Infantry Officer Candidate School (OCS) was six months of pure misery - from the beginning to almost the end, the tac officers treated us like dirt.  The hours were long and there was a limited amount of sleep each night.  Each day started with a run at oh-dark thirty and then included class and field work. Every day included some type of unplanned physical or mental harassment - sometimes things that required you to stay awake all night.  To be fair, what they were trying to do was see who could cope with stress, both physical and mental.  They washed out a significant percent of the class.

[Added 2020: OCS did not produce Infantry officers who could lead a platoon in combat in Vietnam.  When I came out of OCS I had no idea how to deploy a platoon in combat.  I received a commission into the Signal Corps so I don't know if the graduates who were commissioned in the infantry received additional training or not.  I hope so.]

This is the only picture I have of me during my Army training - I think it was taken before I went to OCS.

Anyway, all this exhaustion led to some funny stories.  One of the classes we had was on land navigation.  Land navigation means to take a map and compass and follow a course drawn on a topo map, both in daylight and at night.  Now, for anyone who spent some time in the woods in the country, land navigation is not too tough.  In one or two classes and practice sessions you can pick up everything you need to know.  But the Army believes that "practice makes perfect" so we quickly learned how to take advantage of that.

A land navigation range consists of some land in the wild state, with posts in the ground in various locations.  Each post had a number or letter on it.  When we were given a course, we had to run each leg (and there were many legs to a course) until we came to a post and then write down the number or letter on each post to prove we had correctly followed the course.  The instructor could check to see if we had done the course correctly simply by checking the sequence of letters/numbers.

Soon we were confident that we knew how to do land navigation.  Now, when we would go to a land navigation course, a group of us would get together and head off into the woods.  Once we were far enough into the woods, we'd take turns sleeping under a tree, with one person standing guard.  After sleeping a few hours, we'd each write some random sequence of letters and/or numbers on the paper and hand it in to the instructor.  The instructors thought we were really incompetent in land navigation - none of us had done the course correctly.  Of course, we asked for more practice because we were so stupid.

The second story relates to being confined to the barracks.  Any time you were in the barracks, you were subject to harassment.  There were very few reasons accepted for leaving the barracks area, but one of them was to attend religious services.  A friend of mine was Jewish, and Jewish services are held on Friday evening and Saturday morning (the Jewish Sabbath goes from sundown Friday to sundown Saturday).  So every Friday evening he and I would sign out for Jewish services and then we'd go drinking in town.  And every Sunday, I'd sign out for Christian services and go to other post facilities, even just lay in a park - anything to get away from the tac officers.

Finally, one of the tac officers called me in and confronted me with my conflicting sign-outs - on Friday evening for Jewish services and on Sunday for Christian services.  Now, realize that I had never been to the synagogue, and had no idea even where it was located.  If he had just asked me how to get to the synagogue, I would have been dead meat.  But he started asking me about what we did at Friday services.  I had no clue what a Jewish service consisted of, so I told him that it was a fellowship service and we mainly just talked and maybe played pool in the recreation room. 

Then he asked me why I was also signing out for Christian services and I told him that, although I was Christian, I was thinking of converting to Judaism.  This was too much for him and he threw me  out of his office.  He knew I was lying but he couldn't interfere with religious practices.  However, after that, I didn't sign out for Jewish services on Friday evening any more.

Sometime during OCS, I learned that I could apply for a branch transfer so I filled out paperwork for a transfer to the Signal Corps.  I wasn't optimistic but I couldn't lose much by trying.  To my surprise, not only was I approved for a branch transfer, but they asked our company for volunteers for the Signal Corps.  Apparently they were short of Signal Corps officers and there was not as big of a demand for Infantry officers.  I helped several of my friends write their request for a branch transfer.  Probably saved their life.  But things were different back then.  When you left a post you lost contact with all your friends so I never knew what happened with them.