Atlanta Fort Quietly Hums with Power H by Celestine Sibley The Atlanta Journal, August 30, 1990 “There lies a giant sleeping,” he said. And, following his gaze, I almost agreed. The post, baking under the noonday sun that glittered on the vast, stadium-size expanses of parked automobiles, gave the impression that nothing was stirring there except the flags at the post gate. But I had to tell the gentleman he was wrong. I had just paid my first trip to Fort Mac in years and had come away a bit shaken at the absence of marching men, the sight of great khaki vehicles rolling by (the few I saw weren’t khaki but sand-colored - to blend in on a desert) and even tents. It certainly wasn’t the Fort Mac I remembered from the World War II years, when it seemed to us in Atlanta the urgent heartbeat of the biggest war we’d ever know. In the 1940s, Fort Mac vibrated with activity. Recruits and volunteers poured in from all parts of the country to be put through physical exams, the first visit to a doctor for some of the country boys. They formed long lines outside wooden barracks, shivering in the chill winter weather waiting for khaki uniforms that would replace their civilian clothes. The stuff they were getting was labeled “General Issue” - and it wasn’t long until the appellation became “GI” and applied, as it does today, to the wearers of that khaki. They bade goodbye to coveys of relatives who hovered around the edges of the post. Then they entered the long wooden buildings, which, looking back, resembled chicken houses, for a three-day stay before they were shipped off for basic training. A big hospital, long caretaker of military personnel, was preparing doctors to go overseas. And a handful of strange and wonderful figures appeared on Fort Mac’s historic parade ground - women soldiers, in uniform yet! We reporters and photographers were goggle-eyed and gleeful, a brand-new touch to the old business of fighting! We interviewed and photographed WACs endlessly. And I even inquired if I could join up. Not with little children, they said then - an edict no longer in effect. It certainly isn’t the Fort Mac of that long-ago war, nor even those others it saw, even if I didn’t - Civil, Spanish-American, World War I. But it is neither a giant nor asleep. Physically, Fort Mac is a midget compared with Fort Benning and Fort Stewart. And if anybody thinks it’s asleep they should talk to some of the wives who live in that pretty lineup of beautiful historic mansions facing the parade ground. “Lights burn over there all night,” one wife told me, nodding toward a vast monolith of a building which, if a building has guts, is Fort Mac’s. “They work around the clock.” And a good thing, I found out, because that building houses the headquarters of Forces Command (called FORSCOM), from which our participation in the unpleasantness in the Middle East is planned, prepared for and executed. Fort Mac, named for Gen. James Birdseye McPherson, a handsome, 34-year-old Yankee who was killed near Moreland Avenue during the Battle of Atlanta, is no stranger to change. It was first a wooden building housing Union soldiers in a cow pasture. In World War I it was chiefly a city of tents, where soldiers fought mud and the foibles of little heaters called Sibley stoves. (No kin of mine.) The Spanish-American War sent its wounded and fever-ridden men to the big Army hospital which operated at Fort Mac until recent years. (It now has only a clinic.) McPherson - pronounced “McFurson” by locals and “McFearson” by newcomers - trained Civilian Conservation Corps officers during the Depression. It played host to President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1935, firing off its first presidential salute of 21 guns. It kept loosely, they say, because the subjects had no desire to escape - German prisoners from a cargo ship in the Atlantic during World War I, assigning them to build a boiler house that stands today as the post Officers Club. The cosmopolitan social whirl of the military generously embraced Atlantans, many of whom learned about polo from their cavalrytrained hosts. There was no way the man on the MARTA train could know. But beyond the vast parking areas and the quiet, seemingly leisurely comings and goings of a few hundred men and women, who swapped their regular uniforms for giddily patterned fatigues three weeks ago, there is a giant of a kind. It is authority, authority unlimited over land forces throughout the country. And it doesn’t sleep.
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