To an Old Soldier: Charles T.

To an Old Soldier:
Charles T.


1977, I left SFC Charles T. Hightower at the 545th Ordnance Company, Munster by Dieburg, West Germany; I was on my way to Fort Rucker, Alabama, my new duty station in the Army. We worked together for, four-years: when I left he was Acting First Sergeant.

When I first met him, he walked into the Surety Room at the hidden site, nuclear site in the backwoods of Munster by Dieburg (I was the clerk for the office then), said: “I’m your new Staff Sergeant in charge of this here office,” he was a little taller than me, thin, smoothly shaved, army fatigues stretched to the tip of its seams, his boots shinned like a persons teeth just buffed clean.
I was a Corporal then, and we’d work the next 44-months together. He would insure I became the person in charge of the office, after he left and became First Sergeant. I got awarded the ACM for my services before I left because of him; he was always looking out for me. He would assist in my making Buck Sergeant, he was more like a big brother than a Staff Sergeant in charge of me, and he’d be SFC and Acting First Sergeant in less than two-years (that is, up one pay grade). We both grew back then, through and between 1974-77.
There are those special few people you learn a lot from within a short period of your life, that you carry on into other fields and your future achievements are due indirectly, if not directly, because of their teachings, and Charles T. Hightower was one of those few to me.

He died at 41-years old, one year before he could retire with twenty-years in the Service. He died in 1983, six years after I left our unit there at Munster by Dieburg, and he died off-duty, a civilian vehicle struck him, in Friedberg, Germany. Perhaps one thing we had in common was that we were both Vietnam War Veterans. But he was always a better soldier than I.


By SSG Dennis L. Siluk, US Army