Sports, Scouts and the Army

 Jon Sampson reports: Scouts (basic, explorer, & sea), and high school sports seemed to dovetail well into being prepared for the Army. 

 

During high school, Uncle Vake was 'gently' critical of my mid-section (which I tried to hide by leaving shirts out).  (Too much home-made pie by friends & relatives, I guess.)

In the attempt to be relatively 'in-shape' for the start of football season each year, I used to go running whenever possible.  E.g. I'd go running Sunday mornings, and then come back in time to cook the buttermilk hotcake, etc., breakfast for the family.

 

Scouts helped with things like land navigation, survival skills, etc..  E.g. on a 50-mile hike down the Rogue River, we were 'issued' dried 'Kisky' rations (here I'd point with finger down throat).  Therefore, we supplemented with anything we could catch (snared salmon; rattlesnake which happened to be in our pathway; and.....best of all sautéed  grasshopper tails in the field where we were to be resupplied by air drop, and a chute failed, thereby 'further scrambling' our rations.

 

When it came time to get a .40 cents per hour raise (from $1.60 to $2.00), by going on Forest Service lookout, (the additional 128 non-paid hours per week were not discussed), a weekend 'school' was pretty easy due to scout training.

 

I continued running and trying to stay in shape through college, and it seems to have paid off, especially when I volunteered for Airborne School, at Ft. Benning, Ga, in August of 1962.

 

The next year in Germany, while I was serving a volunteer detail in armor, my whole tank crew should have been killed when my loader dropped an artillery simulator into the tank rather than outside.  The blast put powder burns on our fully combat loaded main gun rounds; dented the 1/8th inch thick steel floor; and vaporized our toilet kit bags which were down there.

 

In '66 or '67, first tour, Vietnam, somebody reported a soldier sitting in one of the squad tents with his rifle under his chin, and threatening to pull the trigger.  I asked the Sergeant Major who was handy to cover me and went to the upwind end of the tent and rolled a tear gas grenade in.  Shortly after that, we found the soldier draped over the sand bags at the far end of the tent, and put him on a helicopter on its way back to his unit.

 

Later in the mid-seventies, back in Germany, I was the commander of a unit with female soldiers in it as well as men.  Sometimes, one had to make up rules as you went along.  I took a 1 ft. ruler and marked off three inches on one end, and two inches on the other.  The three inches became the perpendicular distance from the head that hair could not exceed (both men & women).  The two inches was the distance above the knee cap that skirt length could not exceed.

 

My last four years in the Army, I was in Alexandria, Virginia, and responsible for the Army's sports & outdoor recreation programs worldwide.  I retired on 1 July l982, after serving for 20 years & 20 days.