The 367th Ordinance’s replaced a unit at Fort Bragg that was deployed to Berlin for the Crisis, in late October 1961, when Russian and American tank cannons faced each other in Berlin and leaders swapped threatening words over control of the city.

While the unit was never deployed overseas, it was an experience they won’t ever forget, members of the unit said 50 years later.

Both Dearing and Shupe remember being sent on special missions — “war games,” Dearing called them.

Their role was to help train the 82nd Airborne Division for what they later learned would be a war in the jungles of Vietnam.

“They were trying to capture us was the whole point,” Deraing said.

“We would be the enemy,” Shupe clarified.

Dearing remembered a group from their unit was shipped to West Virginia, where he supposed the landscaped mirrored the terrain in Vietnam.

One night he and his partner from Hattiesburg grew so hungry while trying to escape the 82nd Airborne that they chased a raccoon unsuccessfully for a bite to eat.

Another night, Dearing said, he and his partner crawled in a hayloft inside a barn for a night’s rest. They discovered when they woke the barn was a home base for the 82nd Airborne. So they snuck into adjacent house, where the gracious family — privy to the war games — let them hide upstairs, inside.

Eventually a bus driver who recognized them when they fled to Morgantown, W.Va., at the University of West Virginia let them know an all-point bulletin was posted regarding their whereabouts.

“They were really worried about us,” Dearing said. “They were afraid we’d drowned in the river.”

But life at Fort Bragg wasn’t all adventures.

“I had to be in the office, and we didn’t have a daggone thing to do,” said Andy Pressgrove, who was first lieutenant during their time at Fort Bragg.

Waycaster said he first picked up golf at Fort Bragg.

Pressgrove did recall getting to know some of the Special Forces on the base that Dearing and Shupe eluded in West Virginia. Those men would be some of the first in Vietnam.