It was in 1969 or 1970, as I recall. I had finished my active-duty military time as a lieutenant in the Transportation Corps, first doing their basic training at Fort Eustis, Virginia, and then being moved down the Peninsula a few miles to Fort Monroe in Hampton. I had completed my active service with 13 months in Korea and had begun graduate studies in economics at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill.
I was none too happy about it, I must admit, when I discovered that the Army was not through with me. They sent me to the office of a lawyer in Wilson, NC, an Army Reserve artillery colonel, who informed me that he would be my commanding officer. His unit met one evening monthly in Raleigh. The only memorable thing about those waste-of-time meetings for me was that I was reunited with Larry Whitley, the top pitcher in our county of Nash, from Middlesex, against whom, in the one time I faced him my senior year, I’m proud to say I fouled off a couple of pitches before he struck me out, painting the outside corner at the knees as I watched helplessly. He later signed a big bonus with the San Francisco Giants, but his professional career ended in the minor leagues when he separated his left throwing shoulder running the bases. He was also their top basketball player, a guard, but we at Red Oak, unlike in baseball, always took their measure in that sport, though seldom by much.
The memorable event, the near disaster, came when we took a small truck and trailer caravan one weekend down from Raleigh to Fort Bragg, near Fayetteville, to do firing practice with their big, impressive 8” howitzers. With not one minute of artillery experience, I got an assignment that anyone could handle. I was a spotter, along with a sergeant, stationed on one side of a long firing zone as they fired with air bursts on a target, an old, junked vehicle of some sort, very much in the short end of that zone. Our job was to observe if the burst seemed to have gone a little too far or too short and to tell them to adjust fire, usually by only a few yards, until the shrapnel went out directly over the target. There was another spotter team at the far end of the firing zone who radioed adjust-fire instructions to the left or the right. We were only a few minutes into this drill when a rather excited “ceasefire” came out over our radio. The far-end spotter had heard a round come whistling over his head. It had gone over the road behind him, the one that we had all used to get to the gun positions and that he and I had again used to get to our spotter positions. It had also gone over the heads of a National Guard unit on bivouac in a grove of trees beside the road and had exploded over a parachute drop zone, which fortunately was not in use at the time. I had seen the destructive power of those air bursts. It’s hard to imagine the death and injury toll had that explosion occurred a bit nearer to its intended target.
How could they have been so far off target? As explained on the Wikipedia page, the exploding projectile is propelled by a bagged charge. The general distance it goes is determined by the number of bags inserted into the breech. Obviously, they put in one bag too many.
Who was responsible for this near tragedy? On a personal level, I would like to be able to put it on the shoulders of our commanding officer. At his office in Wilson, he had addressed me condescendingly as “son.” With almost all the Army’s best mid-level officers in Vietnam at the time, I had just finished several months in charge of security, plans, operations, and training (S-2, S-3) for the 20th General Support Group in Korea, usually a major’s job, and I think I had performed my duties conscientiously and well. I was offended to be talked to that way.
But in contrast to the upper brass whose decisions I describe in “A Condensation of Military Incompetence,”the colonel can’t be blamed. He had chosen the logical person for the job, the person whose fault it was. That was the lieutenant bearing the title of “safety officer” for this assignment. In this case, it was an artillery officer who was freshly back from Vietnam where he had had this exact safety officer assignment in actual combat. He is the man who makes sure that the correct number of bags of explosives have been inserted into the big gun’s breech. But whereas the colonel, who had been so smug seeming when I first met him looked white as a sheet, the responsible lieutenant was utterly blasé.
“Happens all the time in Vietnam,” he said dismissively. He seemed less troubled by what had transpired than anyone there.
More on Fort Bragg
Fort Bragg was originally named for Confederate General Braxton Bragg, a native of Warrenton, North Carolina, just up the road from Red Oak where I was raised. It is now named for PFC Roland L. Bragg, a World War II veteran. In a fit of political correctness, the Democratic-controlled Congress had briefly changed the name to Fort Liberty. You can read about these two frightfully expensive name changes on Wikipedia. Ironically, the Northern California Pacific Coast resort town of Fort Bragg continues to be named for the Confederate General.
My reserve artillery officer time was not my first experience with the fort, either. It’s where I had done my six weeks of ROTC summer camp. There were two other Davidson College guys in my platoon there, but my closest friend there quickly became a Presbyterian College student from the city of Rocky Mount, just nine miles from Red Oak in the other direction from Warrenton, a fellow by the name of Al Pearce. I didn’t know him, but he knew of me. He was a big sports fan, and he had read about me and the Red Oak High School’s big basketball success in the Rocky Mount Evening Telegram. We had finished second in the state my junior year and third in the state my senior year in the highly competitive smallest school (A) division, losing both times to Beaufort High School, which went undefeated for three consecutive years.
Al was a quite congenial, likable guy with a good sense of humor. The commanding officer of our platoon was a Captain Codd, the professor of military science at Spring Hill College in Mobile, Alabama, who affected a fierce drill sergeant manner. Pearce got us all to saying, “In Codd we trust,” and with my collaboration we managed to turn the whole experience into an almost enjoyable game. Our friendship continued after Fort Bragg, and we even took a trip to Atlantic Beach, very near to Beaufort, later that summer.
By the greatest of coincidences, our paths crossed again. He was also assigned to the Transportation Corps, and, like me, he was given a year’s delay to report for active duty after graduation. Consequently, we found ourselves together again in TOBAC-66, that is, the Transportation Officers Basic Course 1966 at Fort Eustis. When I was sent to Fort Monroe, he was sent to Fort Lee near Petersburg, which has also gone through the renaming fiasco. We stayed in touch. Some ten months into our respective tours, I got word from him that he had received orders for Korea. Then I got orders for Korea.
“It’s happened again,” I thought, and called him with some excitement.
“They’ve changed my orders to Vietnam,” he informed me.
We had a couple of exchange of letters while on our new assignments. I learned that he was stationed in Vietnam’s central highlands between Kon tum and Pleiku. He told me that the fearsome soldiers of the Republic of Korea Army were responsible for security in his area and that he had never even heard a shot fired in anger.
I had long since been accepted for graduate studies at UNC, but Al didn’t know what he wanted to do when he had finished his Vietnam tour, so he spent an additional year in the Army, back at Fort Eustis. After that, he taught school briefly but realized that it was not for him. He decided to pursue his love of sports and interviewed for a job as a sports reporter at the Newport News Daily Press. He later told me that he could tell from their interview questions that they were looking for someone to cover the NASCAR motor sports beat, among other things, and he pretended to know quite a bit about the subject, when, in fact, he knew practically nothing. The sport is not popular in our part of the state. He proved to be a quick study. His father was an engineer for the Atlantic Coast Line Railroad. They lived on the south or poor-white side of Rocky Mount in a very modest house, and Al had good-ole-boy manner. He was also a good wordsmith. He had found his calling.
Al died last year, and the word “legendary” turns up in all his many obituaries. Curiously, not one of them that I have found tells us that he was a graduate of Presbyterian College. They all say he was a Vietnam War veteran, but just one I have discovered say that he was an Army officer. None of them say that he was the son of a train engineer, but worst of all, like his fellow Rocky Mount native, Leonard Rawls, who founded Hardee’s Food Systems and built it into a major fast-food chain, he is slighted by Wikipedia and by his own hometown. He is a member of the Virginia Sports Hall of Fame, but Wikipedia does not list him either as a notable graduate of Presbyterian College nor is he mentioned as a notable person with a connection to the city of Rocky Mount. Maybe he grew up in the wrong part of town. It goes without saying that he has no Wikipedia page of his own. He might be a national sportswriting legend, but he is not even notable on Wikipedia or in his own hometown.
David Martin