"Choice, Not Chance"

That was the slogan they were using in those days to inspire guys to join the army instead of waiting to be drafted, but I'm getting ahead of myself.

I didn't join right after high school in '63, I spent the first four months in Alaska because I thought I wanted to live there.  When my seasonal job played out, my plan was to spend the winter in Chicago and return to Alaska the following spring.  By the time I got back to Chicago, I realized that I didn't really want to live in Alaska, but I wouldn't have known that if I hadn't gone there.  I turned 18 while in Alaska and duly registered for the draft.  When I got back to Chicago, I went in to tell the draft people about my change of address, and the lady expressed surprise that the Alaskan draft people had already classified me as 1-A.  She said that her office wasn't classifying guys until a year or so after they registered.  She said she couldn't un-classify me, which meant that I would likely be called up sooner than I would have been if I had registered in Chicago.  This got me to thinking that maybe I should join now and get it over with.  I could always re-enlist if I liked it, but I wasn't planning to make a career out of it at the time.

I had a job as a machinist trainee, and the recruiter offered to make me a machinist trainee in the army.  I couldn't see the logic of that, if I had wanted to be a machinist trainee, I could have just stayed where I was at.  I told him that I would rather go to Vietnam and be a real soldier.  In those days (1964), you had to be Special Forces to go to Vietnam, and you had to be Airborne before you could be Special Forces, so I signed up for Airborne.  I thought it would be fun parachuting out of airplanes, and it might have been, if it wouldn't have been for all the running.

I never played sports in school, and had never ran very far in my life, but I was really good at walking, so I figured learning how to run wouldn't be all that hard.  It might not have been either, if they had trained us properly.  The first time we ran a mile, and that wasn't so bad.  The sergeant told us that we would be running 5 miles a day before we were done with basic training.  I figured that, if we ran five days a week and increased the distance by 1/4 mile each day, we would be up to five miles long before our eight weeks of basic were done.  But that's not how we did it.  We didn't run at all for the next two weeks, and then we ran five miles all at once.

Although I had never played sports, I had done a little amateur weight lifting with some guys who knew how, so I knew that wasn't how you are supposed to train for any physical activity.  Right after our five mile run, I talked it over with another guy who had actually ran competitively in school, and he agreed with me.  We decided that, if we wanted to learn this shit, we would have to take responsibility for our own training.  So, after supper, we went out to this quarter mile track out back and ran around it five times.  Our platoon sergeant, the same one that had been drunk the other night, saw us running and followed us back to the barracks afterwards.  He announced that our previous five mile run obviously hadn't been enough for us, so we were all going to do it again right now.  This made me and the other guy really unpopular with the rest of the platoon.  I don't know about the other guy, but I never did anything like that again.  For the rest of my time in the army, I never ran when I could walk, I never walked when I could sit, and I never just sat when I could sleep.