Hot has been the topic of conversation these recent days and my memory went back to 1951 when I was a G.I. at Fort Bliss, El Paso, Texas. We were training to shoot enemy aircraft from the skies with Quad 50 machine guns. Each morning a truck would drive us trainees out to the gun parks and each day the temperature would climb to 120 degrees as we spent four hours sitting around the guns on the gravel in the hot sun listening to our sergeant. We were allowed just one canteen of water for the four hours in the morning and then we would return to the gun park after lunch with just one canteen of water for the four hours in the afternoon and simulate firing the obsolete guns.
We claimed it was like “Going to Hell twice a day.” The local newspaper ran headlines about the continuing hot spell. Not a good time but on Saturday afternoons we could get dressed up in our Class A uniforms, the same dress code that the El Paso garbage collectors wore at work. We’d ride into town and go across the bridge into Juarez and at the Juarez Hotel they offered a big steak dinner and two Tequila Daisies for just $1.
After eight weeks we had a leave home for a few days and then flew to Seattle for a slow boat to Korea. We never did see an enemy aircraft in Korea. When we debarked at Inchon they lined us up and a sergeant came around and wrote a “1” on our helmets and that indicated we had been assigned to the First Cavalry Division as combat riflemen. We all had a nice tan.
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