Highway 6 Runs Both Ways: Recollections of My Four Years in the Texas A&M Corps of Cadets
124
Highway 6 Runs Both Ways: Recollections of My Four Years in the Texas A&M Corps of Cadets
124eBook
Available on Compatible NOOK devices, the free NOOK App and in My Digital Library.
Related collections and offers
Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781491848203 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | AuthorHouse |
| Publication date: | 01/10/2014 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 124 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
Read an Excerpt
HIGHWAY 6 RUNS BOTH WAYS
Recollections of My Four Years in the Texas A&M Corps of Cadets
By Jack B. Holt, Mike Rasbury
AuthorHouse
Copyright © 2014 Lenora HoltAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4918-4819-7
CHAPTER 1
My introduction to life in the Corps
We started the year with forty-nine freshmen in A Company, Third Battalion, Second Brigade. My Aggie buddy Mike always said it was forty-four, but I am almost certain that I heard we had forty-nine freshmen, or "fish" as first year cadets are called, reporting in to Dorm 4 on that hot, muggy day in September of 1962.
I have a theory that might explain the difference in my count versus Mike's. In the uproar of that first day, sweaty freshmen were lined up, pressed against the walls of the long dormitory hallway like ducks at a shooting gallery. A handful of upperclassmen who arrived a few days early to indoctrinate the new cadets strutted down the middle of the hall as they yelled instructions. My theory is that there were five freshmen who had been assigned to Company A-2 who got to the front door of the dorm, saw and heard the tumult inside, and never even entered. I imagine they ran back to the car before mom and dad could drive off and scurried back home to Decatur or Dilley or Dallas or wherever they came from. They probably signed up with the local junior college rather than subject themselves to the ordeal that surely lay ahead as a fish in the Texas A&M Corps of Cadets.
I must confess that there have been moments that I may have envied those five guys.
"You signed up for what?"
My high school friend Charlie and I had gone up to College Station prior to the start of school for a two day orientation. One of the tasks during our stay was to sign up for ROTC at the Chemistry Building located in mid-campus. Just inside the door in the main hallway there were two tables. On one side of the hallway was a table marked "Air Force" and on the other "Army". Charlie got in line for the Air Force table and I got in line behind him. He was signed up for Squadron 8, nicknamed "Animal 8". I was assigned to Squadron "Seagram" 7. Upon returning to the car where Mom, Pop and my brother Jim were waiting, Pop asked which company I was going to be in. When I told him Squadron 7, he nearly went ballistic. He was Class of '40 and had been in Field Artillery, C-Battery. Didn't I know that the Air Force required a four-year active duty commitment for officers, whereas the Army required only two?
Actually I didn't know that. The guy we talked to at the Air Force table told us that the Army ROTC guys had to drill every Saturday morning with rifles, and then spend the entire afternoon cleaning the rifle. (The part about spending all day cleaning the rifle was not true.) He said the Air Force ROTC guys got to sit in an air conditioned hall and watch movies instead of drilling outside in the heat, and they had no rifle to clean. He was quite persuasive.
So I made a hasty trip back inside to the Army ROTC table. Soon I was signed up to be a future member of Company A-2. Pop was now satisfied since I was in Army ROTC, and I was on my way to becoming an officer and a gentleman someday. The pilgrimage was underway. I had no idea of the adventures, and misadventures, that the next four years would bring. All that mattered to me for the near term was surviving from one day to the next.
Freshman shock and awe
In a way, I was better prepared for the rigors of life as a fish in the Corps of Cadets than were some of the other freshmen assigned to Company A-2. My father had indoctrinated me, since birth I suppose, with tales of his days at Aggieland. I knew that I was free to enroll in any college or university of my choice, but if it was anything other than Texas A&M he would disown me. I say this not to be critical, but to note that his generation all served in the military and there was a certain expectation that their sons to also do so. In my case the expectation was unspoken, but the question of whether or not I really had a choice is for all practical purposes academic.
I determined to adapt as best I could and to embrace the path I was now on. But there were some fish who, unbelievably, did not even know when they signed up to attend A&M that it was a military school. I suppose when they enrolled they were told that, oh, by the way, ROTC was mandatory for freshmen and sophomores. So they signed up thinking it was just another course in their curriculum. Some of them did not realize that being in the Corps was a full-time affair. You could tell one of these guys by looking into his eyes. They had a look of panic, the kind that paralyzes a person and renders them perpetually unsure of what to do or say. The odds were that fellows like this were not going to make it. They needed some help, some mentoring, some words of encouragement. Most of them got none. This attitude did not bode well for what lay ahead.
Getting up to speed
The pace of those first few days was hectic. The first order of business was a trip to the campus barbershop in the basement of the Memorial Student Center where those beautiful duck-tail haircuts that were so much admired by the high school girls were left on the floor. Next was a visit to an ancient wooden warehouse that smelled of moth balls where we were issued khaki uniforms, fatigues, wool winter pants, Class A winter dress jackets, hats, shoes and combat boots. The poor guys at the end of the line had a choice between too small or too large. It was then off to the Exchange Store to buy our brass insignia, belt buckles, shoe polish and other personal items not already brought from home in our foot lockers.
After two days of orientation, provided by several juniors and seniors as our initial introduction to Corps life, the rest of the A-2 contingent showed up. Dorm 4 now was packed with students, as were all the Corps dorms. We actually had three fish in my room initially. There was a makeshift wooden bunk stacked on top of the regular bunk bed. I was the unfortunate occupant of the top bunk, and found myself with perhaps three or four inches of clearance to the ceiling when in bed each night. It was like being in a coffin. I quickly learned not to try to turn over or risk getting my shoulders wedged between ceiling and mattress. Since heat rises, my crypt was also the hottest space in an already hot room.
Only wimps need air conditoning
One reason that the cost of attending Texas A&M in the early '60's was so low must have been the lack of air conditioning. The only air conditioned dorm was the one the football team lived in. Many of my classes were in un-air conditioned buildings. The college administration apparently subscribed to the principle that molding young lads into scholars and warriors required hard work and sweat. They were particularly big on the "sweat" part.
So it was that one's chances of avoiding heat stroke was a function of the size and efficiency of the fan you owned. My dad found me a fan for several bucks down at our local hardware store. It was one of those made-in-Japan contraptions manufactured from war-surplus Zero's in the days before Lexus and Sony. It had a little label on the front that read "Nippon Breeze King" or something similar. At full speed it wouldn't even blow a sweat drop off my nose. The only way to get any relief while studying at night was to strip down to boxer shorts. But even that did not prevent the study papers from sticking to my forearms.
So a few weeks into the school term I replaced the breeze king with a really heavy-duty old GE fan that I found in my grandmother's attic. It was one of those stout metal models from the 1930's with a sturdy cage around the giant fan blades and a motor that looked and sounded like an engine from a B-29. But it really could move the air. I set it on my desk at the end of my bunk and aimed it at my head at the opposite end of the bed. It blew so well that I slept under a blanket many nights. That fan served me well throughout all four years in the Corps dorms. I sold it to a sophomore for five dollars when packing up to leave for the last time. It was sort of like saying goodbye to an old friend.
Attrition has its benefits
Relief from the overcrowding soon came. By the second week apparently enough freshmen had already quit that we could spread out to two cadets per room as the standard occupancy for which the dorms were designed. The heat, although still fierce, was more tolerable with only two fellows per room. We quickly settled into the routine of classes, marching, mess hall procedures, room inspections, physical training, Call to Quarters (mandatory study time), and dozens of other rules, regulations and traditions that governed life in the Corps of Cadets.
We learned that fish are not allowed to think, but we could "cogitate". The truth was, the life of a fish is so regimented that there isn't any need to think very much anyway. So I was content with "cogitating" as I fell into the routine and rhythm of Corps life. The Corps had little use for, and no tolerance of, a cadet who marched to the beat of a different drummer.
My "fish old lady", i.e., roommate, was fish Womack from Waco, a very agreeable sort of fellow who also was majoring in Mechanical Engineering, the same as I was. He was smart as a whip and seemed to take to Corps life rather easily. We got along well, and I enjoyed the fact that he drove a gold fuel-injected '61 Corvette. We traveled in style, and we each spent a weekend at the other's home that semester.
Fish Womack made all A's the first semester, but he decided that the Aggie life was not for him. So he transferred to North Texas State, and I stayed at A&M.
A pattern was emerging. Womack was one of a growing number of fish who were calling it quits. Company A-2 was losing freshmen at a rate in excess of the Corps as a whole. I began to have doubts about my ability to finish a full year in A-2, whether it meant being disowned or not.
Tradition
There was much to learn as a new freshman cadet. The indoctrination of freshmen and the practice of hazing were conducted under a longstanding and time-tested set of rules. These rules are not written down anywhere, nor are they formalized or codified. But they carried with them the impact of a far more potent law in the Corps, the law of tradition. The old saw around Aggieland was that if someone did something twice then it became a new tradition. But as we became part of those traditions, like Tevye we came to cling to them for the security they offered. Like the fiddler on the roof, tradition is where we found the balance we needed to persevere from one day to the next as a fish in the Corps of Cadets. There are so many traditions that it is hard to keep track of them.
A fish is required to commit to memory all traditions. Meal formations three times a day, where the unit falls out in front of the dorm to march to chow, became the classroom where quizzes were given by the upperclassmen on "campusology". This inquisition continued on in the mess hall while seated for meals. Failure to respond with a correct answer was grounds for pushups or some other form of punishment. So fish spent an inordinate amount of time memorizing such important poop as "when was Leggett Hall built?" (1911), "where is the stairway to nowhere?" (Baggett Hall), or "how many stars on the Aggie senior ring?" (I have forgotten this, despite having had to count them more than once.)
"Hazing is not permitted at Texas A&M". Student handbook, page 4.
In formations for chow, three times a day, the sophomores gave us the once-over like vultures circling a lost herd of sheep. It seems that many of them tried to outdo their fellow sophomore buddies in being tough by seeing who could provoke the greatest fear among the fresh crop of fish. Several of the juniors also struck fear amongst us, and among the sophomores, also. We quickly made friends with our fish buddies, and soon learned that sticking together was our only protection from the hostile world into which we had been thrown.
All the sophomores tried to act tough, but some of them were not very scary. In fact, one of them reminded me of Barney Fife on the Andy Griffith TV show. When he would interrogate me while we were waiting in formation to march to the mess hall, invariably I would think of Barney and the single bullet in his shirt pocket. I wondered if this sophomore was only given one bullet at a time when qualifying with an M-1. A little smile would creep onto my face; I could not stop this from happening. The sophomore, spotting my snicker, would fly into a rage, yelling, "Get that buzz off your face, fish Holt!! As his voice got even higher and the veins in his neck began to stick out, it became even harder to smother my buzz. The other fish, standing at attention in formation, could overhear the tirade and soon were shaking with muted laughter. Sure enough, we were soon ordered to assume a prone leaning position on the sidewalk and execute twenty-five pushups. We all fully anticipated the entire sophomore class coming down on us like a load of bricks, but then noticed that most of them were grinning broadly themselves at the goings-on.
There were a few who were far more proficient at harassment and were constantly on our case. They were in our face in formation, at meals, and in the dorms so that it felt as if we could not escape the constant grilling. Thus life became more difficult due to the constant threat of hazing by a few cadets who had mastered the art of intimidation.
Now, I have heard tales from fellows at other more conventional schools of hazing that takes place for fraternity pledges during what they refer to as "hell week". At Texas A&M, being a fish in the Corps of Cadets meant undergoing a "hell year". The purpose of this verbal and physical onslaught was ostensibly to produce espirit de corps, discipline, bonding with one's classmates, character development, physical excellence, self-confidence, respect for your country, your classmates, your mother and apple pie. But the practical effect was similar to being incarcerated.
Discipline consisted of some standard physical punishments and a few rather exotic ones. Old standards included pushups and running around the campus golf course at midnight. Officially, denying any cadet of food at chow time was forbidden. But the same effect can be achieved by constant harassment that leaves no time for the fish to finish his meal. Spending the night in an upperclassman's closet with a flashlight to shine his shoes was employed now and then. And there was sitting on a "pink stool". I never figured out where the name came from but the requirement was to sit with knees bent and butt off the floor for extended periods of time. This renders one essentially unable to walk or even to stand up. Another favorite was a punishment for screwing up during a Saturday morning drill. The requirement was to run with your rifle at "high port" ... lifting the nine-pound M-1 extended over your head and running without letting it down until told to do so. It was a real killer in terms of physical discomfort.
In reality, some of the worst hazing dealt out by the upperclassmen was psychological in nature and detrimental to studying, sleeping and maintaining one's sanity. It is hard to get a good night's sleep when you know that dawn will bring one of the sophomores a few inches from your nose at morning formation. Follow this with being yelled at during breakfast so that you cannot finish your Wheaties and you have the makings of a real bummer of a day.
Learning the ropes
Apparently the academic standards for enrolling in Texas A&M in 1962 were not very robust. Any male graduate of a Texas high school who could buy a bus ticket to College Station and show up with about $450 for registration could become a Fightin' Texas Aggie. Company A-2 had some fish that were not exactly the sharpest knives in the proverbial drawer. Since punishment for screwing up was administered to the entire class of fish, we were constantly doing pushups or some other form of physically debilitating feat of endurance, mostly brought on by one or two of our fish buddies who were slower than the rest of us. As one fellow fish noted, a couple of these guys were so dumb that the rest of us knew it.
"Sir, not being informed ..."
When a fish was asked a question to which he did not know the answer, a simple "I don't know, sir" was insufficient. The prescribed response was "Sir, not being informed to the highest degree of accuracy, I hesitate to articulate for fear that I may deviate from the true course of rectitude. In short, sir, I am a very dumb fish and do not know, sir." This standard answer was to be rendered very loudly and very rapidly.
One A-2 fish buddy who was from South Louisiana was simply incapable of meeting this standard. He was hard enough to understand when speaking slowly, which he did habitually. When faced with a question he could not answer, which was virtually a hundred percent of the time, his reply came out something like, "Suh, na beginform ta haw digrin of cursey ..." The sophomores soon learned that his inability to enunciate had an almost infinite variety of presentations. The most entertaining were given shortly after he awoke for the day, while his brain was still in first gear. So he provided many mornings of delight for the upperclassmen who sat at his table each day at morning chow.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from HIGHWAY 6 RUNS BOTH WAYS by Jack B. Holt, Mike Rasbury. Copyright © 2014 Lenora Holt. Excerpted by permission of AuthorHouse.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Contents
Preface, vii,Chapter 1 My introduction to life in the Corps, 1,
Chapter 2 What am I doing here?, 14,
Chapter 3 The fish begin to fight back, 26,
Chapter 4 A brief glimpse of life in the Corps, 33,
Chapter 5 The bonfire is called off, 50,
Chapter 6 Raising the stakes, 71,
Chapter 7 How to kill some time during the summer, 81,
Chapter 8 Kings of the World, 89,
Chapter 9 A Few Final Thoughts, 112,
An Afterword, 115,