NOTE June 13: I did the first draft of this post on June 10. On occasion I do edits, additions and corrections on posts, and on this one, the most recent was on June 11. This was before California U.S. Sen Alex Padilla was thrown out of a press event of DHS Commissioner Kristi Norm, which I learned about late yesterday afternoon. This mornings Star Tribune front page featured my Governor Tim Walz, being grilled by the U.S. House of Representatives Oversight Committee; the Norm/Padilla affair was relegated to page 7. The feature letter in today’s STrib asks citizens to get directly involved in the direction of our country. I concur. These are critical times. More at the end of this post (Postnote June 13). There is more than adequate information on these topics from many sources.
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Dog Tags. U.S. Army 1962-63
When I first envisioned this post, my objective was simple: I wanted to try to describe military life from the vantage point of a single veteran, myself, who was in the Army 1962-63.
This was before Los Angeles and Ft. Bragg and who knows what else in coming days. In my inadequate way, I’ll try to forge ahead.
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Saturday June 24 is the 250th anniversary of the establishment of the U.S. Army. I’m an Army veteran, and the most recent American Legion magazine (I’m a member and I subscribe) had several pages about the Army which are linked here: American Legion Mag June 2025. In addition, Heather Cox Richardson has recently recorded 10 one to two minute videos on the American revolution. They are easily accessed and interesting and total about 20 minutes. Here is the link. The series is called “Ten Steps to Revolution.” They all recall the time around 1775 in the colonies which became the United States. Her June 13 column also is about the establishment of the U.S. Army.
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Most of this post is my recollections of 22 months active duty in the U.S. Army. By preference, I’m anti-war; at the same time, I am never critical of the uniformed services (Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines, Coast Guard, National Guard). More below.
The card below came to mind as I was contemplating this. Also, the anti-war slogan from Vietnam days “What if they gave a war and nobody came?”. We might keep this in mind that, as I speak, certain folks are itching for war within our own country…. (I hope there are lots of non-violenrt protests on June 14, and ongoing.)
1978 card from Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom. (Here is the same card in pdf format: WILPF card 1978. (The original was blank inside.)
“I’m in the Army, now….” Personal Memories.
Every veteran has his or her own story, of course. I asked AI a couple of starter questions, which got instant response which seemed reasonable: roughly one of eight adult American men are military veterans. About 10% of the veterans have been in a combat situation. Quibble with the specifics, but I think the generalizations are close to accurate, simply comparing against my own family constellation.
Of course, far fewer women have military service, for reasons we all know. Probably one percent of women have been active military.
Less than one percent of the U.S. population are actually in the active military.
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I served 21 months of U.S. Army duty in an Infantry Company in 1962-63 (Co C 1st Battalion 61st Infantry 5th Infantry Division (Mech). I have a small internet appearance about my time here. Read the brief 1962-68 section if you wish. The below photos are from those Army days, all at Ft Carson Colorado.
Dick Bernard third from left Basic Training Ft. Carson Colorado spring 1962
The photo reveals that we were not particularly happy campers. Basic Training (about six weeeks) is that way. Veterans will identify…. Our housing – old wooden barracks – is in the background. We earned our $78 a month!
I graduated from college in December, 1961, not a particularly good time to start a career. Like all colleague males, I had a draft card, which in those days left a pretty good chance of being drafted into the military at some point, so I decided, without a whole lot of thought, to volunteer for the draft. (It was peacetime in a sort of tenuous sense, then. The Vietnam era is considered to begin in the spring of 1961.) In mid January, 1962, I was sworn in at Fargo and we were put on a bus with others similarly situated. To my knowledge, none of us knew anyone else in the group. We were all strangers. I recall going to a movie with one of the others. He was a kid who was native Norwegian, with a still very thick accent.
We went by bus from Fargo to Ft. Carson Colorado, near Colorado Springs. I was designated in charge of the others – I suppose this was because I had a college degree, and was perhaps senior (at 21). All that got me was responsibility to make sure everyone who got on the bus in Fargo got off the bus in Colorado. I recall one ‘pit stop’ in the approximately 1,000 mile road trip, though there must have been others across South Dakota, Nebraska and Colorado. This was not a recreational journey.
“You’re in the Army now…”
My time in military management ended the moment I stepped off the bus at Ft. Carson. Any pretense of superiority (there was none) ended immediately. My first job off-the-bus was washing pots and pans in the mess hall. It was dismal duty that seemed endless. Selection was tried and true: “you, you and you….”
Recruits who’ve been there can tell the rest of the stories: “haircuts”, incessant lines, shots for most anything imaginable, tests, communal living in an open floor with perhaps 10 bunk beds on a side. There was no privacy.
Being military means being part of a group, and subject to rules. There is no “Army of One” as an old Army recruiting slogan went. you may have been top of the class, or big shot in your family or town. Basic Training with all of its indignities melds endlessly diverse individuals into something of a unit.
Most of my 21 months service time was in a single Infantry Company, and most of that time I was Company Clerk, thus the rank and file GI who knew the most about the 140 or so men who lived together in three old wooden barracks near the south end of Fort Carson. People in my position had to be able to type, and our greatest responsibility day to day was an accurate multi-carbon Morning Report on matters of the day including personnel comings and goings. As the saying goes, we basically “knew all, but told only some”: who got busted, etc, etc. Co C was like a little town. Ask any veteran about this. The stories will all be different, all the same.
Nobody in my North Dakota group ended up in the same unit as I. From day one we started over. I made a brief list of names I remembered from those 21 months. I’m up to about 25 now – Larry Davis just popped into my head just now, from Indiana somewhere.
In this new collection of humanity was a Hungarian who’d been a freedom fighter there in the 1950s. We became good friends; I was a witness when he became a citizen. One fellow GI was Navajo from New Mexico, another Puerto Rico. There were at least a couple from New York City – some years later I was in NYC and looked up James J Walker in the giant NYC phone book, and there were many pages of James J Walker…. There were a number of African-American GIs. One of the Hispanics, I learned years later, was from a border city in Arizona, and had been elected as town mayor. I could go on and on. Imagine yourself being dumped into a collection of 140 strangers, living communally with 10 or more of them in a single open room, your only possession a foot locker, communal bathroom and no privacy. We may have had a standing single locker – I’m not sure of that. To make phone calls you had to go to the PX (post exchange our “shopping center”. On and on and on.
My younger brothers both became career Air Force officers. At some early point – probably home on leave after basic – one of them asked me about being in the service. “Anything but the Army”, I apparently said, or so he reminded me many years later. I did make one conscious decision as a newbe. Being a new college grad, my test scores were high and I had a chance to go for Officer Training. I declined because I’d have to extend service time, and I wasn’t interested. I knew how to type, and they needed a Company Clerk, and that became my career in a unit that like all the others was preparing for later deployment to Vietnam (at the time, we didn’t know this, of course. I was long out of the Army when Vietnam met Company C in 1968).
Being Company Clerk gave me a small amount of status, for whatever that was worth. My boss was the First Sergeant (a wonderful mentor and man), and we shared space with the Company Captain and at least one Lieutenant. The Supply Sergeant was in the same facility we were. When the Company went on maneuvers, we went as well, and lived in exactly the same dismal conditions in the field as the rest. We were a combat infantry company. While we didn’t know it, we were preparing for Vietnam. It was not a vacation.
We had only one close call, which none of us realized at the time. Half way into my first year, in mid-October 1962, President Kennedy addressed the nation about the Cuban Missile Crisis. The company mess sergeant had a small screen television and a few of us watched the President address the nation in an Army barracks.
One of the possible targets for the Russian missiles in Cuba was the military facility in Cheyenne Mountain, a few miles from us, and within Range of the missiles. We saw Cheyenne Mountain every day – You can see the vicinity in the photo below.
The Cuban Missile Crisis came to an end within days, of course, and except for even more than usual regimentation, we escaped involvement in what was perhaps the closest call the U.S. has thus far had to a foreign invasion. (If you look at a map of Cuba in context with the U.S., Cheyenne Mountain even then was in range of guided missiles
That single incident is the entire story of military service. You don’t know or have control of what you might have to do. Those who came after me to the same company had a horrendous time in Vietnam a few years later. There were many casualties in Nam, I heard.
I doubt that any of us in the service back then could have even imagined the present day scenario in our own country. We simply felt we were doing our duty as required by law. I would suspect that most of us had only vague notions about Vietnam, even though we are all Vietnam era veterans.
Ft. Carson Colorado 1962, my barracks a couple of blocks from this end of the base; Cheyenne Mountain area in background.
PDF of articles from the same Rocky Mountain News: Cuba002
Personal: 22 months of active duty, most of it at Ft. Carson, all of it in Army Infantry, is impossible to summarize in a few words. Only a small percentage (less than 1%) of Americans are actually in the military service. In my day, service could be mandatory (the Draft) and line troops were male only. There has always been a National Guard. It has only been in recent years where Guard Units have been engaged beyond traditional local kinds of actions.
There will always be a meed for military, and military service is in many ways good training for life in general. But it is always subject to abuse, and we need to be wary of aberrant behaviors.
POSTNOTE June 13. I won’t try to add to the abundant news around immigration and especially California. What I did do, before the Padilla incident, was to try to access some reasonable articles on the recent history of immigration policy in the United States. The two linked article, below, seem well worth your time to at least browse.
Brookings Institution
Law Enforcement Immigration Task Force
George Washington, born 1732; 43 in 1775
Here is the “scrum” as I have seen it over the years. I’ve indicated where I sit on the graphic. Note for yourself, where you consider yourself to be.
