<Begin Segment 21>

SF: You were the operations sergeant. Isn't that a really kind of responsible job? I mean, you have to sort of make things happen. You've got a lot of details and so forth, so it's a, it's, you must have been doing really well in the military for, to be --

JF: I was goin', I was doing pretty well. Yeah. I, well, there was, that was it. I mean, you either slouched by the wayside or you gave it all, and most people pretty much gave it their all because they, they, I think most of them had enough common sense to know that sooner or later, if we're unlucky enough, we're going to be in combat, and we'd better damned sight learn how to fire this weapon and how to do this and how to do that and take commands and so forth. So it was, it was an interesting, interesting job. But when we were on maneuvers we were pretty much, for those three months we were pretty much under -- for me, we didn't have very much control over what we were doing. It was all assigned, all assigned by corps and general officers where we were going to go and what we were going to do.

SF: So after the Mojave Desert experience and before you were the operations sergeant, then, then where did you go?

JF: Well, I applied again for OCS, and --

SF: What made you apply for OCS? Because you knew that your tour of duty was probably going to be longer, right? I mean, you had a commitment after you took OCS.

JF: I still had the idea that I was going to get as high as I could in this man's army. But then I gather then I've, well, yeah, so I figured, what the hell. So I applied for OCS and got the signal OCS. So, that was when the maneuvers were over, and actually what we were doing at this particular time was policing a desert. We were, we were just hundreds and hundreds of miles of terrain that we just swept and walked over and picked up debris that was, been left. So the jungle -- the desert was as clean as it was when we got there.

But that was a, that was quite a turning point in my life when I, we were at Needles, California. You must know where that is on the border, and we were living in tents. They weren't tents, exactly, they were, each man has a shelter half, and two men attach the shelter half together and has a small tent that will sleep two people. Strictly for sleeping 'cause you can't, there's no room for anything else. So four of us would get together and button the tents, button all the tents together, and then put a stake at each corner and pull the thing taut so that you had a shelter about this high, as high as the tent pole, to sleep under and get in, get in out of the sun. And, but I was, most of the time I didn't want to sleep on the ground, so I, I slept under, on the hood of a, one of the scout cars. It was just, I was short enough I could just fit on there comfortably. So I would just lay on this steel on deck and sleep there.

But I went from that on to the Santa Fe Chief. The Super Chief was the better grade of train, but the Chief was pretty damned nice, too. And I went from eating out of a mess kit with a spoon and sleeping on this thing to the lap of luxury in this modern train vehicle, which was just a fantastic change and a virtual cultural shock after three months. [Laughs] 'Cause the food was good, and my own, my own little bunk at night in the Pullman, and it was fabulous.

JB: And that took you from California to the East Coast; is that right?

JF: I went right to, I got leave, en route to New Jersey, I got leave to go home to Baltimore. So I, I went home for probably a week or so, then reported to OCS, Fort Monmouth, New Jersey.

<End Segment 21> - Copyright © 2000 Densho. All Rights Reserved.