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Twenty-two Turning Blue Kilt them all. Let God Jort them out. -t-shirt slogan It was late that night, well after we'd gotten back, before we learned what happened to Bigham. Durham from first plamon was CQ for the night and someone caJled in a report. Bigham had suffered a heat stroke. His temperature was 106 degrees when he gOt to the hospitaL They'd packed him in ice to lower his temperature and thought they were going (Q lose him. But after a couple of hours, his temperature went down, and they believed they had everything under control by the time they called the company. As it turned Out,. this was the second time that Bigham had passed out from the heaL It had happened once before when Bigham was in AfT. The second one disqualified Bigham from any further strenuous exercise. It wasn't going to get him Out of the Army, but it would get him dropped from OCS, and it would mean that he would be transferred out of a combat outfit, probably into a derking unit. I had an odd mixed reaction to Bigham's good misfortune. I was sorry that he had made it as far as he had through OCS with only about six more weeks before graduation, then to be dropped. But I thought that it was good that he would get out of the Infantry. A.5 much as f wanted to get it out of my mind, I couldn't help but think that I was partly responsible for what had happened, since I was the one who'd stepped on his heels. His shadowed face began to enter my recurring dreams, repeating his phrase about Philadelphia. A.5 usual, though, I didn't have much time to think about it, because we were about to rurn blue and graduate to the senior phase of OCS. We were down (Q 110 men from our original 256, had lost two TACs, Rancek and Swanson, and would probably lose at least one more before graduation . The TACs had slacked off, thinking I guess that they'd identified and gotten rid of most of the unqualified candidates. So we were marking rime, going to classes, trying not to think roo 6.r ahead. The eighteenth week party didn't have the same atmosphere as the twelfth did. There was none of the tension of a big panel that would bounce our another large bunch of us. We anticipated the benefits of turning blue. We'd get to paint our black helmets infantry blue, wear the distinctive white scarves with the blue OCS patches, get weekend passes, and we could walk through the battalion area raising hell with the beginning OCS companies, just as we had been harassed when we arrived. Even before the official party acknowledging our passage, Kochs gave us full music privileges. We could have radios or tape players, anything small enough to fit in our wall or footlockers. Like most ofmy generation, I'd grown up with music everywhere. I'd come to consciousness in the middle of the fifties just as rod'n'roll began to dominate the air waves and juke boxes, had listened to Elvis sing "Blue Suede Shoes" before I was a teenager, had watched the Beades on Ed Sullivan, and had heard the Doors through a psychedelic haze. Music just seemed part of the air, as natural as breathing. Even in Basic and AIT we gOt to have portable radios and could listen at nights and on weekends. But in OCS with music declared contraband, the silence seemed frightening, foreboding, ominous . Sitting at night in silent study hall, I would spin records in my head. Maybe that was why I remember that time with music so fully, since I was always trying to recall lyrics and melodies. So getting full music privileges seemed like grace. The song that March that will forever be wedded in my memory with that moment was Simon and Garfunkle's "Bridge OverTroubled Waler." [ sat transfixed listening to the Jines about growing weary and feeling smaJl, hoping for someone ro be on your side when times get rough and no friends to be found. I longed to be [ike a bridge over troubled water, so I could just lay me down. I had felt like I was drowning in troubled waters, just barely keeping my head above the choppy breakers. Turning blue meant a lull in the 178 Fort...

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