Ed. Note: Long-time Chestnut Hiller Bobby Harrell still cannot forget his experiences in Basic Training in 1943, when he was training with his Army buddies to leave for Europe in the middle of World War II.

The sun shone brightly as our train pulled up outside Camp Blanding. An army band greeted us with a brisk medley of Sousa marches. While these are supposed to whip the listener into a frenzy of patriotism, they have always had quite the opposite effect on me. Instead of inspiring me with an urge to rush overseas and plunge a bayonet into the nearest Japanese or German belly, the music invariably turns me green with envy. Envy of the musicians. I fancy myself in their place and positively ache to be one of them. True, they must all have been bored silly by having to repeat the ritual (triple fortissimo) each time a fresh batch of rookies arrived in the area.

On the other hand, their job classification enjoys a perceptibly higher survival quotient than any duty one might find in the infantry. How often, after all, does a soldier die from blowing into a bugle? (Gunga Din is the sole exception that comes to mind.) Say what you will, marching along behind a drum or a clarinet is healthier work than crawling face down through mud beneath a hail of machine-gun fire.

The latter exercise, by the way, resulted in the premature death of a trainee at that very camp. The story was told with sadistic relish by a southern cadreman into whose loving care I was soon to be assigned in Company E.  It seems this one poor soul had been seized with panic while negotiating an obstacle course — the noise may have got to him — and he unwisely leapt to his feet in the midst of the crossfire. A burst of 30-caliber bullets coming from opposite directions cut him in two. Did he think the exercise was just a dry run? Had someone told him they weren’t using live ammunition? We’ll never know. His was a mistake nobody makes twice.

Other equally tragic tales were rife throughout the camp. It was hard to tell whether these were “on the level” or simply the fabrications of some clown who enjoyed scaring the living daylights out of his gullible comrades. It takes all kinds. Seeing no reason to doubt their veracity, I myself was all ears.

The previous summer (so the story went), a trainee in Company F across the road had been sufficiently perturbed by army life to commit suicide. He managed to do it in the barracks while his buddies were all asleep. His plan was ingenious. Several unloaded M-1 rifles were stacked together near the exit and securely locked into a gun rack that was fastened to the floor. Only the company commander and the sergeant-on-duty had keys to it. During target practice it was the policy to issue live ammunition on the firing line, and nowhere else. All unexpended shells were accounted for and kept under tight control by the non-coms in charge. Or should have been.

One afternoon at target practice, our unhappy soldier contrived somehow to swipe a clip of ammo and pocket it unnoticed. Later that night, while his hut-mates dreamed of the girl back home, he slipped a single cartridge into the chamber of the rifle at one end of the rack. Its barrel pointed upward. It took but a second (or eternity) for him to bend forward, rest his temple against the cold steel, grip the trigger, and squeeze. The blast, it was said, took the top of his head off. Whoever first got to the remains — should he be alive today — must now and again still relive the experience in a nightmare.

A third episode in this Chamber of Horrors — the last in the series, I promise you — isn’t quite so gruesome as the preceding pair. Yet it is bizarre enough in its own way. This one concerns a youngster who, it seemed, had the audacity to fall asleep during a map-reading lecture given in a forest close by the camp. The offense wasn’t as serious as dozing off while on guard duty (for which, in wartime, a soldier might face a firing squad at dawn), but the staff sergeant delivering the lecture nonetheless got mad as a hornet.

“WAKE UP back thar!” he screamed. Everyone snapped to attention and looked around to where the offender sat curled up under a shade tree. He had removed his helmet-liner. His head lay back against the tree-trunk, a picture of peace. The sergeant, boiling with rage over a fancied insult, came forward to confront this rude member of his audience and “chew him out” good. But before he could go into action, the trainee’s body sank slowly to one side and came to rest in the grass. The professor of map reading now found himself a student short.

The exact cause of death took a while to determine. Owing to its tiny mouth a coral snake cannot easily bite a human being. These reptiles, also called harlequin snake (Micrurus fulvius), have a small blunt head, a cylindrical body, and average 2-1/2 feet in length. Their venom must be injected into the loose skin between a man’s fingers, or possibly at the tip of an earlobe. The bite, in any event, is almost always fatal. To complicate matters, a coral’s incision is too minute to be detected by the naked eye, and even if detected the victim is likely to be in heaven before treatment can be administered. The bite, we are told, is probably not even felt by the host (a dubious blessing at best) and the toxin would appear to work as quickly as the fluid King Claudius poured into the porches of Hamlet Senior’s ear. The reader will recall that he, too, was fast asleep in an orchard when stung.

We heard little talk in 1943 about endangered species. Had it been an issue, every GI at Camp Blanding would still have shouted “Bullshit” with one voice, and voted with a clear conscience for the immediate extinction of the coral snake. Bear in mind, please, that we often were obliged to lie face down in tall grass. It was impossible not to worry about these deadly creatures. None of us wanted to earn a Purple Heart posthumously.

In the ensuing 17 weeks of basic training at dear old Blanding, I was gradually converted from “an infant mewling and puking in the nurse’s arms” into a man whose uncanny resemblance to John Wayne is beyond dispute.