HARVARD GI FINDS LIFE STRANGE IN FORT BRAGG

The sandy waste known as Fort Bragg, where Hargrove lived and gold-bricked, is just what he cracked it up to be. Strange and quaint people and officers, fantastic programs, and unbelievable feats of training squat sweatingly there. Forty-five former Harvard ROTC men will to I you so any day, to the tune of the Caisson Song.

Back in June it took three weeks of worrying at reception centers to get to the "largest field artillery reservation in the world," and once there the problem was how to get out fast. As a matter of fact, the Army had some pretty definite plans after a while, but these were greatly improved on by imaginative GIs whose fathers were "good friends of the adjutant of the ASTP" at innumerable colleges, who knew WACs in Center headquarters, or who just had good imaginations. There were rumors--all size and shapes.

The place was colorful. Mostly it was boring, but it was colorful sometimes. The sergeants, of course, come out on top in that category. Colorful? . . .! Sergeants have been written about by so many wistful draftees of World War II that they're as trite as KP, but the fact approach to ROTC was a little skeptical, usually distrustful, seldom fawning.

There was the small man with the big remains that Bragg's were colorful. Their muscles, the close combat instructor and fiendish ("scrub barracks tonight") platoon sergeant. He had the "cadre complex" and had it bad, and was continually nasty in a high-pitched way. Then came the first cool day, when he winsomely confided that he was an ex-English teacher, that his greatest ambition was to come to Harvard after the war as a graduate student, "and just read for a year."

There was old (25 years) "Sergeant Dick," who got his name from calling everyone Dick. Talkative, Ozarkian, lanky, he harangued his platoon half hours at a time, often to heights of innocent eloquence, as in his farewell speech: "I ain't a sacred man, but we gonna win, 'cause we got folks ta home what's got a mighty big drag wid de Man 'at runs 'a whole shebang."

But mostly there was sand, and the dust of the sand, and the heat crawling night, and dirty clothes. There was a lot of artillery and a lot of digging and crawling, and a lot of training that was designed for and that they know readied them for, combat duty