He was talking about years ago. They used to have Basic here at Gordon until the early 70's. He's already been busted. He said he was on Hamburger Hill, which was in '69. Now he's saying he was in basic at Bragg, in '70. Also, the troops at Hamburger Hill were the 101st. Only unit of that size at Bragg is the 82d and 18th airborne corps. If I'm wrong, Doc will correct me. I know a few brigades are there, like the 44th Med. 35th Sig used to be there, but it's at Gordon now.
BFD, I was stationed at Gordon in the 90s, it was a TRADOC base then as now, and as it had been for a long time, with IET and the Signal officer and enlisted MOS-producing schools as its main function.
The timing of his tale is hosed, but apparently from some madining it appears the Army did in fact run BCT at Bragg in 1970, I found a memorial page to a guy killed in Viet Nam that had his 1970 BCT platoon picture on it, with 'USATC Bragg' on a banner crossed with the platoon guidon.
Aside from the possibility of him taking basic there and then moving on to AIT and the 101, The idea that someone could've been trained at Bragg and assigned to the 82nd or XVIII Corps and then ended up in the 101 in Viet Nam isn't odd at all. At that time replacements would've been levied from undeployed units Army-wide, not pulled forward from the rear of a rotational unit in theater as has been the practice in GWOT (Due to having rotational units in theater replace
en masse for GWOT, instead of enduring ones that drew constant replacements for casualties through an in-theater AG replacement det as in all the pre-GWOT wars). So it's not that you're wrong about what was stationed where, it's that it doesn't mean anything one way or the other.
And rigger school is at Ft. Lee, airborne at Benning, however back in the VN days there was supposedly a shoestring airborne school operation at Fort Bragg (Or some kind of drug deal based at Bragg anyway) as well, mainly used to qualify new SF assignees with 5 jumps and the required technical training. Apparently, as I was surprised to learn from reading about a particular colorful SF figure a couple of years ago, officer SF assignments at the peak expansion demand period of Viet Nam were not all volunteers, I guess it would've been awkward to involuntarily assign someone and have him FUBAR the Benning course.
