I guess you didn’t read this guy’s account too well. HE WAS IN THE AIR FORCE. They don’t have “PLATOONS,” or “DRILL SERGEANTS>: They hae “FLIGHTS” and “TI’s.”

Carry on with your bullying though.

The following Sunday my flight marched to religious orientation where a minister told several hundred of us: “Some of you are Catholic, and some of you are Protestants, but we are all Christians. That is the main thing.” It wasn’t quite the ‘main thing’ for me though because I wasn’t Christian, I was Jewish. I informed the minister of this slight discrepancy and he was visibly shaken; “Are you sure?” he asked. I told him that I was quite sure and he had me accompany him to his car. We drove to the Protestant chapel where he put in a phone call to the base Jewish chaplain. “I’ve got one of yours over here.” he said laughingly into the phone. While we waited for the rabbi to arrive the minister made small talk: “How come you’re an enlisted man?” he wanted to know. “Most of the Jewish personnel I see are aviation cadets, or in OCS. We don’t see many Jewish enlisted personnel.” I didn’t know how to reply.

The following Friday, when the TI spoke to me about the upcoming Saturday schedule of training events, I dutifully entered what he said onto the clipboard and then informed him that I would be attending religious services on Saturday morning…
“What kinda religious services is that?” he wanted to know.
“Jewish services, sir,” I replied.
He cocked his head to one side and stared hard at me for a couple of moments. “You a Jew Pruitt?” he asked.

On Saturday, when I returned from Sabbath service, the TI called me over along with a boy named Jordan.
“Pruitt,” he said, “give that clipboard to Jordan! Jordan you’re the new flight commander! Pruitt, you go sit down on your foot-locker!” I couldn’t believe what was happening. I sat there feeling pretty damned miserable. Jordan peered at me sympathetically, but without any trace of surprise.

A few days later our flight marched over to an administration building where we waited as our ‘dog tags’ were stamped out and issued to us. When I received mine they had the letter ‘P’ stamped on each of them in the place where one’s religion was to go. If you got killed people from graves registration were supposed to be able to put the right kind of monument over your grave. My dog tags were supposed to have been stamped withe the letter ‘J.’ I told this to the sergeant who was in charge of the procedure. He was an older, grizzled Master Sergeant with what seemed to me a fatherly face.
“Listen son,” he kindly said to me, “you don’t have to do this… Just leave it the way it is.”
As I look back now, from a distance of many years, it seems to me that the older sergeant might, secretly, have been Jewish himself, or he might have been one of those who witnessed the insides of some of Hitler’s extermination camps during the war. I wasn’t mature enough, or smart enough, to take his advice. I had been brought up in an Irish Catholic neighborhood, immersed in the center of Irish Catholic friendships whose warmth still exists, even now, and no’one had ever given me to believe that being Jewish was a liability. I was beginning to learn the truth though, with quite a bit of shock and disappointment.

After about thirty days we were given our first ‘pass’ to go off-base into the city of San Antonio. I went with a couple of friends and we visited the Alamo and a few other ‘touristy’ places. By late afternoon we were ready to return to the base and boarded an air force bus which hauled us back to nearby our barracks.

[If any would like to hear the rest of my story please contact me and I will complete this account of a four year encounter with beatings, harrassments, final exile to northern Greenland and further persecutions, even there in Greenland.