Hello I am a 17 year old boy getting ready to turn into a man very quickly. This is my basic training picture taken at Fort Jackson S.C. in the summer of 1975. From there I was sent to {Advanced Individual Training} A.I.T. at D-1-1 {Delta Company 1-1} Fort Polk Louisiana, where 4 soldiers and 1 Drill Instructor died during training.

The first soldier was shot to death by a Drill Instructor {DI} after he shot a DI to death at the rifle range, the DI kept hitting the soldier because he was not doing something correctly with his rifle and the soldier kept telling the DI that if he did not stop hitting him that he was going to shoot him, the DI said yeah right!! The DI kept hitting him every time he made the same mistake, so the soldier unloaded a 6 round clip in him and another DI ran up to the foxhole and unloaded a 20 round clip in the soldier.

The second soldier died while on night training in the Louisiana swamps, we where on night patrol learning how to read a compass and a map, it was so damn dark we could not see each other very well even though we were only a few feet apart, anyway, the lead soldier saw a few pairs of red eyes looking at us and he asked the DI what are they, when the DI told him they where crocodiles the soldier dropped the compass, the map and took off running as fast as he could. A few of us tried to go after him, but the DI yelled at us not to, that they would find him in the morning, well they didn't, they did find him on the 3rd day, dead... A crocodile had got hold of him and ripped his leg off, he bled to death before anyone could find him.

The 3rd soldier died during night training again, but this time they were hitting us with a lot of small arms fire, machine gun fire, hand grenades, and mortar fire, the soldier jumped into a huge ditch {Foxhole} trying to get some cover from everything that they where hitting us with and broke his neck. Died instantly..

The 4th Soldier: We were a the L.A.W. range {Light Armor Weapon} actually a small rocket, anyway our targets where Tanks, we had to shoot this small rocket at moving tanks, well one tank stopped for some reason and one of the members of the tank crew decided to come out of the top of the tank and before the DI could stop any of us from firing our LAW's the soldier was hit in the back and was killed instantly.