Bert Spearman. Basic training was a piece of cake, said Bert. Jump School was where the real test came.

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1 Bert Spearman By Neal Beard Bert Spearman grew up in the Appalachian Foothills of Anderson, South Carolina. As soon as he graduated from Anderson High School he headed off to the Army; that was one of several major goals that he had set for himself early in life. Another one of those goals was to become a paratrooper and wear the unit patch of the Screaming Eagles of the 101 st Airborne Division. And nothing was going to stop him. didn t stop Bert from participating in some of the tensest moments in America s history. But I m getting ahead of myself; I ll get to those in a few moments. Basic training was a piece of cake, said Bert. Jump School was where the real test came. I was determined to finish jump school ahead of time; nothing was going to stop me from getting my wings. On the weekends when everyone else in the barracks was out on the town barhopping, I was in the gym doing calisthenics to strengthen my upper arms and legs. I was going to need all the strength I could muster for the upcoming jumps and final qualifications, said Bert. Private First Class, Bert Spearman Bert was one of those soldiers who never served in a combat zone of war. He was too young for the Korean Conflict, and he completed his military obligations before Vietnam. But that But two weeks before my qualifications, I turned an ankle. My foot swelled up so much that I could barely get my jump boots on; I couldn t tell a soul. If I had, they would have sent me to the infirmary and made me stay off that foot, and I would have been assigned to light duty tasks till it healed. I would have had to drop out of the class. That would have meant a six-month setback in completing jump school if they would have even let me stay in the program at all. Bert was determined to hide his injury from everyone. He wrapped his ankle in gauze and put on two pairs of socks. Then he laced his

2 boots up as tight as he could get them and let his bloused pants legs fall a little lower than usual to hide the bulge. The pain was almost unbearable especially on full-gear endurance marches that sometimes exceeded ten miles. I was popping aspirin like it was candy, said Bert. I never let on to anyone how much pain I was going through. You just never knew when someone would rat you out. Finally the day came for our final qualification jump. I made it! I had completed jump school four weeks ahead of schedule and I don t know how to describe the feeling of accomplishment that I felt that day standing in formation when they pinned those silver wings on my chest. I earned those wings; it was one of the proudest moments of my life, said Bert. A few days later, Bert was on a plane headed for Fort Campbell, Kentucky. His orders had him reporting to the famed 101 st Airborne Division the Screaming Eagles. Goal number two accomplished. At Fort Campbell an Army sedan picked Bert up at the airport and drove him to his barracks, but just as he got there he found his new unit forming up for a ten-mile bivouac to the field for a two-week field exercise. All he could do was stow his personal gear away; put on his fatigues and combat boots; grab his weapon, web belt and full rucksack for the march ahead; and drop into line. I just had to suck it up again and deal with the pain, said Bert. It took several more weeks before the swelling and pain began to subside, and Bert s foot healed up. A Screaming Eagle is a tough old bird! For the next several months, when the battalion came back in from the field, we trained, said Bert. There were long forced marches, low altitude jumps, high altitude jumps, hand-to hand combat training, weapons quals, and more forced marches. Final Qualification Jump, 1961: Bert with his arms outstretched in a "V" so that the cameraman could locate him in the crowd of parachutist. Then one day we had to train for riot control; then we had to do it all over again. The training was pretty intense. It wasn t long before we knew why. Just before midnight on September

3 30, 1962 we were ordered on stand-by and at 0300 we boarded a plane headed for Oxford, Mississippi, said Bert. President John F. Kennedy had mobilized Federal Troops to guard the campus of Mississippi State and a young African-American Air Force Veteran, named James Meredith, who had enrolled at Ole Miss as the first black man ever to attend the school. What Bert didn t know was that there were several thousand Klu-Klux-Klanners and White Extremist in route from as far away as California, along with local and state police, and a mob of armed citizens converging on Oxford to see that James Meredith didn t get that chance. Ross Barnett, Governor of Mississippi, and a White Extremist himself, vehemently opposed desegregation and only a few weeks before the incident in Oxford had said that Mississippi had the largest percent of black Americans because they love our way of life here, and that way is segregation." Governor Barnett was determined that Meredith was not going to make a mockery of Mississippi or Mississippi State University. The majority of the white community of Oxford was outraged at the audacity of Meredith and the U.S. Government forcing desegregation on Mississippi State. We landed in the early dawn hours at a small airport just east of the campus, deplaned, and spread out in an adjoining wood line to rest and square our gear away. Then something unusual happened. The Black men in our Company began to move away from their platoons and squads and huddle together off to the side of the group. Our Company Commander saw this and decided to put a stop to it by forming up and marching us on to the campus earlier than planned. There was too much at stake to let anything divide our unit. We had trained as a team and we had to fight as a team. Each man counted on each other. There is no such thing as segregation on the battlefield every man bleeds red. We were one team and we were going to stay one team. We never had another issue like that the whole time we were there. The 327 th Infantry of the 101 st Airborne (Bert s Company) was the first to arrive. They found over 100 Federal Marshalls injured with 27 seriously wounded by civilian gunfire. Fortunately, help was on the way; President Kennedy had not only mobilized the 101 st Airborne, he had mobilized almost 30,000 troops and guardsman to contain the conflict; and they all arrived almost at the same time. The 101 st stood guard outside Meredith s window and escorted him and a contingent of Federal Marshalls everywhere he needed to go. Civilians wielding clubs attacked several soldiers and damaged or overturned several military vehicles weapons were fired at the troops. Scores of people were injured, two people were killed. We managed to contain the

4 riot without a single U.S. soldier firing a shot, said Bert. Within a few weeks things calmed down and we demobilized back to Fort Campbell. But things were not back to normal for America. A few weeks after returning to Fort Campbell, we were back on stand-by again. We were ordered to be ready to board the plane at 0300 the following morning for another combat mission we didn t know where we were going. At 0310 the next morning the plane lifted into the air with the 101 st aboard. Somewhere over the coast of Florida, we received orders to turn back. It was then that we learned what our mission would have been. We were supposed to have jumped at dawn on the coast of Cuba in support of what would become known as the Bay of Pigs Invasion. We knew that Russia had a ship headed to Cuba to support the Castro Regime and that it was believed to have nuclear weapons aboard. Kennedy had backed Russia down. At the last minute, Nakita Kruschev had ordered the ship to reverse course and head back to the U.S.S.R. Aborting the mission didn t hurt my feelings none, added Bert. Within weeks, we were in the air again headed for the Mohave Desert for another jump and desert survival training and, again, we didn t know why. A few weeks after the unit returned to Fort Campbell, orders came down for another mission; this time to Iran. We flew to Turkey and from there we boarded a cargo plane for a jump into the Iranian Desert. Our mission was to safely complete the jump, march over twenty miles of desert, traverse a steep mountain range, and link up with the Iranian Army for joint training. At the time, Iran was an ally and we were part of an exercise to show how quickly we could mobilize forces in order to aid Iran in the case of an Iraqi invasion. Desert Survival Training in the Mohave Desert, But things don t always go as planned. As we were stepping to the back of the plane for the jump, just as the tail section began to drop down, we were engulfed in sand. The plane had dropped down into a violent sand storm we were forced to abort the jump. We flew back to Turkey and the next morning, again at 0300 it seemed like every flight was always at 0300 in the morning we were in the air. And this time,

5 as we flew over our drop zone, it was a go. Now the hard part began. We marched for four days and three nights to get to our rendezvous point. Some of the men refused to descend the steep precipice on the other side of the mountains that lay in our line of march and had to be lifted out by helicopter we never saw them again. A few days later we marched into camp. It was a heck of an experience. start on Bert s next major goal in life raising a family. When Bert s enlistment was up, he and his new family moved to Lawrenceburg, Donna Kaye s hometown. He then set out to accomplish goal number four: He joined the Lawrenceburg Police Department as a patrolman. From that day forward Bert has made Lawrenceburg his home, and he has continued to face life s challenges with the same determination and courage that he showed in the face of adversity as a Screaming Eagle. And like the eagle, he s never once looked back. Unlike many of us who have lived through much of America s history in the making as a casual observer, Bert had the opportunity to do something more he was in the thick of the action. He was there. Thank you for your service Specialist Fourth Class Bert Spearman. Private First Class Bert Spearman and his bride, Donna Kaye While stationed at Fort Campbell, Bert would often travel down to Nashville, Tennessee on the weekends to see the sights. On one of those trips he met a gorgeous petite young woman named Donna Kaye Dorsey who was going to school and working in Nashville, and it wasn t long before they were married. It was time to