Fort Johnson South

Uh, hopefully we're at the finish line of that.

Um, I am leaving on Wednesday, taking a trip to Louisiana, going to visit my son at Fort Polk.

Um, so that's fun.

We're excited about that.

When we got out we're like, "Dang, it's kinda, it's kinda chilly out." You know? 'Cause we're just used to the, the heat.

So 80 felt kinda cold, you know, kinda chilly, and there was a little breeze going.

But honestly, like Fort Polk, Louisiana, where I'm about to go, that during 4th of July, bro, it's only like maybe 96.

It, it does hit 100 here and there, but the h- amount of humidity and what the dew point's at just makes it absolutely vile, disgusting.

Where were you and what did you think that you would be called upon to do in its wake?

I was a colonel, a brand new colonel, serving at the Joint Readiness Training Center, the JRTC, in Fort Polk, Louisiana.

It's one of the Army's training centers in a very desolate part of Louisiana.

It's where light infantry units would go through every month to be a new brigade would come through and train against a tough enemy force.

But we still had a mission to do.

And so I headed out into the training area, the woods, and I was there for basically the next two weeks with our unit rotation still going on.

But at the same time, even Fort Polk, Louisiana was shut down because nobody knew.

So access to military installations, everything was shut down.

We went to Fort Worth, Texas, 130 miles away.

And the sergeant got up and said, for all you people who have anything to straighten out in your family or your love life or whatever, you need to do it because everybody is going from here to Fort Polk, Louisiana and directly to Vietnam.

Everybody in this room.

No exceptions.

Okay, 1968, May 5th, I'm drafted.

We're in Oklahoma City taking our, uh, inspection to go to Fort Polk, Louisiana.

We have to drop our laundry, bend over and grab our cheeks.

Okay.

That clip is from the Oral History Collection at the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum.

An extraordinary event, the governor said, and one that made a lot of us angry, including one of our listeners, David in Mount Morris, who says, I had just joined the Army as an infantryman, was in Fort Polk, Louisiana, training up for Kosovo with the 10th Mountain Division when 9-11 took place.

It was a mixed bag of emotions that day, anger, fear, vengeance, and excitement.

Yes, I said excitement.

And now I'm living in a place where one of those cases took place, a Santucci family.

Their son was arrested right here at Fort Polk, Louisiana.

He's in Fort Leavenworth now.

And