Not many kicks at boot camp

Not many kicks at boot camp

EDITOR:

I realize that flag-waving is very much in vogue today, and rightly so.

But I cannot allow the article by Mary Smith about Navy veteran Robert Shuttleworth which you ran on Nov. 4 to stand without comment.

The article states that he went through Navy boot camp in 1946 in Bainbridge, Md., and that his group was the last one to go through the facility before it closed.

Wrong, since I was there in the winter of 1954-55.

Then Shuttleworth says that the basic training wasn’t hard. “When you were a kid, it was like playing around,” was the quote in the article.

I don’t know what time of the year he was at Bainbridge, but when I was there that winter the place was a gulag, except for decent chow.

We marched for hours on the “grinder,” which was swept by frigid north winds, and had to have our peacoats opened at the throat.

At night, we slept in our skivvies and had a single blanket, even though the windows of the barrack were left open to the cold winds.

If one tried to keep warm by donning his Navy-issued turtleneck sweater, a sentry came around and made him take it off.

The result was a virtual epidemic of some type of respiratory illness. What was the Navy’s brillant answer to this wave of recruit illness? It was pills, which I believe was penicillin, passed out like after-dinner mints.

Despite this, my illness lingered, and I have had a life-long allergy to penicillin, which may have been caused by being overdosed at Bainbridge.

Shuttleworth is also quoted as saying that the Navy “was a lot of fun.”

That may have been true for him, but I think that prospective recruits need to be wary of such broad generalizations. There is little opportunity for U-turns on the road that leads out of the recruiting office.

ROBERT R. STANGER

Boardman