I was looking forward to getting out of this dead end town. (Danville, Illinois). I just wanted to get out into the world. I had been sleeping on a couch at my grandma’s for the past few months because my stepfather had thrown me out of his house. So I dropped out of high school in the middle of my sophomore year to enlist in the Army. I turned 17 on September 19, 1959 and five days later I am on a train to Chicago to the Army induction center. I have a shaving kit, five dollars and the clothes on my back.

I arrived late in the afternoon and was met by a soldier who walked me and the other guys to a hotel a couple blocks away, where we were paired up in rooms. Then we walked to the Army induction center for our physicals. A large room was laid out in stations; you turned your head and coughed and moved on. We broke for chow and returned for more stations. It was very late when we returned to our hotel.

Some guys said, Let’s go see the town. I went along and one of the older guys got us beers. We got to talking and one of the guys said once you get in the Army your body is government property. Let’s get our tattoos now because if we do it later we would be defacing government property. What did I know? When I returned to the hotel I was two dollars poorer and had a tattoo on my right shoulder, a heart with a wreath around it.

This wasn’t my first tattoo. When I was 15 my uncle came back from the Marines and of course he had a couple tattoos. I watched him put a tattoo on my older brother with a sewing needle stuck in a wood matchstick and stovepipe soot. I thought, Wow that’s cool. I got ahold of some India ink and put a needle in the end of a matchstick like I saw my uncle did, and I tatoo’d on my left forearm BC for Bill Cooper. Twenty years later when I was a battery commander a sergeant looked at me and said, “Sir, you’re really serious about this job aren’t you?”

I said, “That BC’s been there a long time.”

Basic

From Chicago we loaded on buses for basic training at Fort Leonard Wood in Missouri. By now I am broke, the five dollars long gone. After unloading into a barracks I found the mess hall and had a great Army meal.

The next morning we began three days of processing. Each morning we had to fall out and line up at one of three colored stakes. Red was for the first day, blue for the second day and white for the third and final day of processing. The first day we got our uniforms. I learned that the Army had just changed uniforms. The dress uniform went from brown to green, and footgear went from brown to black.

In 1954 the Army decided to make changes to the uniform, in part so that officers and enlisted uniforms should be the same, distinguished only by insignia. But it was not until late 1957 that the new uniform was issued to inductees, with a transition period of four years to allow wear-out of existing uniforms. Bill landed in the middle of this transition period when the Army was still issuing both colors of footwear.

When I went through the initial round of getting my boots they were issuing brown boots with a bottle of black dye. If you got the brown boots and brown low quarters you had to dye them black, which was a mess, and you had to keep doing it. One of the old timers said to me, “If they bring you a pair of brown boots tell them they don’t fit until you get the black ones.” Sure enough they brought me a pair of brown boots. They fit perfectly but I said they were too tight. They went and got me a different size, but they were black and I said these fit perfectly. The poor guys stuck with brown shoes had black fingers forever.

One the third day – after a day of trying to march, getting our hair cut, and receiving a five dollar advance on our pay – we were on our white stakes and told to board a bus for new barracks and the beginning of our basic training. The barracks sergeant told us this was his house, which we had to treat well, and he taught us how to make a military bed. We had maybe a hundred guys, fifty upstairs and fifty downstairs.

Then we met our drill sergeant. He was a whole new kind of person. I never met anyone who could yell so loud, and he seemed to yell every word he spoke. He let us know we were stupid civilians and to forget all that we had learned till now. He was going to tell us all we needed to know from here out. There was the Army way and the wrong way, and we would damn sure learn the Army way.

I learned that the Army was everything I had expected and hoped for. I was quick to learn the rules and what was expected of me, and it was the same for everyone without favorites. We were given tests to see what we were good at or at least what we had a little knowledge of. I knew a little about cars and how they run, because I had an old clunker that I had to keep running the best I could. I loved to drive. The Army found that I was interested in this field and took a chance on me. I was to go to LVDC school after basic (light vehicles up to 2 ½ ton trucks).

Right after graduation I had a few days off. I returned to Danville to see Grandma and Mom. I met with some of my old friends and I talked with them about what I had been doing. They seemed so childish to me now. I had moved on with my life and no longer fit there. I could not wait to get back to the Army base. It just felt like home to me and I was beginning to give some thought to staying forever.

Right out of training I got orders for a light truck company in Germany. I flew to New Jersey to board the USS Randle. Early in the morning there were 1700 troops getting aboard. I had never seen so many people in one spot in my life. They put a chalk number on your helmet and herded us like cattle into stalls in these big hanger type buildings.

I met a guy who was a private like me but older. He had been in the Army, become a sergeant, gotten out and then come back in the Army again. But he had stayed out too long to come back with his old sergeant rank. He was in his late twenties and an old guy to me just 17, and a streetwise fellow. We kind of connected.

This guy heard that the Red Cross was giving out donuts and coffee and we should go get some. No, I said, we were told to stay right here so that when they call our packet number we get on the ship. He said, Screw that, we got time. We found the Red Cross, got our coffee and donuts, and slowly worked our way back to the hangar. When we got back to our stall we found it empty except for our two duffle bags leaning against the wall.

We got on the bus that was taking guys down to the dock and worked our way into the formation. It was still dark out it was so early. He said, “Now they are going to pick details as people get on the boat so we don’t want to get on too quick.” As the front ranks moved onto the boat we kept falling back. We were in the last rank getting onto the ship and the fellow checking off names had to go back through the book about ten pages to find our names. The good news was that all the details had been picked: guard duty, KP, whatever.

On our way to the bunking area he snatched a couple paper tags and wrote PAINT SHOP on them, and we tied them to our field jackets. The next morning we got up early with everyone else, went topside and laid on these huge coils of rope at the rear of the ship. We goofed off all day, and if anyone asked we were on break from the paint shop.

Things went well for three days. On the fourth a Navy-type sergeant (called petty officers in the Navy) walked by and asked what we were up to. We told him we were on break from the paint shop. He said to get back there. As we started to walk away he said, “Where are you going? The paint shop is in the other direction. I’ll show you the way.” He took us way down to the bottom of the ship to a sergeant who said he had never seen us before but he could keep us busy the rest of the trip. So for the next three days we chipped paint and spot painted all over that ship.