As the statistics show, Toccoa was a challenge. Colonel Sink’s task was to put the men through basic training, harden them, teach them the rudiments of infantry tactics, prepare them for jump school, and build a regiment that he would lead into combat. “We were sorting men,” Lieutenant Hester recalled, “sorting the fat to the thin and sorting out the no guts.”
Pvt. Ed Tipper said of his first day in Easy, “I looked up at nearby Mount Currahee and told someone, I’ll bet that when we finish the training program here, the last thing they’ll make us do will be to climb to the top of that mountain.’
[Currahee was more a hill than a mountain, but it rose 1,000 feet above the parade ground and dominated the landscape.]
A few minutes later, someone blew a whistle. We fell in, were ordered to change to boots and athletic trunks, did so, fell in again—and then ran most of the three miles to the top and back down again.” They lost some men that first day. Within a week, they were running—or at least double-timing—all the way up and back.
At the end of the second week, Tipper went on, “We were told, ‘Relax. No runs today.’ We were taken to the mess hall for a tremendous meal of spaghetti at lunchtime. When we came out of the mess hall, a whistle blew, and we were told, ‘The orders are changed. We run.’ We went to the top of Currahee and back with a couple of ambulances following, and men vomiting spaghetti everywhere along the way. Those who dropped out and accepted the medics’ invitation to ride back in the ambulances found themselves shipped out that same day.”
The men were told that Currahee was an Indian word that meant “We stand alone,” which was the way these paratroopers expected to fight. It became the battle cry of the 506th.
The officers and men ran up and down Currahee three or four times a week. They got so they could do the six-plus-mile round trip in fifty minutes. In addition, they went through a grueling obstacle course daily, and did pushups and pull-ups, deep-knee bends and other calisthenics.
When the men were not exercising, they were learning the basics of soldiering. They began with close order drill, then started making night marches with full field equipment. The first night march was eleven miles; on each march that followed a mile or two was added on. These marches were made without a break, without a cigarette, without water. “We were miserable, exhausted, and thought that if we did not get a drink of water we were certain to collapse,” Pvt. Burton
“Pat” Christenson recalled. At the end of a march Sobel would check each man’s canteen to see that it was still full.
Those who made it got through because of an intense private determination and because of their desire for public recognition that they were special. Like all elite units around the world, the Airborne had its unique badges and symbols.
Once through jump school, they would receive silver wings to wear on the left pocket of their jackets, a patch for their left shoulder, a patch for their hats, and the right to wear paratrooper boots and “blouse” their trousers (tuck the trousers into their boots). Gordon said that “it doesn’t make much sense now [1990], but at the time we were all ready to trade our lives in order to wear these accoutrements of the Airborne.”
The only rest came when they got lectures, on weapons, map and compass reading, infantry tactics, codes, signaling, field telephones, radio equipment, switchboard and wire stringing, demolitions. For unarmed combat and bayonet drills, it was back to using those trembling muscles.
When they were issued their rifles, they were told to treat the weapon as they would treat a wife, gently. It was theirs to have and to hold, to sleep with in the field, to know intimately. They got to where they could take it apart and put it back together blindfolded.
To prepare the men for jump school, Toccoa had a mock-up tower some 35 feet high. A man was strapped into a parachute harness that was connected to 15-foot risers, which in turn were attached to a pulley that rode a cable. Jumping from the tower in the harness, sliding down the cable to the landing, gave the feeling of a real parachute jump and landing.