Читать книгу Welcome Home From Vietnam, Finally - Gus Kappler MD - Страница 13

We had no savings, but we were granted the credit to purchase a Chrysler sedan and drove across the country to Ft. Sam Houston in San Antonio, Texas, for my basic training.

We rented a small condo near the base. Ed Kayser and his wife, Mary, who had arrived a few weeks earlier made things easier. Ed was my roommate at Cornell Medical College the first year before he married Mary. After graduation, he trained as an orthopedic surgeon and was in the “same boat” as me. He deployed two weeks prior to my departure and was stationed at Cu Chi’s 12th Evacuation Hospital. One saving grace of basic was the opportunity to enjoy the wonderful city of San Antonio with its architecture, history, canal area, and great food. All this was wonderful, but the specter of a year’s separation seized our attempts at enjoyment with stark reality of the near future.

The basic training experience was a joke. Boy Scout Camp reincarnated: map reading, marching, demerits, VD and hygiene lectures, how to brush our teeth, shooting the M14, which was not being used “in country,” and a crawl under the machine gun (M60) fire. The most dangerous experience was at the shooting ranges as those unfamiliar with weapons waved loaded and chambered .45 semi auto pistols and M14 rifles freely in all directions.

There was no instruction in what types of wounds we would encounter and the brutality of military weapons.

Did you know that two cold cans of beer neatly fit into the canteen cup on the webbed belt? The night compass course was a hoot attempting to read an azimuth with a buzz on in the dark.

The “PIT” was a club on post we frequented, which was filled with nurses, dentists, veterinarians, and doctors all headed soon for Vietnam. The veterinarians were involved with food inspection in Vietnam.

We knew we were all going to Vietnam so we practiced passive-aggressive irreverence. The fiasco lasted six weeks.

Then I left!