American Valor Quarterly Issue 12 - Spring 2015 | Page 11

Top: 506th Infantry Association

the machine gun. We also had patrol
training, and worked on other tasks
that would serve us at some point in
our combat roles.

On a typical day, we would have
breakfast at 6 a.m. It was a meager
breakfast. That was part of the
training. We didn’t get anything fancy
to eat. After we had breakfast, we were
issued some sort of C rations or K
rations for our lunch, which we packed
for the field. There was no service in
the field, which was also part of the
training.
Bottom: myfoxatlanta.com

our camp, except the days we ran Mt.
Currahee, which was about three days
a week for the entire time we were
at Toccoa. After a while, Currahee
was not a walk in the park, but it was
less stressful than on the first day.
But the stakes were the same. We
all had to do it and if you fell out of
the group or stopped, you were out
of the 506 that night. It didn’t
matter if it was two, three, or
even four weeks into training.
At our training areas, we had
the opportunity to specialize
in rifle training, machine gun
training, and mortar training. To
be designated a rifleman, you had
to be better than expert. If you
couldn’t make expert, you were
out. Remember, we still had to
get rid of most of the 7,000 and
we were doing it pretty quickly.
I did qualify as expert after a
bit of manual training, but not
good enough to be a rifleman. I
qualified as a machine gunner.
After I became a machine gunner,
within three weeks, I became
a private first class, and had an
assistant machine gunner and
weapons bearer with me. They were
all good people, and I was just lucky
to become machine gunner. I was
good at it.

We wanted to do total weapons
training with the entire regiment.
We had already completed a lot of
weapons training in Toccoa, but the
weapons and mortar facilities there
were small. We couldn’t do the entire
regiment at one time. Col. Sink wanted
us to do total regimental weapons

And after training we came back
to camp for dinner. I don’t believe
the cooks we had were well trained,
but we survived. During the course
of the day, we also had extensive
map training, which I took to with
enthusiasm. My childhood hobby had
stayed with me and I was very good at
it, in addition to maintaining a flair for
SPRING 2015

Prior to entering the big war, we had
a mission to walk from Clemson, GA
back to Camp Toccoa as a training
mission. About two or three weeks
before we went down to Fort Benning,

THE FAMED COMMANDER OF THE
506TH, COLONEL ROBERT F. SINK.

training and the nearest place with the
facilities to hold us was a school called
Clemson College in South Carolina. At
that time, it was a military college and
we soon found out they had a huge
facility for weapons training. It was
beautiful. So we boarded trucks down
to Clemson. This was about the middle
of November. We saw these trucks in
the morning, just after we had had
our breakfast. We were told to get
all of our gear together, including
our tents and sleeping gear. We
never had trucks until then. We
walked or ran wherever we went.
We got on the trucks and the
next stop was Clemson College,
South Carolina, a roughly 49-mile
trek. After we arrived, we fired
all day on these beautiful ranges
they had. We performed weapons
training with rifles, machine guns,
mortar, and also land mines. It
was the first time we had done
land mine traini