make a long and agonizing story short, I wound up with a bad case of Montezuma’s Revenge. I was hospitalized for 30 days taking the cure. I really enjoyed that hospital stay because they cured me of the horrible disease but mainly because the food was so good.

When I got back to the training outfit I was put in another training unit. I learned that I had to go out on the forced march exercise all over again. I was not pleased with that, but I got through it again. I, like every other private in the unit, did not know where I was going to be shipped after I completed my training. I did learn that the group I was training with before I went to the hospital was sent to Korea.

After I completed training, I was sent to spend much of the winter in Buzzard’s Bay, Massachusetts. They assigned me to a triple-A gun battalion at Camp Edwards. Up to that time, I had not experienced snow. So, one day after working all day we fell out and went to the barracks. Sunset came and it got dark, but there was a moon out and when someone said that it was beginning to snow, we all went out and saw how beautiful snow could be in the moonlight. I thought I was going to love the stuff. Later, I found out what a blizzard is like.

We spent our time continuing our training at the camp. Our battalion went out on the cape to a place called Wellfleet that sat on a bluff above the sea near the north end of Cape Cod. It was quite a sight, sixteen AAA guns with support equipment and vehicles moving up the only highway on the cape. There were four guns in each battery and the sixteen made up the battalion. When we got to the site, we set up the guns and began firing exercises. Our targets were large red cloth banners towed by air force bombers. The targets had copper wires woven in them so the gun-laying radar could see them. The radars hardly ever worked, but we had optical sights to track the target. It had a mechanical computer in it that would compute the fuse settings for the fuse cutters.

While we were on the cape, we had our first heavy snowstorm. It got very cold and the guns froze to the beach. We had a hard time digging them out when we were ready to go back.

On the beach at Wellfleet.

At Edwards I was in a battalion peopled with malcontents. The battalion was originally a national-guard unit in New York City. When the Korean War started there were a lot of men who hastened to join the guard units believing that they would not get into the shooting war. However, President Eisenhower decided that he would make the guard units part of the national army. Although they were not yet in the shooting war, they were close enough to New York to cause mischief. They borrowed a lot of equipment from the supply sergeant and the equipment just never came back. In the four months that I was there, there were four battalion commanders. The ones who had left were out of a lot of money because they were stuck with the replacement costs of the stolen material. I saw the situation for what it was and one day had an opportunity to remedy that. Against my better judgment – never volunteer for anything in the army – when the captain said they would like two volunteers to fill out a unit that was shipping over to Germany, my hand went up along with a kid from Tennessee. I had reached another fork in the road. It was the best move I ever made while I was in the service.

I packed up my duffle and the sergeant told me to go to the office for instructions. A jeep driver took me over there. Of course, I had to spend a lot of time filling out paperwork. This took several hours. Meanwhile, the wind picked up and by the time I was to go to my new barracks to wait for shipping over, a full-blown blizzard had started and there were snowdrifts up to the roof of the barracks. It seemed to take me forever to get to the new barracks that was only three buildings down. The next morning everything was covered by snow. Everybody lined up with the biggest guys in front and we stomped down the snow to go to the mess hall.

I had never been on a ship larger than a shrimp boat before I got on the ship at Camp Kilmer, New Jersey. Kilmer was an assembly point for the troops being sent overseas; also known as a "repo-depot." The ship had a load of troops bound for Morocco, France and Germany. The ship would eventually make stops at Casablanca and La Palais, and would end at Bremerhaven, West Germany.

Living on a troop ship can be good or bad. I realized right away that this would be a bad trip if I let it get that way. The first day we were on the ship, a sergeant whom I did not know took charge of us and selected several of us ("you, you and you") and told us to tie a bath towel at the end of the bunk so he could wake us up in the morning to pull kitchen patrol (KP) duty. KP duty is ordinarily bad, but it is awful on board a ship. It is bad enough trying to eat in the bowels of a ship loaded with troops without having to spend your whole day there. Being no fool I said to myself, this man does not know me from anyone else. So, when I woke up early the next morning, I went topside and took a nap on a bench on the top deck. The sergeant never suspected; no one was the wiser. That is when I started looking for something constructive to do on that ship that would keep me away from below decks as much as possible. I had met a fellow from Louisiana named Angelle and talking to him I found out about the laundry. The laundry was set up on the upper deck near the fantail of the ship. He worked there and said that there was an opening for a laundry worker. The benefits were that we ate with the merchant marine crew and had full access to the fantail deck. Some fool who did not want to work, but later wound up working on KP in the kitchen anyway, had declined the job.

This made life on the ship much better than it would have been otherwise. I loved the food – the crew had best food on the ship, much better that the troops were getting below decks. We worked hard. I was on a two man team that worked the mangle; a machine that was used to press big items like bed sheets. Whenever we made port, Scotty, the man who ran the laundry went ashore on a short leave. He would always bring back some goodies for us because he knew that we couldn’t get off the ship. When we made port in La Palais, he even brought back a small flask of schnapps – illegal on the ship, but no one ever knew about it except us. This voyage was the smoothest of the three crossings that I was to eventually take. This was unusual for late winter on the Atlantic.

We finally made port in Bremerhaven. We went from there by train to a place in the foothills of the Bavarian Alps called Sonthofen. I was impressed by the transportation system in Germany. Besides the coal-fired trains there was an electric rail system between major cities and the autobahn, the superhighway system. When I saw it for the first time I wondered how many lives had been sacrificed by Hitler to build it. This was at a time when we in the U. S. did not have the Interstate Highway System. General Eisenhower saw the advantages Germany enjoyed during World War II because of the autobahn network. He noted the enhanced mobility the autobahn provided the Allies when they fought their way into Germany. It profoundly influenced his ideas about the need for the Interstate Highway System when he became president.

When we arrived in Sonthofen, the winter thaw had begun and early flowers had begun to appear. The area was beautiful.

The Berg in Sonthofen

We were only temporary residents at the Berg; we had to leave because the Berg was to be occupied by another outfit.

After we left the Berg, we became gypsies, roaming all over West Germany. We camped in pup tents for some time in a forest outside of Russelsheim where the Opel automobile factory was located. Every evening when the workers were shifting, there were hundreds of bicycles that went up and down the highway we were bivouacked near. We were there for about a month and then went to the beach on the North Sea near Lubeck. It was summer by then, the weather pleasant and we occupied a large portion of the beach near a resort area. We were there to fire AAA missions against airplane-towed targets. We spent about two months there. We were housed in large tents.

From then on we roamed from one end of West Germany to the other, running a full range of firing exercises and generally making a show of strength. It was all part of the cold war posture we had to maintain.

We eventually were housed in a building called a casern in Biebrich south of Weisbaden at the confluence of the Rhine and the Main Rivers and across the river from Mainz. Having a more permanent home did not mean that we became barracks soldiers - far from it. We would be in the casern for about a week to get the equipment cleaned and ready for the next exercise. Then we would hit the road again. We had an assembly of over 100 large pieces of equipment and we never knew where we were going to go next.

Our troops in formation on casern grounds. I am in the center of the picture, fourth from the right in the left column.

It was while I was in Germany that I learned that my mother was dying. I had known she was sick for some time but I did not know how badly off she was. My father had contacted the Red Cross and they in turn contacted my commander. It was in April of 1952. They gave me fifty copies of my orders and took me by jeep to Rhine Main Air Force Base where I caught a hop to Westover AFB in Massachusetts. It was the first time I had ever flown in an airplane. It was a C-54 and we had on board a very large box painted olive green with a folded flag on top of it and our instructions were: do not touch the box. The box contained the body of an Air Force sergeant and it was being transported back to the U. S. for burial. The box was so large that it seemed to take up most of the center of the plane. Our seating arrangements were webbing alongside the walls of the plane.

We landed first at Lodges AFB in the Azores for refueling and meals. Although I was already sick because of the turbulence of the North Atlantic in April, I decided to eat something anyway. We ate, picked up some more passengers and then took off again. One of the passengers was a drunken sailor who decided that he would climb up in a sort of hammock on the opposite side of the plane from me. He wasn’t there long before he threw up his lunch all over the passengers below him. In addition to this I was seated next to a soldier who was going home on a bad conduct discharge. I did not enjoy this first ride because the plane bounced all over the sky during the whole trip and I dreaded what was in store for me at home.

We landed at Westover and it was not long before I caught a hop to Mobile where I caught a bus to Morgan City. I arrived the night before my mother died. It was one of the saddest days in my life. She died the next day at 6:30 Sunday morning May 4, 1952. She was 48 years old. We buried mama in the Franklin cemetery.

I was home for 30 days and then was shipped back to my outfit on a troop ship. This cruise was not as pleasant as the first one. The sea was turbulent all the way and all I remember is that I suffered all the way from seasickness.

When my tour of duty in the army was over, I was shipped back (again by troopship) to Camp Kilmer for mustering out of the army. The trip back was like the last trip, I was seasick most of the way. The only way I could escape the sickness was to go topside as much as possible.

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