Abandoned in Hell : The Fight for Vietnam's Firebase Kate (9780698144262) by Joseph L. (FRW) Marvin; Galloway William; Wolf Albracht

candidates quit during this phase. But once our squad adapted to the weather, once we learned that if we couldn’t be comfortably dry, then all wet is better than partly wet, the weather was simply an inconvenience that could be ignored. We just went with it—accepted that this was how it was just then—and let’s go! Find the enemy, complete the mission, and let the good times roll. In the end, we had a great training exercise, while the other squads, operating under the same conditions, made themselves miserable.
    As for the rest of OCS—maintaining a personal and unit spit-and-polish environment, constant marching and drill formations, parades—it wasn’t fun, but it was tolerable. As a survivor of parochial schools and corporal punishment by unbending priests and nuns, as the frequent object of my father’s fury, the constant hazing and harassment never really fazed me. The trick, I learned, was to understand that it was pretty much all a game. So I played the game. My dad could yell and scream better and louder than any TAC officer; they might get in my face, but I was sure that, unlike Dad, they wouldn’t hit me. Let’s make that I was
pretty
sure, but not completely.
    Later, of course, I learned that TAC officers have
never
been allowed to strike an officer candidate or any other soldier. It’s a very rare event whenone of those bright, intense young officers fails to remember this. Their supreme gift is planting that doubt in the candidate’s mind.
    As the days turned into weeks and weeks into months, the schooling, the pressurized environment, the young officers pushing and prodding me and my classmates, awoke something in me. One day I realized that, despite my best intentions, despite the years that I had sabotaged myself by clinging to the comfort of underachievement, I had become a
leader.
Was I born one, or created? It doesn’t matter. Weeks before the Army made it official, I knew that I could command and that I could lead. When the shock of that realization wore off, I felt very good about myself. It had been a long time coming.
    Twenty-two days past my nineteenth birthday, on the last day of August 1967, I was commissioned a second lieutenant in the US Army Reserve, the first in my family to become an officer.
    â€¢Â Â Â â€¢Â Â Â â€¢
    A couple of weeks before graduation, our class was allowed to request individual duty assignments. Some put in for Germany, where the Army kept an enormous garrison, nearly a quarter of a million men, in support of NATO treaty obligations and its policy of containing the Soviet Union. Some asked for South Korea, where some 50,000 American soldiers and airmen remained as a counterweight to the threats of the bellicose North Korean regime. Still others were eager to go to Vietnam. Recalling brother Bob’s advice, I asked for assignment to Special Forces at Fort Bragg, North Carolina.
    Immediately after graduation, I moved half a mile across Fort Benning’s vast cantonment and reported for Basic Parachutist School, a three-week course that included a week of ground school—training in the apparatus of military parachuting, learning how to exit an aircraft door, and to land safely while encumbered with a spare parachute, a rifle, and field gear. During Ground Week, we ran everywhere, toughening our legs for the shock of landings, and made several jumps from a 34-foot tower in a parachute harness. The fall is arrested after about ten feet by a steel cable; then we slid down the cable a hundred meters or so to an embankment, where we were caught by a couple of classmates. For week number two, Tower Week, we were dropped from a 250-foot tower under fully inflatedparachutes to practice landing falls. During Jump Week, we made five parachute jumps from various types of aircraft, including a night drop. After the last, the graduation leap, I was awarded the silver wings of a parachutist.
    More than a year