R. Thomas Douglass
U.S. Army
1954-1958
The employment prospects for recent college grads in late 1954 were grim for a liberal arts major with scanty job experience. Faced with this situation upon graduation from George Washington University, I decided a good strategy would be to volunteer for the draft and serve my two years in the military as an enlisted man rather than try to get into Officer Candidate School or try to start a career. I had two years of ROTC as an undergraduate academic requirement, but opted out of the program to take more courses in foreign languages. As a draftee, I was ordered to report to Fort Dix, New Jersey for basic training. I reported on December 9 of that year, and began basic training in early January, 1955.
Basic training was eight weeks of marches of many miles. We marched laden with full packs on our backs carrying our WWII weapons, the M1 Garand Rifles. We had bivouacs in the snow, firing range practice and competition with live ammunition. We also had night maneuvers, tear gas exercises, night fighting practice, and crawled under machine guns firing real bullets. Faced with a second eight weeks of combat infantry training, I opted to re-enlist for a third year of service to receive a generous bonus and a choice of school. I wanted to get into the Army Language School in Monterey, CA, but was convinced to settle for clerk typist school, which meant another eight weeks at Ft. Dix.
At the end of that training, I was assigned to an Army unit attached to the Pentagon, where I was a clerk typist in the intelligence documents library, cataloguing documents sent by embassies and offices around the world. From the Pentagon, I was fortunate to be reassigned to a unit that sent me to work at the U.S. Embassy in London, where my oldest son was born at the Ruislip Military Hospital. From London, I was able to take leaves to visit Germany, Switzerland, France, and the Netherlands, and a trip around the coast of Great Britain in September of 1957. My new family and I were sent home in August of 1958. As a result of my Army service, I qualified for the G.I. Bill and was able to achieve my doctorate in Romance Linguistics from the University of Pennsylvania in 1964, and get teaching positions at Moorestown (NJ) high school, Millersville (PA) State College, Simpson College, and most recently to the University of Iowa, where I taught Spanish language courses from 1970 to 1992.
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