Induction - Part 2

When I left off in my prior post, I had just returned to the military induction center in Portland after a quick trip back to Eugene to fetch some clothes and other personal effects, and they put us up for the night at the Heathman Hotel (with a couple of meal vouchers).

Now - anyone familiar with Portland would be puzzled at this point, because the Heathman (which dates back to 1927) is a 4-star luxury hotel. But back in the early 1970's it was pretty rough around the edges and the military had rented a couple of entire floors. The rooms were furnished with 4 cots, a couple of chairs and a black and white TV - no "adornments" of any sort.

Aside: The female recruits were housed on a different floor, and the elevator operator (a young guy) would not tell us which one. He wouldn't even allow male and female recruits in the elevator at the same time... A few guys came up with the idea of asking to go to random floors to see which one he refused to take them to, but he wouldn't "play that game"... Yeah - it was all kind of juvenile :-)

Mom had given Ron a "head's up" that I was in town (he was the friend who had helped us get settled in Eugene) and he swung by to keep me company for a while. (I admit it - I was scared shitless)... We went next door to the Portland Theater (also now a historical landmark) to see the movie "The Reivers" and I don't remember a darn thing about it :-)  After the movie Ron wished me well and I headed back up to the hotel room where my "roomies" had just started watching "No Time for Sergeants" (an old Andy Griffith military movie). I remember discussing whether basic training was going to be anything like what was portrayed in the movie and discovered that all our recruiters had assured us it wasn't like that any more. (Yeah - that was the biggest lie of all.)

The last thing I remember from that evening is sitting by the window looking down at Broadway, watching all the muscle cars cruise by (that was the "main drag" in Portland at the time) and thinking about everything I was leaving behind...

None of us got much sleep that night, and the next morning we headed back to the induction center where they gathered us all (roughly 70 or 80 recruits) in one big room and administered the oath of enlistment...  I have to admit I kind choked when we got to the part about obeying the orders of the president, and afterward the guy next to me whispered that he'd had his fingers crossed... Umm, I don't think that counts :-)

Aside: The problem with swearing allegiance to the president was that it was Richard M. Nixon. He had just been re-elected by the largest margin in U.S. history despite revelations that members of his staff had been involved in the break-in at the Democratic National Committee office in the Watergate Hotel the previous summer... Let's just say he wasn't very high on my "trustworthy" list.

Then the Gideons gave us our "pocket size" New Testaments (it was the only non-military item we were allowed to carry on our person during basic) and we started piling into cabs to go to the Portland airport.

It turns out there were only 6 Air Force enlistees out of the entire bunch. One was a rather attractive (but "frigid") young lady from Sweet Home, and two of the guys were complete idiots. (Me and the remaining guys were OK.) We traveled as a group (by commercial airlines) to San Antonio, and the trip took all freaking day (it must have been the cheapest option available). I think we had to change planes three times, and we decided it would be best to have one person hold all the boarding passes because we were afraid the "moron twins" would lose theirs... Yeah - every time we stopped they'd joke about going AWOL and head off to go exploring somewhere... I think it was in Denver where the rest of us waited at the agreed meeting place until the last possible second before boarding and they never showed up... It turned out they had managed to talk their way onto the plane without their boarding passes. (This was long before airport security got so tight.)

There were about 30 or 40 recruits on the last Air Force bus to leave the airport in San Antonio that evening, and it was sometime around midnight when we finally rolled into Lackland AFB. Yeah - I'm certain there must have been an inscription over the gate that read "Omnes relinquite spes, o vos intrantes", but I apparently missed it :-)