angry and channeled it into strength, picking the tents up and finishing the task with ease. We did a series of other tasks, and at the end of the afternoon, they tallied up our points and I was more than relieved to see that I’d passed.
Getting caught in the wave of high spirits, I jokingly said, “I’m ready to go pick up my wife now.”
“As a matter of fact, your wife and son really are here and they’re ready to be picked up. I’ll go with you since you haven’t actually graduated just yet,” the sergeant told me.
I eagerly jumped into the sergeant’s jeep, and we left to pick them up from the hotel they were waiting at. The sergeant gave me five minutes to go upstairs and be with my wife in private after months of not being together. Fastest five minutes I ever knew because I got about two kisses in before the sergeant started banging on the door to let us know it was time to head out. Intimacy can wait, I guess, because my family was here to stay this time. We moved their belongings down to the jeep and made our way to the hall where the ceremony would be held. I graduated at number 17 out of the thirty-nine that passed the Special Forces Recondo training.
Ammo Dump No. 49
As the SF had promised, my family and I were given nice quarters in a large three-bedroom apartment in Crailsheim. When we finally got to the guesthouse and had a moment to rest, all my wife wanted to do was sleep. I couldn’t argue with her because I knew she was tired from her long flight and sitting around at the hotel before the graduation ceremony. But man was I really looking forward to having some more private time with my wife after not having been intimate for so many months.
Because I did not own any personal furniture to ship over, I was loaned some government-issued furniture. Later my whole baggage came in a crate weighing four hundred pounds. It would be a week before transportation would bring over my baggage, but I had made friends with a few black soldiers back at Schwaebisch Hall. They didn’t avoid from me like some soldiers did because we were wrapped the same way. We demanded respect where it was due. They offered to help bring my stuff over that weekend so I wouldn’t have to wait for the government to do things on their own time. I wasn’t against the idea because I could really use the pots and pans to do some cooking. I really missed listening to some sounds on my stereo too.
These soldiers were just as crazy as I was because they showed up to my apartment in a deuce and a half that they stole from the motor pool. But they followed through on their promise. The crate with my stuff was shipped to Schwaebisch Hall, which was about a forty-mile drive from where we were. They carried everything up to my apartment within a few minutes. The truck was back in the motor pool in the morning, and no one noticed a thing. I’m still surprised that those guys managed to carry the crate up my stairs because it weighed upwards of four hundred pounds.
I lived in Crailsheim and had to drive over forty miles to get to work in Schwäbisch Hall. It was late in the year. Winters in Germany are very cold, and snowstorms and blizzards are almost an everyday occurrence. It only got worse with time, and I wasn’t the only one having trouble getting to and from work. One officer didn’t make dead man’s curve due to the weather. A little slip and there went his precious Dodge Charger. The sergeant major, in all his wisdom, got the idea into his head that because I’d driven a bus through the snow once before and got the soldiers to their destination alive that I was the best candidate to drive the bus that transported the officers and NCO sergeants to work. Thankfully, it was a smaller bus than last time, only a passenger bus was much easier to handle than the fifty-five-passenger bus.
Soon after I was transferred to the communications section at McKee Barracks in Crailsheim, so I didn’t have to drive the short bus for very long. We were tasked with keeping the battalion synced with communications during convoy movements and when nuclear rockets were deployed in the field. It was extremely important to keep convoys updated and aware of activity, but the radios during that time didn’t have the range they do now, so it was up to us to keep relays timed properly so that the convoy would always be in range of communication.
I walked into the commo section at the motor pool and told them I was going to start working in their section that day. I was introduced to a heavyset sergeant that easily weighed more than three hundred and fifty pounds. He was going to oversee me from that day on, so he gave me the basic rundown introduction to the rest of the workers in the section and for the equipment.
Once introductions were over with, I was given my first task by sergeant in charge.
“The first order of business, Sergeant Bravo, is that you go get doughnuts. So, boy, why don’t you take this $5 and go get us some doughnuts,” Sergeant Beauregard told me in his thick Southern accent.
“I’m no doughnut dolly. Go get them yourself!’’ I told him defiantly.
“What do you mean you’re not a doughnut dolly?” he asked me.
“You ever heard of the doughnut dolly girls in Vietnam? They flew out doughnuts to us.”
“I’ll talk to you later. This is no way to start working as a team,” he replied sarcastically, walking away before I could respond.
Later that day he showed me around the equipment shop and explained about being on call. He had a board on the wall above his desk in an open section of the shop that was covered in plastic film over black lines so that names could be written in. He used a grease pencil with a wax base so he could easily erase and add names daily.
One day after coming back to work from lunch I saw my name on the board and it hadn’t been there that morning. The sergeant in charge routinely writes names on the board the evening before so that when we arrive in the morning, we can know if we are to be on call that day. We were tasked to go out on alert to provide communications to the convoys that were transporting Honest John rockets. Later in the day, he went and told the first sergeant that I had missed alert. First Sergeant Dubois sent for me the next afternoon. When I reported to his office, he asked me why I had missed the alert the day before.
“Before I was out to lunch, my name wasn’t on the board. Usually Sergeant Beauregard writes the names on the board the night before, so we know we’re on call that next morning.”
“We’re going to have to give you some extra training then. I’m going to send you out to the ammo dump for the next two weeks,” the first sergeant tells me, making it clear that he didn’t believe my story.
I thought how much of an Uncle Tom this black first sergeant was acting like right now. He blindly believed the white sergeant’s blatant lies over me, a minority just like him.
In a couple of days I found myself driving out in the country, about forty miles out of camp. When I got to the ammo dump, I saw it was surrounded by a ten-foot-high barbed wire fence. It was isolated, the nearest farmhouse being about two miles away. Farmland covered most of the area, which was good so we could see any uninvited guests.
When I arrived at the entrance, I couldn’t see the bunkers where they kept the ammunition because inside the fence there were trees and brush all around the bunkers.
When we got closer to the gate, there was a button we had to press to ring the guardhouse. The guard came out to open the gate and led me to a jeep. The duty driver that was with me said he had to pick up the sergeant that I was going to relieve, so he was going wait at the entrance.
I walked into the guardhouse and noticed the sergeant was still picking up beer and wine bottles around the room, and I thought that the place looked more like a crack house than an official guardhouse.
The sergeant had already been waiting when I arrived so that I could relieve him of his duty and take from him the book of standard operating procedures for the ammunition yard.
He showed me the arms room in the guardhouse, and we inventoried the weapons, making sure the serial numbers matched the log form. There were four M16s, one 12-gauge shotgun, and one .45 pistol. He said only the duty sergeant wore the .45, although he never had to put it on himself. All the serial numbers matched the weapons, but when we got to the ammunition form, he told me to sign it because he had to get going already.
“I was taught