Uniform Army Troubles

Do you have a guess of how many different uniforms you had in the Army?

I don’t remember... there was summer and winter uniforms.  Then there was what you called the “Tigs”. These were work uniforms made of denim for field work. I had a whole bunch of them.We wore them for select occasions. For instance, we had a field jacket which was zippered across, ya know. That was NOT worn off the post. Not worn off the post!

Got a phone call from the MP’s – Military Police – that they had apprehended one of my officers. He was at the railroad station near Camp McCoy, Wisconsin in a field jacket! They were going to release him to me for appropriate, ya know.

The MP is pretty much like civilian police, but on military bases. They were very active overseas directing convoys. They had to know where the convoys were going, and ya know, that kind of a thing.

Did a lot of your men get in trouble?

No, no. The worst one was Roberts. I was at Camp McCoy, Wisconsin. About the second day, I was talking to the first sergeant and he was making up the orderly report. I looked at it. I said, ‘You reported Roberts AWOL – absent without leave’. He said, ‘Well he’s been gone for 3 months’ and they hadn’t been able to find him. The military police were looking for him. He said he’s been in trouble before. He’s out of Kentucky. He’s a gunner, and so on. He told me about him. Then we just waited. And ironically enough, in a week, the military police called and said that they had apprehended Roberts! I don’t remember where they got him. But they were bringing him back!

They walked him into the orderly room and turned him over to me. In talking to him, of course I had to put him in the Guard House, the jail, because of what he had done. I had to, I had no alternative. He went into the jail, but before he did... Sitting there in the orderly room. (An orderly room is an office. Two rooms – the first Sargent and mine, Captain at the time.) And this was my company of men. Roberts had a bad history. A bad history. And yet as he sat there looking at me, he almost burst out into tears. He said, ‘Captain, I am SO TIRED of training. I can’t stand it anymore!’ Now he had to go to jail. But the night before we left to go overseas, I took Roberts out of jail and took him with us. He turned out to be one of the most valuable men in the company. He got overseas and got his ability to FIGHT! Heh, Heh. He was in trouble all the time, he just didn’t want to train. He wanted to fight!