The stories in my collection, Artie Azzetti & Me, are based on growing up in Westwood, NJ. The first Azzetti story is set in 1959, and the series runs through 1972, when I graduated from high school. And while my friends entered college, I joined the Army. The Vietnam War was still on, but some guys would do anything to get out of going to Dartmouth. Not that Dartmouth wanted me. I’d been a thoroughly subpar student from K-12, with kindergarten being the only academic year I truly enjoyed.
Decades later, I wrote a memoir about Army life, focusing on basic training, a coming-of-age experience shared by millions, but it ain’t nothing like freshman year in any university.
Here now, the opening salvo from A-5-2, A Boot Camp Story by me, Paul Berge. Cover art by Emily Berge-Thielmann. Layout and production by Karey Sanderson. Cover photo by James F. Berge. Foul language is courtesy the United States Army and may not be suitable for sensitive eyes and ears.
--Paul Berge
Ailerona, Iowa
“A-5-2 BCIT”
(Alpha Company Fifth Battalion 2nd Basic Combat Infantry Training Brigade)
Thursday, 28 Sep 72
Day 1
“Nine more weeks, and we’ll be through….”
Everything significant in the Army begins in darkness. And it was the night of September 28, 1972 – or 28 Sep 72, as the Army called it – that found me on a chartered bus, that smelled of cigarette butts, urine and Hai Karate aftershave, headed from Newark, New Jersey – where I’d been born eighteen-and-a-half years earlier – to Fort Dix, New Jersey, where I assumed I would die before the Army calendar flipped to 1 Oct 72.
Staring out the grimy window at the red and gray flow of the Jersey Turnpike with my stomach knotted tighter than a collapsing star, I tried not to focus on the significance of the mistake I’d made. The Vietnam War was still playing itself out but getting less press; viewers were bored, and ratings were in the cellar. Protests had lost their glam.
“Hey, Hey Ho, Ho – We’re getting bored And gotta go….”
Still, it was there like a soap opera that refused to die, been there since I was a kid in St. Andrews Grammar School in Westwood, NJ, where we once watched from our sixth grade classroom window as a funeral procession pulled up to the church for a High Mass to honor Pfc. Richard Nugent, who’d left Westwood High School in 1963 to join the Marines and died at age 19 during his second tour in Vietnam on 28 Feb 66. Over six years later Nugent’s name was on a memorial in the town’s Veterans Park, the war lived on, and I was on a bus headed to basic training.
I’d joined the Army as part of an ingenious plan to avoid college that fall. It worked. I’d been accepted into William Patterson College in Wayne, NJ, and gawdalmighty, I didn’t want to go. College just seemed like more high school only you had to pay for it. So, when the Army called – literally called on the phone – that summer and asked, “Are you Paul Burgie?”
“Yeah, but it’s pronounced – ”
“How would you like to join today’s all modern volunteer Army?”
Giving it no thought, I answered, “Okay,” and heard the recruiter’s phone drop at the other end.
A week later, I reported to the AFEES in Newark – AFEES means Armed Forces Entrance and Examination Station. There, a doctor determined my military fitness by my ability to turn my head and cough. Then, after passing an aptitude test that required counting to eleven without removing my shoes, I was in the Army Reserves with orders to report, again, to the AFEES for active duty on 28 Sep 72.
This plan didn’t go over well with anyone. My mother cried, saying I was throwing my life away in Nixon’s war. I remembered when they used to call it Johnson’s War and explained that whoever’s war it was it was almost over, and, besides, the recruiter promised I wouldn’t be sent there, saying that only draftees get sent to Vietnam.
My father – a World War II infantry veteran – merely shook his head and my hand while saying, “You have absolutely no idea what you’re in for.”
In late August when my friends, Bruce Schentes and Rich Desmond went off to college, possibly thinking me an idiot, I stayed on the job as a valet parking attendant wheeling Lincolns, Corvettes and Eldorados to half-drunk rich dudes at some of the best Italian restaurants in Bergen County. The tips were great, but as September wore down, the 28th loomed like a date with the gallows. All the while I hoped the war would stay out of reach, and I didn’t realize that in June President Nixon had announced that no more draftees would go to Vietnam. I didn’t read the papers. I wasn’t a draftee. I was Regular Army – RA. My lottery number was 323, and that year they only drafted to something like number 62, which didn’t matter because no one from 1954, the year I was born, was drafted. I didn’t need to be there. But there I was...on a fucking bus to Fort Dix, experiencing a level of depression I didn’t know existed.
There’s the depression you’d feel when Christmas vacation ended, and you had to go back to school in the January cold. There’s the depression of being dumped by a girlfriend, or depressed when a Mets game gets rained out. But this...this was new territory.
I was as alone as any teenager could feel. My three-year enlistment stretched ahead like the Turnpike vanishing into the darkness of something I couldn’t fathom. Watch all the John Wayne movies you want, but no one can understand the military until actually experiencing it. It’s like trying to imagine a kidney stone when you’ve never passed one. My father knew that. John Wayne didn’t; he just acted like he did. Not the same thing.
Anyhow, I’d volunteered – for the Army, not a kidney stone. Earlier that day – 28 Sep 72 – at the Newark AFEES, alongside a couple dozen other long-haired, pimply, tall, skinny, short, fat, white, brown, blue-eyed, brown-eyed, red-eyed, scared, confused kids from 17 to, maybe, 23, guys from north Jersey and some clustered together speaking Spanish like West Side Story understudies, we swore the Oath of Enlistment in one uncertain mumble, pledging to defend the Constitution of the United States of America or die trying – literally. A profound moment, although, no telling if anyone in our group had ever actually read the Constitution. I doubt if the Marine 1st lieutenant administering the oath had read it either. I also wondered why a Marine was swearing us into the Army, and for a minute, wondered if I’d accidentally joined the wrong organization. Wouldn’t have surprised me. I’m not one for reading details on contracts.
We agreed to obey our leaders and live the next years subject to mind-fucking regulations enforced by the UCMJ – Uniform Code of Military Justice. In other words, like millions of young Americans before, we were in the Army. Starting pay – $178 per month, less taxes, plus free room and board. And free hats. I always thought it funny that we had to pay taxes in the Army. Taxes paid us, why didn’t they just pay us less and keep the difference? Ah hell, some things aren’t worth thinking about.
Also, no girls allowed. Not on this bus. Not on this day. Not for a while.
The air brakes hissed as the bus exited the Turnpike onto another highway leading deeper into the black night of my mortgaged soul. My stomach clenched even tighter. I’ve never been to prison but imagine there’s a similar feeling to seeing the cold hard lights of an entrance gate.
MPs waved cars through, saluting the ones that carried officers. The civilian world slipped away as we passed the discomforting Welcome To Fort Dix sign. The kid beside me – round and very white with shiny glasses – hadn’t said a word the whole trip, but he now simply muttered, “Shiiit…”
I silently agreed.
We’d entered a foreign land. Technically, we were still in America but didn’t feel like it. I couldn’t take in much through the glass. Square green vehicles moved past square buildings with neatly trimmed square lawns beneath disinterested streetlamps. Uniformed figures wearing olive green caps ignored our arrival while marching in square blocks of forty or so. They looked so sad…no, not sad, but…blank, as though the personalities had been sucked from their marrow. And each block of uniformed figures had a single figure with his face obscured beneath the wide brim of a Smokey-the-Bear campaign hat, marching beside it. And Smokey looked immensely dangerous, as though he could kill the entire block on a whim. Who were these poor wretches? Prisoners? I thought we must be near the stockade. Smokey, I knew from watching Gomer Pyle on TV was a drill sergeant.
And that’s when the bus stopped.
Silence. And I don’t remember how I got from my seat, down the aisle and out the door, but I do remember the warm night air, squinting against overhead lights and gripping my brown paper Shop Rite bag that contained a change of underwear, toothbrush, toothpaste, razor, shaving cream and Right Guard spray-on deodorant. Nothing else, because that’s what the written instructions that came with the orders to report for duty on 28 Sep 72 said to bring. Everything else, even money, the note said, would be provided.
I had eight bucks in my pocket. That morning as my father dropped me at the Army Recruiting Center – a storefront office in a strip mall between a pizza joint and liquor store in Fairfield, NJ – where I’d get a ride to the AFEES, I removed forty-eight dollars from my pocket, handed two twenties to him and said, “Take my mother out to dinner or something.” I don’t know if he did. But I didn’t see any need to have money, didn’t see the need to possess anything. Standing beside our ’64 Ford Galaxie wagon, he took the money, shook my hand, cleared his throat, and told me to do what I was told and not to volunteer for anything. Too late for that I thought. And, saying he didn’t want to be late for work, he climbed into the car and drove away.
I climbed into a ’69 American Motors four-door Ambassador – OD green with US ARMY stenciled in white on the doors, and together with two other guys my age who’d just shook hands with their fathers who were late for work, we rode off to the AFEES in Newark. No one spoke in the car.
Once at AFEES we processed through several rooms, where we signed more papers and pee’d in plastic specimen cups after which an officer told us to line up along a hallway wall and to “roll up your sleeves above the elbow and turn your palms out.” He, then, walked slowly along the line, inspecting our arms—for what I didn’t know, until he stopped at the guy beside me, who leaned against the wall and slightly to his left.
“How old are those?” The officer asked and pointed to an arm scarred with needle tracks, including one that bled. Receiving no answer, the officer leaned into him and said, “You’re in the Army now and can’t do that. Understood?”
The kid nodded. Drug screening session over, we spent the rest of the day waiting for the bus.
At Fort Dix, we weren’t allowed to stop after getting off the bus, no chance to look around and panic. Keep moving, everything would be provided.
Through a set of double doors and into a large fluorescent-lit pale green room that smelled of Johnson’s floor wax. Keep moving, everything would be provided.
We resembled cattle stumbling down a chute into a feedlot, and like doomed cows, we bunched up in mute terror, eyes wide, turning, looking for a friendly face. There weren’t any.
I wore faded blue jeans, a white polo shirt, tan wind breaker and dirty white sneakers. The other arrivals mostly looked the same, although a few of the older ones wore dress slacks, buttoned shirts, loafers and managed to keep their styled hair in place. My blonde hair stood out in a curly mop like Harpo Marx in the wrong movie. Everyone else in the room wore uniforms, officers in tailored khakis with short sleeves and shiny insignia on their collars. A fat sergeant quietly stalked the perimeter supervising a half-dozen sad characters who resembled Soviet gulag inmates with shaved heads, wearing dumpy green uniforms and clunky black boots. I figured they must be part of that prison team I’d spotted outside. The fat sergeant quietly handed the prisoners stacks of folders and indicated they should set one on each empty seat.
Everything moved slowly but with an intense inevitability, like watching a glacier approach, no stopping it.
“Listen up, gentlemen!” Someone shouted, but I couldn’t see who. A prisoner glanced at me and smiled in a you’re-in-for-it-pal look before turning away. “As your name is called you will file into the assigned seats, but do not sit, do not talk, do not touch anything until told to do so! Any questions? I didn’t think so.”
And the shuffle and scrape of molded plastic chairs on metal legs against a fantastically polished tile floor began as names echoed off the concrete walls: “Abrahams, Michael; Adams, Peter; Benson, Robert; Burgie, Paul; Bosworth; Gareth…” And we moved to our assign seats and stood, looking around.
“Each seat has a packet with a name printed on the exterior. If the name on the packet’s exterior does not match your own name, then you are in the wrong seat and have already fucked up.”
We glanced down, and I was immensely relieved to see my name, Berge, Paul Joseph in block letters on a large manila envelope, the flap secured with a brown string tied in a figure-8 around two brown buttons. It looked Top Secret. My first mission in the Army and I hadn’t fucked up, although my name had been mispronounced. It wouldn’t be the last time, but I thought it best not to correct the Army at that moment. We’d have plenty of time to better get to know each other.
A shuffle and muttering – possibly whimpering – two rows back indicated someone had fucked up. I turned to look, but a voice that I couldn’t believe could be so loud and piercing, screamed, “Eyes front!”
I wanted to go home and really needed to pee.
(to be continued…. Or to read more in paperback or e-book, or listen to the audiobook, go to paulberge.com or Amazon Kindle https://www.amazon.com/5-2-Paul-Berge/dp/169392028X/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=A-5-2+paul+berge&qid=1578172719&sr=8-1&pldnSite=1) Or even a real bookstore.
A-52, A Boot Camp Story, © Paul Berge
Ahquabi House Publishing, LLC (all rights reserved; no trainees were sacrificed in retelling this tale…well, not many)