The Military Intelligence Years
The Military Intelligence School — Fort Holabird, Maryland
I arrived at the MI School a tank Platoon Sergeant E7 but was immediately converted to a Sergeant First Class E7. Only my title changed, my pay grade remained the same. Fort Holabird was a very small installation. located in the city of Baltimore. We were trained in the whole range of Military intelligence except for the functions of interrogators and plain-clothes agents. I graduated as Honor Student.
Upon my return to Fort Hood, I was assigned to the corps G2 as an analyst in the War Plans section.
A short time later, I received orders for the Military Advisor Training Academy (MATA) at Fort Bragg, North Carolina to be trained as an advisor to the South Vietnamese army (ARVN). Nobody I knew really wanted advisor duty, including me. The toughest part of the training was learning Vietnamese language. It is a tonal language having up to five tones for a word, e.g. “ban” could mean either “friend” or “shoot,” depending on the tone. As I had a hearing impairment I didn’t do well. With about ten days to go I received new orders assigning me to the 55th MI Company supporting G2, I Field Force Vietnam (IFFV) which was a U.S. Army corps level headquarters. I nearly cried with happiness. I didn’t find out until it was nearly time to rotate back to the U.S. that I had been requested by the G2 operations officer (who I’d worked for at III Corps) when he saw my name on the advisors list. He never told me, rather I found out from the G2 operations sergeant.