My First Time

I’ve mentioned in the past that when I was drafted in 1966, I did basic training at Ft. Polk, Louisiana and then spent the rest of my Army career at Ft. Hood, Texas.  What I don’t think I've mentioned  was that it was my second tour at Ft. Hood.

The picture above is one variation of a patch worn by the men of the Tank Destroyer School at Camp (later Fort) Hood.  The patch featuring the black panther crushing a tank in his mouth was the symbol of the 808th Tank Destroyer Battalion that saw action in Europe in WWII.

My father trained with them at Ft. Hood before being deployed to the Pacific Theater where he fought in Manchuria and Korea.  While he was training there, we lived just outside the north gate of the fort at Gatesville, Texas.

 

I was only about two years old at the time, and have only a few memories of our time there. 

It was where I saw and caught my first horny toad.

There was another Army wife who lived next door who had a son  about my age.  I don’t remember her name, or his, but I remember well that there was a barbed wire fence separating our yards and I remember ducking under the wire to go play.

That same lady once fed me cabbage that she had fixed in a cast iron skillet with bacon grease.  I always wanted my mother to fix it that way because I thought it was the most wonderful thing I had ever tasted.  Mom did not make cabbage often, but when she did, she always  boiled her cabbage in a pot with a little bacon or salt pork, and it just wasn’t the same.

My other vivid memory is of the sound and the feel of the guns.  At the beginning of the war, Tank destroyers were half-tracks like this

{Picture from the 827th Tank Destroyer Battalion, an all black unit that fought in Europe attached to the 12th Armored Div.}

But by the time we got to Camp Hood, the Army was transitioning to track mounted guns like this

Which was basically a modified M1 tank mounted with a 155MM Howitzer on a turret that would rotate a full 360 degrees.

When those big guns went off, and they did a lot during training exercises, it would literally shake the ground in our front yard.