Bill has been in the Army for ten years with the rank of E-6 staff sergeant. He is married to Honey, who he met on his first tour in Germany, and they have two children. On a second tour in Germany he becomes the battalion supply sergeant, normally an E-7 slot. When his 24th Division returns to Ft. Riley, Kansas he goes with it under the promise of promotion to E-7 and a permanent assignment as battalion supply sergeant.

I am now twenty-six, a husband and father. I have almost ten years in the service and had gone far on the Germany assignment. We had two children in Germany and I had made E-5 and E-6, not a bad two years as things go in the Army. I am no longer just a truck driver. I have grown. I have been responsible for millions of dollars worth of equipment and shouldered some very high responsibility. I am feeling pretty good about my life so far.

Then as always something came up to set me on another path. On a nice sunny day an E-7 walked into the office and announced he was taking over as the new battalion supply sergeant. I was pissed! I ran to the battery commander and said, “What the hell?” He said he knew nothing about it. I then went up the ladder to the battalion XO and he said the E-7 had been assigned by the Department of the Army and there was nothing he could do. I told him I was promised the E-7 position and this was a rotten deal after all my work in Germany. He was very quiet, a major probably not used to being shouted at by a sergeant. Oh well. I knew there was no way I was going back to being a battery supply position. Just as I was thinking how to handle the situation the answer walked in the door. It was a turning point in my life and career.

Three sergeants from firing batteries walked in and said, “Coop, we’re going to OCS (Officer Candidate School). Why don’t you come along?”

I thought for a moment and said, “Hell yes.”

We all filled out paperwork requesting OCS and that’s when I found out you needed two years of college, and me a high school dropout. I was lucky I had gotten my GED equivalency on my first tour in Germany, and now I took a walk over to the education center. I took some tests and gave them information on schooling and positions I had held, and walked out with two years of college equivalency and then some.

Out of the three sergeants who applied to OCS with me, one was turned down. Seems he had hit a 2nd lieutenant somewhere in his career and they did not think him officer material. Another failed the OCS test and dropped off. That left two of us waiting for a class date. I asked for artillery OCS at Ft. Sill, Oklahoma.

I found a nice apartment for Honey and the kids in town near Ft. Riley. I would go to Ft. Sill alone. I felt that if I had them near me I would not study as hard. I would be almost twenty-eight years old while the average guy in OCS was a lot younger with all the advantages of college and good study habits. It would be hell not having my family near but it would be for the best. I was ready to give it a shot.

OCS

I had very little trouble adjusting to the training in OCS and let the abuse from the upper classmen just roll off my back. It was funny how these young soldiers in the upper class tried to act like they knew everything better than you. They too were just candidates, but they loved to lord it over the lower class. I was going to become an officer no matter what they threw at me. This was an opportunity I could not let slide. The first sergeant and I got along, to the point he called me in to ask if I would talk to some of the other sergeants in OCS who were having a hard time.

The leadership part of the training was easy, but the math required for artillery was another story. I was up against guys way ahead of me who had gone to college and I never had good study habits. Artillery involves a lot of math and they’re asking who’s had trigonometry and 90% of the class is holding up a hand and I’m looking around thinking I wish I could hold up my hand. I was the oldest in a starting class of 130, of which 40 dropped out the first couple weeks. There were times when it got hard to keep up and I was starting to doubt myself. If I failed it would not be because I did not try hard enough. But was I good enough?

Then I ran into a real asshole. He was a young gunnery instructor who had just graduated from OCS and stayed to teach. He taught from the book, not from experience. It was apparent to me that the only thing separating the two of us was that he had already read chapter four and I hadn’t. In class he went along like he was reading out of a book. I was having a hard time absorbing what he was putting out, him babbling on, and I had to stop him and tell him he was losing me and asked that he slow down. He kind of put me down, and after class called me out in the hall and proceeded to chew me out. His attitude was he’s an officer and I’m a lowly candidate and I should grovel at his feet. I was shocked that an officer in the U.S. Army would act that way. Well I was having none of it and I got in his face a bit. He’s maybe twenty-one; I’m twenty-eight, six foot four two hundred pounds. I told him he was there to teach and I was there to learn and we better get together somehow. The result was, No we don’t, I’ll just fail your ass.

For your final gunnery test you had to call in artillery from a small aircraft with two seats in the front and one in the back. They took one candidate at a time. There’s a pilot up front, an instructor in the co-pilot seat and the candidate in the rear seat. You got a map and a pin. You get up in the plane over the range and they say, Your target is that school bus. You have to know where you are on the map, stick the pin in the map on the right coordinates for the target, then you key the mike and call in the fire mission.

When my turn came to go up, my instructor friend gets on the plane in the co-pilot seat. I locate my target, initiate the fire mission, and call for a first round smoke, which is standard procedure before you adjust and call for high explosive. About the time the smoke round is to go off I see the instructor nudge the pilot and he does a banking maneuver away from my target. Even twisting around in my seat I cannot see the smoke round go off. By the time the plane comes around my smoke is drifting off. The instructor is screaming at me over the headset, “Do something, candidate, people are dying down there. What are you going to do?” Instead of asking for a repeat of the smoke, which I should have done, I guess at an adjustment and call in high explosive. Of course I miss the target. That got me a failing grade in the exercise, and therefore I failed gunnery.

My classmates told me this banking maneuver had not been pulled on any of them. A few had even vomited in the aircraft and gotten just passing grades of 70. I thought, Maybe I should have vomited on my instructor friend.

You fail gunnery you don’t become an artillery officer, so now I had a choice. If I wanted to stay in OCS I would have to repeat the last four weeks of training. I phoned Honey and told her what happened. She wanted me to sew my sergeant’s stripes back on and come home. I told her I was not being kicked out, just sent back a few weeks, and I wanted to give it another go. If I failed again I would stay in the Army and work for the highest enlisted rank I could, and she agreed.

I asked that my gunnery instructor be looked into, and was assured that I would not be seeing him again. So I packed up my stuff and moved to the class behind me while my friends became upper classmen. The good part was my old classmates were now my uppers and they cut me a lot of slack.

The four weeks flew by and I was doing great; I was ranked seventh in a class of 84, and because I was in the upper ten percent I wore a white stripe across my red trainee epaulet. I excelled in the military side of the training: breaking weapons down, firing artillery pieces, knowledge of military regulations, and things of that nature. On the academic side I got into a study group of all white stripes and they helped me out a lot. We committed to help each other stay at the top.

Then the roof fell in again. Before graduation we were marched to the orderly room to pay for our graduation notices and calling cards. I had been told it would be awhile before we had to pay, and now I was required to write a check. All candidates were required to have a checking account. Being a married guy with two kids most of my money went home to the family, leaving me with not enough in my account to cover the check. I ran to the bank the following day with a savings bond I had in my footlocker to cover the check. When I got my bank statement I noticed the bank had posted the debit before my deposit and bounced my check.

A bad check was considered an honor code violation and grounds for dismissal. Guys had been kicked out for less. My 1st sergeant said to just wait it out. The next few days were agony and then it happened. The commander of the OCS program wanted to see me right away. He first chewed me out and then told me I would be a danger to the officer corp reputation and should not be commissioned as an officer because I showed such poor judgment. I explained the bank’s procedure was not sufficient cause for such a drastic measure. I further reported I was ordered to write the check with no opportunity to ensure sufficient funds. I looked him straight in the eye and told him I intended to see the base commanding general if they were going to put me out for this.

In a day or two I got word they were going to let me graduate, but with a letter in my file for one year indicating that if it happened again I would pay dearly. This I knew to be a complete crock. Once I got officer bars there was no way they could take them away for a lousy bounced check.

I left OCS as a Distinguished Military Graduate (still in the top ten percent). My last encounter was with a major who asked me to stay and teach. By then I had a lot of respect from the officers and enlisted cadre that ran OCS because I was an E-6 with a reputation for helping other guys and I think my age helped. He said, “ With your experience you are what we need here. And let me tell you what’s going to happen. This class will have an allocation for Vietnam. At graduation all the class records will be on a table. I’ll pull one from this stack and one from that stack until I fill the allocation for Vietnam. If you agree to stay your record will already be pulled, it won’t be on that table. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

“Yes sir, I do. But I just want to graduate and go to work.” He was very pissed off at me for turning him down.

The great day came. I was to graduate and be given the rank of 2nd lieutenant. I would be Lieutenant Cooper – not driver, not sergeant, but “Sir.” The whole class was in the theater waiting to get their assignments. The top three graduates by tradition got their first choices, and all three had chosen military intelligence. Next came the draw for Vietnam, and we knew the allocation was for seven from our class. The major said, “The following candidates have been chosen to serve in the Republic of Vietnam.” The first name out of his mouth was, “Cooper, William A.” I know that son of a gun had my file on top. The class gave me a standing ovation when my name was read. I think they were happy to see me graduate because I had helped so many of them.

To this day Honey thinks I volunteered for Vietnam, but I did not. To be honest, in the back of my mind I was looking forward to seeing if the things I had been doing for ten years worked in a combat situation.

I had to get Honey and the kids settled quickly in a house. Our realtor was a retired lieutenant colonel from Junction City, Kansas by the name of Meis. He understood what I was up against and worked a minor miracle to get the family into a house owned by a woman who had just lost her husband and had not expected her house to sell so quickly. I was very grateful to him. Before I left Colonel Meis said his son was in Vietnam in the artillery. He gave me his card with his son’s name and unit on the back – the 5th of the 27th Artillery, B Battery. I had no idea where I was going in Vietnam, and the colonel knew it was a slim chance, but if I ever ran into his son would I say hello from his father.