Today there is little evidence of what once stood here. A water tower. Crumbling spreads of concrete. A ghostly guard house.
Sixty-five years ago the field spread before me was the site of a huge complex of buildings known as Camp Bennion. Once hundreds of men called this home. It was part of the Farragut Naval Training Station, named after the first Admiral of the United St
ates Navy who is famous for saying, “Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead!” Admiral David G. Farragut started his navy career at the age of nine, and the remaining sixty years of his life were dedicated fully to the Navy.The training center was built in northern Idaho on the shores of Lake Pend O’reille (Pend-or-RAY) in 1942. One of the men who came to Camp Bennion in September, 1943, was my brother, Ronald Albert Parsons.
Where he entered Farragut as a recruit not quite eighteen years of age, my wife and I entered the park and its visitor center. Here I found a book which listed all the men who trained here. My brother’s name was among them.
The Navy built the 700 or so buildings that once stood here out of wood, and when the Navy abandoned the site after World War II, and the land sat idle for nearly three decades, the buildings rotted and fell back into the soil from which the trees that had been cut to provide building materials once grew. Trees are growing here again.
The only building to survive was the brig. It was not built of wood but of concrete blocks. I doubt my brother was ever confined to the brig. He said in his letters that he had a clean record in the Navy and he intended to keep it that way. Today the brig serves as a museum to the center that existed here for only four years, from 1942 to 1946.
Ron used to write about the grinder, which was a large concrete oval in the center of the ring of buildings on the outer oval of the camp. Trees, grasses, and possibly a rattlesnake or two now occupy the spot where the recruits marched nearly every day. They called it the grinder because marching on the concrete would erode the heels of a new pair of boots in a matter of days. Now the same concrete has been conquered by seeds of grass and trees and weeds, erasing nearly all trace of what once was here. I walked on the crumbling concrete that was new when my brother walked it six and a half decades earlier.
The largest building in each camp was the drill hall. The hall could hold six side-by-side basketball courts, a boxing ring, an Olympic-size swimming pool, an area with a portable altar used for religious services, and an area where 2,000 men could watch a movie at the same time. Since each camp had a drill hall, there were six of these huge buildings at Farragut.
These buildings were constructed with an open truss design that allowed the roof to be supported without columns to interfere with movements on the floor of the building. This allowed the recruits to march and train indoors when the Idaho cold and snow had taken control outside.
Occasionally Ron was called on to help put out a fire in the camp. In the center of the square building that is the brig and museum stands a bright red fire engine marked with the initials “USN.” Perhaps Ron was part of the crew on a vehicle like it. There is also a green truck from the forties parked there. Trucks were used to carry the new recruits from the train station to the camp as well as to carry supplies.
In a room in the former brig, a wall shows a map of the station as it appeared in the forties when my brother was there. On a bench in front of the map are clipboards from the various camps that were there - Scott, Waldron, Peterson, Ward, Hill, and my brother’s camp, Bennion, each named for a heroic officer of the Navy. The clipboard was for veterans returning to visit the site to sign in. I signed for my brother, writing the word “deceased” next to his name.
To the north lies the small town of Bayview, situated on an inlet of Lake Pend O’reille. During the four years the training station stood just south of the town, the streets were often filled with officers and sailors enjoying a break from their duties. Today fishermen and boaters are the main visitors. We did see a family of geese swimming in the water near the floating buildings that service water craft.
In 2006, men who trained at Farragut returned to dedicate a monument to the nearly 300,000 men who trained here from 1942 to 1946. Facing the museum, a representation of the men who served bears the images of the variety of races and creeds who fought for America’s freedom during the war. They were all Americans. They were all fighting as one man. They were all trained to bring the war to a quick and successful end.
Ron arrived in 1943 at FarragutTraining Station a few days before his eighteenth birthday to prepare for service in a dangerous war. I arrived about a month after my sixty-seventh birthday at Farragut State Park to trace my brother’s route from boyhood to manhood. Much has changed in the sixty-five years that separate our two arrivals, but one thing remains the same.
Men still need to train in the ongoing defense of freedom. War is still very much an inevitable part of life on this sin-cursed earth.
Thank you, Ron, and others like you who faced danger and death to keep us free from tyrants and foes. Though you and the station where you trained are gone, neither of you is forgotten.
Photos: The entrance gate to Camp Bennion today. In the Farragut Naval Training Station museum at Farragut State Park in northern Idaho.
Ron's story is told in my book, Windsor's Child.
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