CHAPTER TWO CAMP TYSON
CHAPTER
TWO
Camp Tyson
It took one day of basic training for Roscoe to understand that he didn’t much care for it.
Most of the time he spent doing menial labor around the camp: digging pits, laying planks or mopping floors.
When they went for exercises, the drills ranged from haphazard and ill-considered to downright cruel, and the officers treated them like vermin to be squashed, not soldiers to be trained.
Complaining got you quarter rations or a beat-down or sent to the guard house. Roscoe learned to keep his mouth shut.
When he’d been there for over a month and hadn’t so much as held a weapon in his hand, let alone trained with it, he worked up the nerve to ask Lieutenant Williams, the one colored officer mixed in with all the others, ‘When are we going to learn to fight, sir?’
He held Roscoe’s gaze, as if weighing up his answer, before telling him, ‘The generals don’t intend to train men who look like us to kill men who look like them.’
‘But we’re at war,’ he stammered.
‘Negro troops get service postings, not combat.’
He searched the officer’s face for signs of a joke but found only simmering frustration.
‘But,’ Roscoe protested, because surely in a war you needed every man, ‘I signed up to fight.’ That had been the whole point. Otherwise, what was he doing there?
The lieutenant shook his head, his mouth set in a grim line. ‘You signed up to serve,’ he said, and walked off, leaving Roscoe reeling.
Now he understood the careless, lazy training that wasn’t training. Even in an army, someone needed to fetch supplies, wash the dishes and clean the latrines. It was a kick in the teeth to think that he’d rushed to join the army to become a houseboy.
About a month after he’d spoken to Lieutenant Williams, the officer pulled him aside. ‘If you’re interested, there’s a barrage-balloon battalion the army’s putting together that I can put you forward for. It’s a chance for real training and soldiering.’
Roscoe barked out a bitter laugh, then pulled himself to attention. ‘I thought the army didn’t want to train us, sir.’
‘They don’t,’ Williams said. ‘But there’s pressure from the NAACP, the Negro press, some pro-integration congressmen and the first lady, so they’ve had to give a little.’
‘Would I fight?’ He held himself still, tempering the hope growing in his belly.
‘Your main role would be defensive barrage balloons, but you’d deploy to Europe, and you’d see action.’
That was all Roscoe needed to hear. He put in for the transfer and, a few weeks later, was on his way to training at Camp Tyson, Tennessee.
The officers at Camp Tyson set a grueling, relentless pace. On bad days the men endured twenty-five-mile hikes through the woods, weighed down with full packs. On worse days they suffered through bruising stamina tests of crawling through obstacles with rifles pressed against their bellies.
The first time he woke to shouts and gunfire at two in the morning, Roscoe thought the Germans or Japs had made it to America to attack them in their beds. It took a few seconds for his groggy brain to realize he’d been woken for a night drill.
As hard as training was, he found he could take it, first because his commanding officer, Lieutenant Colonel Reed, was a fair, decent man who didn’t resort to dirty tricks or racial slurs like other officers did, and second, because no-nonsense British instructors trained the 320th on the balloons and told them ‘our side’ was counting on them.
It was the first time, all war, he’d felt a part of it.
‘Have a care how you go,’ one said, showing them how to inflate the blimp-sized balloons. ‘Otherwise, you’ll spark the hydrogen and blow yourselves sky-high.’
Another showed them how to release the built-up static electricity on the hanging cables. ‘If you forget,’ he warned, ‘the charge could jolly well knock you unconscious. And if you don’t wear your double gloves, the cables will shred your hands like paper.’
A third explained how to find the right height so the balloons would form a blockade.
‘Force the Jerry bombers too high for them to aim properly, up where our anti-aircraft can shoot them out of the bloody sky. And if anyone tries to fly below your blockade,’ he said, ‘the dangling cables will stall his plane. Could even take off a wing.’
A fourth showed them how to use TNT bombs that released down the cables. ‘Just to be doubly sure that no one escapes.’
This was the war effort Roscoe had signed up for. Now his letters to Cora were full of optimism and eagerness to ship out, and in November he got the command. He wrote to her, telling her he’d make her proud and that he’d face whatever came with a soldier’s honor.