OAK RIDGE RECOLLECTIONS - HAL BEHL

In wartime, you could not enlist, you had to volunteer to your local draft
board, and they'd send you out with the next monthly quota that had room. I
volunteered, but we had about a month before I went, during which I had a short
temporary job making Engineering drawings for a machine manufacturer in NYC.
You couldn't get a permanent job in wartime with the draft hanging over your
head.

As soon as I knew when and where I was to be inducted, I notified the
National Roster of Scientific and Specialized Personnel, who had assigned me an
identification number when I graduated, and who were supposed to see that I ended
up doing the thing that I was trained for, in the war effort. I went into the
Army on August 18, 1944, and was sent to Camp Upton out on Long Island for
induction processing - shots, tests, uniforms, waiting. When I was interviewed for
assignment, I told the interviewer that I wanted to get into the Army Air
Corps, and produced a copy of my Aeronautical Engineering diploma and a letter
from the Convair Chief Engineer saying that I knew everything there was to know
about the bombers that they were currently building (B-24s, B-32s, PB4Y-2s,
PBYs) (I didn't really). He assured me that I would be in the Air Corps, BUT,
"by the way, have you had any military experience"? I told him that I'd had 4
years of Army Reserve Officers Training Corps (ROTC) in College, and had fooled
around a little helping the San Diego company of the California State Guard
when I was working for Convair. He then wormed out of me that the State Guard
was an INFANTRY unit, and that in ROTC, when we weren't in class, we marched
around with RIFLES. Needless to say, several days later I was on my way to Camp
Croft in Spartanburg SC for 13 weeks of INFANTRY Replacement Training!

Having no great desire to be a Combat Infantry Private in a ground war, as
soon as I arrived at Croft, I started to volunteer for anything that might have
a higher priority than the Infantry, such as Paratroopers, Commandos, Mountain
Troops, but nothing came of it. Because of my previous military training, I
was assigned as "Company Guide", which meant that when we were hiking, I walked
out front with the Company Commander, a Captain about my age - we got to be
pretty good friends, and ended up running every morning before the troops got
up.

One morning, while the Captain and I were out running, he said that he
thought that I really should be an officer, and if I'd apply for Officer Candidate
School, he'd endorse the application and send it on. I did, filling out the top
choices as Air Corps and Ordnance. I took all the physicals, and a couple of
weeks later, he told me that I had been accepted, and would be leaving for the
Infantry School in a few days - I hadn't applied for Infantry, because the
only thing I wanted less than being a Private in the Infantry was to be a Second
Lieutenant! It turned out that someone had crossed out my "Air Corps", and
replaced it with "Infantry" -I had a long series of discussions with the higher
ups, explaining that the reason that I didn't have a commission in the Corps of
Engineers from my college ROTC was that the Army had decided that I was a
little color-blind in the red/green range, and thus could not be commissioned in a
combat branch of the Army. They finally gave up, and I went back to training,
where my San Diego Judo came in a little handy because I ended up instructing
hand-to-hand combat after I threw a big clumsy Sergeant across the
demonstration pit in front of the whole company. I also ended up instructing on the
machine gun range, which left me with a permanent high pitched whistle in my left
ear (Tinnitus), and an equivalent loss of hearing in that same frequency
range. The Army, at that time, didn't believe in ear protection.