Grade 8: Army Basic Training
Grade Level: 8
Subject Areas Addressed: History
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Army Basic Training
A Big Deal in South Carolina
Columbia is an Army town. And one has but to spend a few hours in the Capital city on an overcast day with a low cloud ceiling listening to the distant, rather charming staccato of automatic-weapons firing and muffled “whoomps” of mortars and grenades emanating from nearby Fort Jackson to know we are an Army town.
I personally love the sound— a faint unobtrusive trumpeting of our Army on the job. I’ve heard it all my life, as have generations of Columbians before me going back to the summer of 1917.
In the spring of that year, as war raged in Europe, the U.S. Army announced that Columbia would be the site of one of 16 training camps nationwide. America had just declared war on the German empire. And military planners were playing catch-up in the readying of American troops for overseas service.
Less than two years earlier, the U.S. Marine Corps had established a permanent East Coast recruit depot on Parris Island, near Beaufort.
But the nation needed more land for training huge numbers of men, preferably in a temperate climate like South Carolina where the training for large-scale land campaigns would not adversely affect the surrounding civilian populations. The piney woods of the state’s interior— specifically large tracts of the vast estate of the late governor Wade Hampton— were deemed perfect.
Fort Jackson was initially christened the 6th National Army Cantonment in the summer of 1917, but was quickly renamed Camp Jackson in honor of Andrew Jackson, the hero of the Battle of New Orleans and seventh President of the United States. And why not? Jackson was, after all, born in the Upstate.
Today Fort Jackson is the largest U.S. Army basic training facility in the nation. Fifty percent of all American soldiers serving worldwide are trained here. And according to Fort Jackson Public Affairs Officer Karen Soule, this 52,000-acre Army installation is always training an average of 9,500 recruits on any given day.
Those recruit numbers do not include 3,500 active-duty military personnel who are permanently stationed on Fort Jackson, some 14,000 Army family members and another 3,500 civilian employees plus contractors. The fort also provides services for more than 36,000 military retirees and their families.
Among the 3,500 permanently stationed soldiers are approximately 800 drill sergeants, 98 percent of whom have recent combat experience.
“That’s very significant for us,” says Soule. “We’re an Army at war, and the training our soldiers receive is based on real-world experience. It’s topnotch.”
It is also why Army basic training has increased from nine to 10 weeks. According to Soule, the more time a new soldier has with a combat-experienced drill sergeant, the better.
Good land and lots of it, pleasant weather and experienced-based training are great, to be sure. But the overall success of Fort Jackson is— and always has been— largely attributed to its years of warm relations with Columbia. Fort Jackson loves its Columbia neighbors. And Columbia loves its fort, which has an economic impact of $5.6 billion on the Midlands. It is a somewhat unique, decades-old relationship that was as much a part of the fort’s founding back in 1916–1917 as was the War Department’s choosing of Columbia as the site for a military cantonment.
“Fort Jackson and its community relationship goes back to the early part of the last century when the business community and the local governments raised money and purchased a portion of the Hampton estate and deeded it to the War Department— today known as the Defense Department— with the hope that the Army would locate a military installation here,” says Ike McLeese, president and CEO of the Greater Columbia Chamber of Commerce. “This community is often referred to as the most military friendly community in the United States and that has played a large role in the Defense Department keeping Fort Jackson here.”
Keeping Fort Jackson here indeed: as McLeese said in a recent interview, despite Fort Jackson’s near-century of success, “Everything is on the table when it comes to Base Realignment and Closure [BRAC].” Washington can and will close bases regardless of stellar history. We’ve lost great bases before to BRAC.
So how do we make sure we keep Army basic training a big deal here? Lots of land, great weather and money back in the state’s coffers are certainly pluses; always have been. But we must never forget that the relationship between the fort and the city is what made and will keep— Columbia an Army town.
