In early 1944, I was seventeen years old and in my senior year at Eastern District High School in Brooklyn. One day an Army recruiting officer came around and said that if anybody in the senior class scored high enough on an aptitude test they could join the Army Specialized Training Reserve Program. If you were accepted you would receive early graduation from high school and be sent to a college paid for by the government. Then when you turned eighteen and joined the Army you would be in a better position to choose your field of service. This sounded great to me. Besides, I knew I was destined to be drafted anyway.
So I took the test. I think they really wanted everybody they could get. Some of the questions were not too difficult, like “2 + 2 = what?” Needless to say, I passed. I was not in the Army yet; I was in the ASTRP, the Army Specialized Training Reserve Program.
I was sent to college at VMI, the Virginia Military Institute, founded in 1839 and known as the “West Point of the South,” for special training. After a long overnight train ride I arrived in Lexington, Virginia, the home of VMI. I was stunned by the setting of the college in the beautiful Shenandoah Valley. I’d never seen a vista like that.
When we got to the campus we were issued military garb. Wow. An Army uniform! I felt like a soldier. Well, almost a soldier. For a short time, I was an honorary “rat.” That was the affectionate term for freshmen cadets at VMI. It was popularized by the 1938 film Brother Rat, starring Eddie Albert, future president Ronald Reagan, and his future wife Jane Wyman.
Being from Brooklyn, VMI took a lot of getting used to. I had never even seen a cheeseburger before, and they had a cola drink that was only popular in the South then called Dr. Pepper. Talk about a little Brooklyn fish out of water!
Even though I think they were speaking English, the language was very different. In restaurants down there, after I ordered, the waitress would often add in a Southern drawl, “Youwantgrisswiththa?”
It took me a long time to figure out exactly what they were saying. And what they were saying was, “Do you want grits with that?” It turned out that “grits” were a Southern dish that was a kind of porridge made of ground corn. So my previous answer of “No thanks!” still worked.
Life at VMI was wonderful and terrible. The terrible part was getting up at six a.m. to shave, shower, and have breakfast. And also having to make my own bed with hospital corners. (I won’t take the time and trouble to explain what hospital corners are; you’ll have to find that out on your own.)
Here I am as a soldier cadet at VMI, the Virginia Military Institute.
And here I’m surrounded by my Army VMI buddies; most of them were also from New York and New Jersey.
The wonderful part was that the VMI cadets were so welcoming to us, the Army Reserve trainees. They never resented our sharing the school with them. VMI was not just an academic college. Like I said before, it was “the West Point of the South” and truly a great school. So in addition to my academic studies of electrical engineering and learning all about cosines, tangents, slide rules, and such, they also trained you to be a cavalry officer. So I learned to ride a horse and wield a saber—something I had never seen any kid from Brooklyn do.
It was thrilling—if you didn’t fall off. To get the horse to really gallop, you’d yell “Yah! Yah!” and at the same time you had to wield your saber and cut little flags off the tips of bamboo poles. I loved it. I felt like Errol Flynn in They Died with Their Boots On. I kept telling myself: “Wait till I tell the kids back in Williamsburg what I’ve been doing. They’ll never believe me!”
On Saturday nights there were dances that were called “cotillions.” They were held in a large gymnasium at Washington and Lee University, whose campus was connected to VMI’s campus. And there were girls at the cotillions. Beautiful Southern belles! Unfortunately, there was no getting close to them while dancing, because they all wore large hoop skirts so whether you wanted to or not, you had to keep your distance.
All in all, my semester at VMI before the Army was a wonderful transition between leaving home and being out in the real world. I loved it, and the gracious Virginians couldn’t have been nicer to the brash kid from Brooklyn.
When I turned eighteen, I was officially in the Army. They sent me to Fort Dix in New Jersey, which was an induction center. For some reason, even though I had spent a semester studying electrical engineering at VMI, the Army in its great wisdom decided that I should be in the field artillery. They shipped me out to Fort Sill, Oklahoma, which was the Field Artillery Replacement Training Center. When reduced to its initials, it spells FARTC.
(Which somehow lingered in my unconscious and later made its way into a comedy scene in my film Blazing Saddles. Waste not, want not.)
Fort Sill is in the southwest corner of Oklahoma. It’s cold, it’s flat, and it’s windy. If you ever have a chance, don’t go there. If you’re not in the field artillery, I don’t know why you would go there. It’s not an ideal spot for a fun weekend. It was a very long train ride to get there. We arrived around two in the morning and they fed us because we really hadn’t eaten in close to twenty-four hours and we were starving. I remember the mashed potatoes were terrible. They were gray, watery, woody, and splintery.
I said, “These are the worst mashed potatoes I’ve ever eaten in my life!”
My friend Sonny turned to me and said, “That’s because they’re not mashed potatoes. They’re called turnips. We’re eating mashed turnips.”
I said, “Oh. Thank god!” Because I’d been about to give up mashed potatoes for the rest of my life, but after experiencing them I could very easily give up mashed turnips for the rest of my life. And to this day I don’t think I’ve ever knowingly eaten a turnip—mashed or not—ever again.
Having gone to VMI, basic training at Fort Sill wasn’t that difficult. I had already learned how to do close-order drills, and basic training was more of the same, perhaps with more intensity. It’s lots of drilling. You learn how to carry a rifle, how to drill with a rifle, and how to shoot a rifle. The rifles we trained with were not the M1 Garand that was actually used in combat, but an earlier model called the Springfield. It was a single bolt-action rifle that had quite a kick when fired. A tip from one of the sergeants on the rifle range saved my shoulder from being bruised from that kick. He told me to fold a towel over my shoulder before shooting and it worked. By the way, I was very good at the shooting part and it earned me my first little badge as an expert marksman.