Army Life

After quitting a job (more about that later) and seeing little chance for employment, John, at age twenty was approached by an Army recruiter. The enlistment age at the time was twenty-one, but John’s father signed an affidavit that John was eligible. In addition, John would be a valuable addition to an Army boxing team.

John had heard that the Armed Forces were no longer segregated, but that didn’t prove to be the case. He rode in an unheated railway car from Cleveland to Cincinnati with temperatures dipping to as low as twenty degrees below zero. When John left the train, his entire company was placed into a a holding area for blacks. To his mild surprise, he was forced to eat in a mess hall for blacks only.

On his way to basic training in Fort Knox, Kentucky, the sergeant on the bus ordered all the blacks to the back of the bus, using a derogatory term. John and his fellow African Americans remained in the barracks for a month with no change of clothes. Finally they were marched five miles to the quartermaster’s for uniforms. After basic training, John was assigned to outside guard duty at the Fort Knox gold repository, and he was given the honor of being a flag bearer.

John was one of the few soldiers to be sent to Germany instead of Korea based on his boxing prowess. One night in sub-freezing weather, John was on patrol in a truck, and the officer with whom he was riding made advances on him. He refused his to comply with the demands of the officer and was forced to sleep on the hood of the truck as snow covered him. This resulted in John’s suffering pneumonia and being transferred from one hospital to another. He was “treated like a dog” and barely survived after six months of overall neglect by the doctors and nurses.