Dennis Rogers recalls his Army boot camp days in a new book ‘Spit Shine’

Dennis Rogers is still famous. Waitresses come up and give him a kiss. People roll up beside him in parking lots and shout, “We miss you!” if he’s out with his wife, HollyAnn.

After all, in his newspaper days, Rogers was about as close to being a rock star as a boy raised poor in Wilson — moved from one relative to another (his grandmother was his most devoted “parent”) and forced to trudge up many a steep, hilly challenge — could be. He was the columnist for The News & Observer for more than 30 years, a good bit of that time writing five pieces a week from 50 counties.

By 2007, 32 years after his first piece, he’d had enough. When the Gulf War had come along, Rogers focused his columns on military families. Some writers “embedded” with soldiers; Rogers embedded with the ones they left behind. But it got to him, wore him down. He went to more than 50 funerals. He retired a little early and hit the road in an RV with HollyAnn. Friends back home predicted they’d be back soon, that a homebody like Dennis wouldn’t like that kind of traveling one bit. Wrong. Three RVs and some years later, they came back so HollyAnn, who supervises grants development at Wake Technical Community College, could move on with her career.

People talked to him about a memoir. He wrote something, he says, over breakfast at the Gateway in Raleigh (his favorite place since the 1980s), but he didn’t like it and he put it on the shelf. “It was,” he says, “one of those things where people would have said ‘I don’t believe I’d a told that’.”

But now he has the book he always had with him. “I didn’t write it to sell it,” he says. “It’s something I wanted to say.” What he wanted to say he says in “Spit Shine,” the memoir of his eight weeks of basic training at Fort Jackson, South Carolina. It’s a story of a 19-year-old kid becoming a grown man.

And it is for sale, by the way, through Amazon.

Of his entry into the Army he says, “I had traveled from North Carolina to Virginia in my whole life. That’s all. My life had run into a dead end. I had flunked out of college. I had lost my job. I was at a dead end. I had no prospects.”

It was 1962, and signing on with the Army (he remembers climbing the steps to the recruiting office and winding up with the Army because the Marine and Navy recruiters were out to lunch) was his way to try to reverse the downward spiral. He’d stay in for a little less than nine years. When he signed up, Vietnam was unknown to him, though he’d eventually wind up there. But this book, “Spit Shine,” isn’t about Vietnam. It’s confined to that eight weeks in 1962. And how it changed Dennis Rogers forever.

“I had never slept in a building with a black man,” he says. “I’d never eaten a meal with a black man. I was a poor white boy from Wilson, that’s all. This is about coming of age, about how it affected me.” The title comes from the Army’s demand for shiny boots (Rogers’ boots from the day are the cover photo for his book) and how Rogers was taught to spit shine by a fellow member of the Platoon, Mike Reardon. Writes Rogers: “It can take an hour to get a decent spit shine on a pair of boots. The bad news is, such shines are highly vulnerable to scuffs. The good news is, once you’ve worked on them for an hour or so for several nights running, you’ve got a base that can be brought to an inspection-quality shine in mere minutes.”

Rogers writes of the lessons learned in pulling together to get a comrade with a strained ankle down a hill, of looking out for each other on and off the base, of the humor and heartbreak fellows experience in going through basic training. At one point, he thought perhaps he’d found his way, that he’d stay in.

And he thought later, after leaving the Army and having a family, of going back in. Things got tough while he was a student at UNC-Chapel Hill and then a dean came up with $1,000 grant that kept him there.

Now he is 77, still blessed with his great storytelling ability and good humor, grateful for the good fortune (hard work, mostly) that brought him from that poor, tough beginning to what one former colleague used to kid him was being “the star in the East.” But in the end, after basic training, after the big career, all that matters is HollyAnn and home. And that’s just fine

This story was originally published March 11, 2020 at 10:27 AM.