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52 BACK ON THE VICE BEAT a fe months after joining the Constitution in 1953, I got an urgent telephone call that sent me off on a major investigation and one of my most harrowing experiences as a reporter. Brigadier General Richard Mayo, who had succeeded General Armstrong as commander of Camp Stewart, told me that gambling, drinking, and prostitution, under the protection of Liberty County officials, were victimizing soldiers and seriously hampering their training for combat duty in Korea. Most of the soldiers were young inductees who were lonely and easily led astray. Teenaged barmaids, many from out of town, were luring the trainees into gambling joints and fleecing them of their money. And prostitutes were beckoning them into whorehouses where they were contracting venereal diseases at an alarming rate. The general, fiercely protective of his troops’ welfare and morale, expressed outrage that soldiers were out gambling, drinking, and whoring around until well after midnight and then having to get up at 4:30 a.m. to be on the firing range at 6 a.m. He was concerned they would not be properly trained when they shipped out to Korea. Mayo said he had spoken to local authorities about the problems to no avail and asked that I investigate and expose the corruption. From my time at Camp Stewart I knew that Hinesville and Liberty County were rough-and-tumble places where a courthouse gang headed by Sheriff Paul Sikes and his brother-in-law, Judge Paul Caswell, ruled with an iron hand. But I told the general I would do what I could. It was no secret that slot machines and other forms of gambling operated illegally outside Camp Stewart. In fact, when we were based there some of my colleagues from Battery C patronized the gambling joints, although I never heard of anyone being victimized. In fact, they had so much practice skimming horse racing machines in Biloxi, they were Chapter 8 back on the vice beat 53 more like the victimizers than the victims. My buddies had developed a scheme that rigged the machines to pay off. Once the machine registered a winning horse they would jam a wire into the machine so the same choice would be registered as a winner on subsequent replays. For weeks they drained money from the machines until they were finally caught and barred from the gambling joints. But while I already knew something about Liberty County politics and the gambling, I didn’t know much about the prostitution, the high incidence of VD, and the way officials colluded to protect the vice establishments . Mayo’s call was also the first I had heard of the military’s concern that soldiers’ training was being undermined by the vice raging there. I returned to the Camp Stewart area with gusto, surveying the scene in detail and interviewing numerous soldiers and others who had intimate knowledge of both the gambling and prostitution. Soldiers were losing their paychecks in gambling joints situated so close to the camp that you could stand next to one of them and touch it with one hand while touching the fence surrounding the camp with the other hand. There were gambling machines of various types in almost every establishment in Hinesville, including a dozen stores on the courthouse square in the center of downtown. Scantily clad girls, some obviously minors, plied the soldiers with drinks as they gambled, and in some cases sold them sexual favors after closing. I wrote about the extraordinarily high venereal disease rate at Stewart and about the whorehouses that lured them inside, including one house that turned out to be operated by a deputy sheriff. The VD rate for Camp Stewart had soared to 42.8 in the month before I visited Liberty County, which, as Mayo pointed out, meant that if the rate continued for the next year, there would be 428 cases of VD for every 1,000 troops at Camp Stewart. My stories touched off a firestorm, and a Liberty County grand jury was quickly empanelled to investigate. After three days of testimony, during which several witnesses from Camp Stewart were put under military police protection because of threats, word that indictments were about to come down spread throughout the county. As night fell the jury returned forty-three indictments and charged Sheriff Sikes of knowingly failing and neglecting to enforce state liquor laws, a charge that could result in his ouster. A crowd of forty or...

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