This Aint No Dress Rehearsal!

“This aint no dress rehearsal!” At least that’s the gist of our drill sergeant’s message to a dozen or so trainees starting Army basic training at Fort Polk, Louisiana, in 1968. As a reservist who would head home in less than six months to the safety of his Civil Affairs Company in Connecticut, and to complete grad school, I assumed that message was for the full-time volunteers and draftees who owed Uncle Sam two years of their lives, most likely in the jungles of Vietnam.

In fact, basic and advanced infantry training for most of those trainees was a crucial dress rehearsal for surviving what was to come. Experiences like crawling through the mud under barbed wire with live bullets whizzing overhead and alertly approaching a mock jungle village, complete with deadly booby traps and Viet Cong escape tunnels, were designed to keep our soldiers alive.

Before the basic training cycle began, I had to spend time in a so-called Reception Area, which was the first of many “hurry up and wait” experiences, courtesy of the U.S. Army. During these pre-Basic days, all of us recruits got our hair cut so short that we couldn’t recognize ourselves in the mirror. We also received a battery of anti-everything shots as we walked through a reception line of medics; I was afraid to ask what I was being inoculated against, but figured I wasn’t likely to catch it in CT anyway. Walking down an endless line, I was handed clothing that clearly ignored my size as well as assorted gear, which would add 20 or more pounds to my backpack. For some of us, this almost made up for the weight of our hair that lay on the barbershop floor.

Some busy-work was designed to help keep us occupied in the days before our actual training was to begin. Most memorable was an assignment to march to a swampy picnic ground, shovels in hand, and dig drainage ditches. Marching in a row, I followed John Spain, a six-foot, 250 pound Texan I’d just met that day. Suddenly, mid-stride, he stopped in his tracks and raised his shovel high over his head. I froze in place so as to avoid his back-swing. Fiercely he pounded the shovel into the ground six or seven times.

The drill sergeant, who was leading our column of now anxious recruits, doubled back to see what the commotion was about. He quickly spotted the dead coral snake that lay smashed at John’s feet. To this northern guy, this was as close to a venomous southeastern critter as I cared to come. A couple more steps on our march and I’d have played in my final act – no dress rehearsal, no encore, no curtain call!

As if to punctuate my thoughts, the drill instructor gathered our nervous squad around a nearby picnic table. As he raised the red, yellow and black-striped corpse so all could see, his supposed calming words went as follows: “This here’s a coral snake. If you get bit by one, here’s the three-step first aid: spread your legs…bend over…and kiss your ass goodbye.”

The rest of my experience proved to be much less stressful, which allowed me to consider the training as an unnecessary dress rehearsal. I looked forward to getting home to my reserve unit, which had explained to me when I signed up that if we had a war with a sub-Saharan African country and won that war, then I’d go in with a typewriter. As expected, the balance of my six-year commitment would prove to be a dress rehearsal for a performance that would never take place.

Marc Sacher
4/25/18