Now See This!

A camera took aim at the rifle's innards and then switched back to a crew-cut sergeant in fatigues who breezily demonstrated how to strip the weapon.

A hundred recruits in an airy classroom at Fort Ord, Calif., sat clustered around six 23-in. television sets, intently jotting down notes. "Nobody sleeps through these classes," marveled Army

Sergeant First Class James L. Peters--with a hard-boiled twinge of nostalgia for the times when he bellowed at day dreaming rookies.

Today's trainees, virtually reared on the tube, are hooked on the Army's version of Ding-Dong School. Unwittingly, they are participants in one of the few radical advances in teaching the arts of war made since the days when Julius Caesar's centurions were bawling out greenhorns as they learned the goose-stepping passus Romanus. Replacing hoary drill instructors are cool specialists; no longer mechanical spiels learned by rote and replete with undigested, ill-pronounced jargon, lessons are couched in the G.I.s' everyday language; small items of equipment once invisible to troopers at the back of the class can now be magnified on TV screens.

Salute to the Tube. To learn how to avoid Viet Cong booby traps and needle-pointed poisoned bamboo punji stakes, infantrymen will be shown eight hours of video tapes on Viet Nam. In a lesson on military courtesv, recruits watch a televised salute and then salute the screen while they are checked by their own sergeant. Altogether, the Army has assembled more than 2,000 TV tapes on such wide-ranging subjects as how to bandage wounds, drive correctly and repair radios. Unlike old training films, which cost three times the $500 budgeted to crank out a minute of televised teaching, video tapes can easily be kept up to date by shoot ing and splicing in a new footage.

Teaching recruits a multitude of martial skills through TV gets into high gear this year, following a two-year study by the Army, which first began experimenting with the tube in 1952. In coming months, Fort Ord will expand its closed-circuit television network so that 30 of a rookie's 60 hours of classroom work during basic training are likely to consist of televised instruction By mid-1968, eleven basic-training installations will muster a total of 60 TV-training channels.

Soldiers trained by TV learn their lessons more thoroughly; scores at Fort Ord have jumped by as much as 20% since video tapes were first used to teach the military code of conduct. "It's more relaxing because the man's not watching you," said Recruit Dwight

Shaw, 19. "You forget about yourself and you pay attention." Even so, the brass is still making sure that rookies do not turn into armchair warriors. "They will walk a total of 200 miles and fire the rifle 784 times," declares Major General Thomas A. Kenan, Fort Ord's commander. "Basic trainees will always have to do some things the hard way."

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