Army, Miilitary

No One Laughed

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Drill Sergeant with new recruits at Ft Dix NJ circa 1985

Drill Sergeant with new recruits at Ft Dix NJ circa 1985

What time is it, kids? It’s ‘Do Your Duty’ time. So, I enlisted in the Army on February 25, 1974.

The bus from New Haven to Ft Dix, NJ, filled up at the Port Authority Station in NYC. Two “long hairs” took the seats to my left, a semi-Italian 19-year old from Brooklyn, New York named Rios, and Keller who was fresh out of a Rikers Island prison cell.

We nodded, did not shake hands, and returned to our own thoughts while not knowing we’d become roommates in 3rd Plt, B-4-3. Madison from Patterson took the seat to my right. He was thin, 6′ 6″, assigned to 1st Platoon, and a prankster who I, weeks later, punched in broad daylight. (More later about James Henry Madison from NJ.)

The four of us glanced out the windows at the traffic, falling snow, and darkening skies as the bus rushed down the NJ Turnpike. Too soon it seemed we turned off and rolled through the Main Gate after MPs there checked the manifest. Runway lights blinked beyond the fence (McGuire AFB) outside on one side of the bus as USAF transport jets landed and took off.

We stopped at the Reception Station.

A burly, mean looking mad man in a Round Brown Hat boarded when the bus doors opened. He barked, “Listen up!” The lives of 50 ‘Swinging Richards’ were about to change.

The Drill Sergeant then said, “When I tell you to move, and not before then, you will stand up, grab your large yellow envelope with your papers and AWOL bags, un-ass this bus, line up with your toes touching the yellow line, and stand by for further orders.”

“Move!”

We un-assed the bus. He never yelled or screamed. He just walked from our left to right pointing down at the yellow line as we lined up.

He continued, “Hold up your envelope in your right hand and hold the handle of your AWOL bag with your other. … Move! Now, raise your envelope up and read whose name is on it. If it is your envelope, lower your arm to your side. If it is NOT your envelope, keep it up at eye level and, when I tell you to, sound off with the last name, printed in large letters, on it. … Move!”

Somehow, all of us had managed to grab the correct envelope. Yet two guys in the second row, 20 feet apart, still held up their envelopes.

The Drill Sergeant stood in front of the first one and said, “Sound off!”

“Smith, sir,” Smith replied in a low voice, as snow quietly fell, and each snowflake slammed into the cement.

“Welcome to the United States Army, General Smith!” The Drill Sergeant then marched down the second row and stopped in front of the second guy holding up his own envelope.

“Name?”

“Smith,” Smith replied in an even lower voice that everyone toeing the yellow line heard.

No one laughed.

“Is your first name ‘John’, Smith?” asked the Drill Sergeant.

“Yes sir,” John Smith replied in a whisper heard around the world.

“Well, Admiral John Smith, General Eugene Smith must be your older wiser twin brother, ain’t that right?”

“Yes sir,” John Smith whispered.

The Drill Sergeant leaned in until the brim of his Round Brown Hat just barely touched Smith’s forehead, and then he growled, “You will address me as Drill Sergeant. Do you understand?”

“Yes, Drill Sergeant,’ Smith said loudly.

The Drill Sergeant then added, “I work for a living. Don’t call me sir.”

Then he said, “Now, when I tell you to move, you 50 Army volunteers will face to your left … Not yet, General Smith … and move in column by stepping off with your left foot, follow the Drill Sergeant by the door and line up standing behind the tables inside where the Drill Sergeant tells you to stand … Move! … Your other left, Admiral Smith.”

No one laughed out loud for we were too scared. But it was funny.

We followed the other Drill Sergeant into the building and lined up where he pointed, each of us behind an individual table. Then he said, “Place your yellow envelope in the slot below your tabletop and your AWOL bag on top of your table … Move!”

“When I tell you to, quickly take everything out of your AWOL bag, pockets, and concealed on your person, and place it on the table. You have 30 seconds. … Move!”

“Place your empty AWOL bag under your table.”

As we did so, Drill Sergeants moved in front of each table, surveyed the contents, and screamed at us to take everything out of our pockets, take off all hats, and removed all jewelry (except for wrist watches). They circled, surveyed, stirred each table’s stuff with a short stick, and directed those with them to place all weapons, drugs (except prescriptions), and contraband (which they pointed to) in the “large red barrels marked ‘Amnesty Box’ at the back of the room and then return to your desk.”

“Move like you have a purpose!”

A few fools actually had brought contraband. As fast as rabbits could run, they ran to the red barrels and dumped their “junk in the trunk.” It was chaos. Yet the Drill Sergeants calmly directed rush hour like the traffic squad in a Keystone Cops movie.

No one laughed.

“Now, place everything remaining on your table, except your wallet, into your AWOL bag, put your wallet in your pocket, grab your AWOL bag with your left hand, and retrieve your yellow envelop with your right hand. … Move!” … “Your other left hand, General Smith.”

No one laughed.

The next two days at the Reception Station were a blur. We were weighed, measured, issued uniforms, medically examined, inoculated, vaccinated, drilled on by dentists, had our head “shaved” by barbers using the # 1 clipper in 30 seconds flat, lined up everywhere, and hurried up and waited. I’m sure we ate three meals a day and were allowed to sleep 7 hours a night, but I don’t remember either eating or sleeping.

Then a “bus” took us 50 brand new Army volunteers to our new home for the next 7 weeks of more fun than a human being should be allowed to have, ever: Army Basic Training at B-4-3.

***

Tim Sumner is a retired career U.S. Army Military Policeman. His service included as a Drill Sergeant from 1983 to 1985. He co-founded 9/11 Families for a Safe & Strong America in 2004. And he is currently writing a yet to be named memoir.  

9/11, Capitol, January 6, Protest, terrorism

It’s a Travesty to Compare the Capitol Siege to 9/11

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More than 3,000 children never saw their parents again. On Jan. 6, Congress returned within hours.

9/11 attack sites: Pentagon, WTC, and Shanksville

9/11 attack sites: Pentagon, WTC, and Shanksville

Democratic lawmakers want to establish a “9/11-style commission” to investigate the siege of the Capitol on Jan. 6. “I would like to see Jan. 6 burned into the American mind as firmly as 9/11, because it was that scale of a shock to the system,” commentator George Will said recently. The attempt to reconfigure the “domestic terrorist” narrative to fit the horrifying story of Sept. 11 is profoundly disheartening. These two events are fundamentally different in nature, scope and consequences. Mentioning them in the same breath not only diminishes the horror of what happened on 9/11; it tells a false story to the generation of Americans who are too young to remember that day nearly 20 years ago.

My brother, Charles “Chic” Burlingame, was the pilot of American Airlines flight 77. He was murdered in his cockpit at age 51 in a 6½-minute struggle for control of the airplane. Here is what I want these young people to know:

Members of Congress might have had a frightening day on Jan. 6, but on 9/11 some 200 people in the World Trade Center towers chose to jump from 80 to 100 floors above the ground rather than be consumed by fire. A woman waiting at a lobby elevator bank was burned over 82% of her body when jet fuel from the first plane sent a ball of fire down the elevator shaft and into the lobby. She spent three months in a hospital burn unit and was permanently disfigured.

There are countless harrowing stories like this—of death, destruction and heartbreaking loss. More than 3,000 children lost parents. Eight young children were killed on the planes. Recovery personnel found 19,000 human remains scattered all over lower Manhattan from river to river, including on rooftops and window ledges. Victims’ remains were still being recovered years later by utility workers and construction crews. Some families received so many notifications of remains that they couldn’t take it any more and asked for them to stop. More than 1,100 families received nothing. Their loved ones went to work that morning and disappeared.

The attack brought down our nationwide aviation system, shut down the New York Stock Exchange for days, destroyed or rendered uninhabitable 16 acres of Lower Manhattan including underground subway and commuter train lines and destroyed a section of the Pentagon. Rebuilding at ground zero is still incomplete, and U.S. troops are still in Afghanistan.

On Jan. 6, Congress resumed its session that evening.

It is deeply offensive and sad that the brutal and harrowing memories of the worst terrorist attack in American history are being deployed by political partisans. They are using 9/11 not as an example of what the American people endured and overcame together, but explicitly to divide, to stoke hatred and to further a political agenda aimed at stigmatizing the other party and marginalizing ordinary Americans from participating in the political process. That is the real threat to democracy.

It should matter that the vast majority of the people who went to the Capitol protest that day didn’t believe they were there to overthrow the U.S. government, or, it must now be said, to kill anyone.

There have been real terrorist attacks on the Capitol. But those must be forgotten because they came from the political left. In 1971 the Weather Underground, a Marxist-Leninist terrorist group whose goal was the overthrow of the U.S. government through violent, armed revolution, blasted a hole through the ceiling on the Senate side of the complex. It also bombed the Pentagon in 1972 and the State Department in 1975.

In 1954, four Puerto Rican nationalists opened fire with automatic weapons from the House visitors gallery with members in the chamber for a quorum call. Five representatives were wounded, including one, Alvin Morell Bentley of Michigan, who was hit in the chest. The perpetrators received sentences ranging from 50 to 75 years; one was released in 1978, and President Carter granted clemency to the others the following year. One week after the shooting, the House was back to business as usual. That was a time when more members of Congress had served in the military, and with the world still recovering from World War II, one doubts that anyone likened the attack to Pearl Harbor or the Battle of Iwo Jima.

We are living in perilous times. When a modern democracy deploys forces of intimidation—whether government, corporate media or cultural institutions—to promote the ruling majority’s propaganda, it is time for good people to stand up and object. The world-changing attack of Sept. 11, 2001 shouldn’t be used, either as precedent or moral authority, to create a commission whose sole purpose is to turn a straightforward law-enforcement failure into destructive political theater.

Ms. Burlingame is a founding board member and trustee of the 9/11 Memorial and Museum Foundation and a director of the National Medal of Honor Museum Foundation.

This commentary by her first appeared on the Opinion Page of the Wall Street Journal on May 27, 2021, under the same title.