I was discharged from the Coast Guard in May of 1960. I attended Northeastern Univ. in Boston for a bit. Couldn’t go to school and eat too so I chose eating. I attended Mass. Radio/Electronics School, less time consuming, and ended up going into the wholesale/retail end of the electronics business.

I worked for Radio Shack when they had only seven stores and all of them were in Mass. with a warehouse in Boston.

I became a buyer. That became boring.

So, in 1962 I joined the U.S. Army. It was the poster of the soldier in the “Modern Army” green in front of the Post Office that got me. The Army sent me to Fort Jackson, S.C. for basic training.

I was introduced to the “Modern Army”!

The barracks were wooden shacks from WW2 with pot bellied stoves burning coal for heat which required a “fire watch” to stand by them all night.

When I was a kid in Savannah I loved to go to the St. Patricks’ Day Parade. I loved the drums. I would follow the military band all the way along the route just to listen to the drums. At Fort. Jackson we had “Range Week”. The Company was marched out to the range to fire weapons. We marched to the beat of a base drum and a snare drum. Just before the week started, both the base drummer and the snare drummer were recycled. They had failed part of their training. The barracks sergeant announced that we needed drummers. I raised my hand! I just knew I could play that snare.

Fortunately the guy who volunteered to play the bass had actually played in a high school band. We started for the range and with a lot of assistance from my fellow drummer, we found a beat.

About halfway there the beat morphed into something of a jazzy rhythm. We started really jazzing it up and the guys marching changed their body motions till it became a two-step dance routine!

As we approached the ranges the instructors were coming to the side of the road and looking down to see what the heck was going on. Sort of like the 1981 movie “Stripes” with Bill Murray. The instructors were grinning, shaking their heads and waving us on.

I had requested (AIT) Advanced Infantry Training at Fort Dix, New Jersey. Our reception at basic training was bad enough. We started catching the devil from the moment the bus door opened at Fort Jackson. I was apprehensive about what kind of reception I would get at AIT. Even the bus drivers hated us! It was bad! Worse than basic.

From there I headed for airborne training. I was sent to Fort Benning, Ga., for jump school. Certainly my apprehension as to what kind of reception we would get there tripled anything previous. It was warranted! The training lasted three weeks. Testing, conditioning, classroom and field instruction. There were five mile runs that ended up with us crawling through a structure somewhat like a car wash to cool us down.

You start by jumping off a platform a few inches off the ground to learn how to do a proper PLF (Parachute Landing Fall).

You graduate to a 40 foot tower with a zip line and on to a 100 foot tower.

You earn your jump wings making five jumps out of planes at 1,250 feet with and without gear, day and night.

I still remember literally laying in the chow line in the darkness with the granite curb as a pillow.

Somebody would kick you when it was time to move up. A sign in the mess hall said, “Take what you want-Eat what you take”. It was not optional.

Something I will never forget is the change in attitude of those new “Airborne” troops. They arrived a rather timid group. They left with those Jump Wings on their chests, highly, physically and mentally prepared. They fought that way.

My next stop after Basic, AIT and Jump School was Fort Bragg, N.C. and the Green Berets. U.S.

Army Special Forces.

With all of the hostile receptions I had experienced going thru Jackson, Dix and Benning, with instructors anxious to show you what a loser they thought you were, I was very apprehensive of showing up at Fort Bragg, N.C., home of the 82nd Airborne Division and the 7th Special Forces Training Group. It’s where the very first Navy Seals learned how to jump out of planes back in the fifties.

We arrived early morning, it was pitch dark.

We were all sitting there, silent, waiting for the bus door to explode or something. A Sergeant First Class stepped on to the bus, looked around and said, “Welcome to Fort Bragg people. We have a mess hall open in case any of you would like to grab some breakfast!”

I was home!

Roy Hubbard is a retired Green Beret and a local environmentalist.