Inner-City Cavalry : Former Buffalo Soldier Says Boots and Saddles Would Help Keep Teen-Agers From Getting in Trouble With Drugs, Gangs

For a moment, half a century was being peeled away for the old Buffalo Soldier.

Fred Jones struggled into his riding boots, tugged at the brim of his cowboy hat and joined a column of young black cavalrymen on horse patrol along the rugged Mexican border--just like he did in 1943.

This time around, the 70-year-old Los Angeles man would end his ride by “aching for three days,” as he put it.

Saddle sores were the least of Jones’ worries when he last mounted up. Then, World War II was raging and the lean and leathery 20-year-old was one of the final members of the Army’s historic Buffalo Soldiers, the all-black cavalry troops that first came to fame by guarding the American frontier on horseback in the late 1800s.

During the early days of the war, Jones’ unit helped patrol the border east of San Diego. Eventually, the horse soldiers were sent to help with the liberation of Europe--on foot.

Now Jones was reliving his past by riding across the Arizona desert with modern-day Buffalo Soldiers. The uniformed horsemen clop-clopping behind him were black teen-agers, former juvenile delinquents living in a military-like setting designed to teach them self-discipline and a work ethic.

As Jones slapped the reins of his horse and glanced around, the scene was exactly what he had been dreaming of for more than a year: city youths saddling up to ride to new lives.

After the 1992 Los Angeles riots, Jones drafted a proposal to create a civilian version of the Buffalo Soldiers for inner-city youths.

African-American teen-agers would be recruited and taken from their Los Angeles neighborhoods to a remote “boot camp” location. There they would be taught self-reliance and self-pride--by learning horse sense.

It would be an effort to “break the cycle of incarceration of the inner-city poor, rescue a lost generation of young men and teach our children how important their contribution is to their community,” Jones wrote to local legislators and leaders.

Mothballed military bases could house the program. Soldiers who had lost their jobs because of cuts in military spending could be hired to help run it. Money being spent to send teen-age offenders to probation camps and state institutions could pay for it.

Once the teen-agers were trained to be precision equestrians and marchers, they could return to the city to appear in parades and at schools and perform other community service work. There would be no drugs or alcohol and no gang colors: The youths would all wear frontier-style cavalry uniforms.

“Give them a horse to break and the barriers will break down too,” Jones said. “I’ve seen it before.”

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Fred Jones was a Cincinnati teen-ager when World War II broke out. He likes to tell people that until then the only horse he had ever seen was the one that pulled the neighborhood milkman’s wagon.

When his friends started volunteering for military duty, Jones enlisted too. The Army was segregated back then, so he was assigned to a newly organized black regiment--in something called the Buffalo Soldiers.

The unit was sent for training to Camp Lockett in a mountain valley about 40 miles east of San Diego.

“We didn’t know where we were going,” he said. “The windows on the train on the way out were covered over, so we couldn’t see anything. When we got off we saw guys sitting on horses at the train station. I said, ‘Oh my God!’

“I’d just turned 19. I didn’t know anything about horses. I didn’t know anything about anything, actually.”

The recruits were given halters and told to walk into cattle cars and get a horse. The animals were high-spirited and half-wild: Most had never been ridden.

“We were scared to death we’d get trampled,” Jones said. “We were raw and the horses were raw. At first we rode bareback. The horses got tamer after being ridden every day. We were getting tougher, too. We were given a sense of responsibility.”

The soldiers had to feed their horses each morning before eating their breakfasts. At night, they had to clean their animals and bed them down before they turned in.

As Jones and his fellow Buffalo Soldiers rode through the chaparral and canyons along the border, on the lookout for spies sneaking in to the United States, they learned of the unusual history of the Buffalo Soldiers.

Many of the black cavalry’s first recruits in 1866 were former slaves. They patrolled the frontier from Montana to Texas, guarding settlers and protecting wagon trains.

The Buffalo Soldiers earned their name--and respect--from the Indians they sometimes fought. They were among Teddy Roosevelt’s Rough Riders in Cuba in 1898. They chased Pancho Villa into Mexico in 1916. They had the highest esprit de corps and the lowest desertion rate in the Army.

The era of the horse cavalry ended, however, before the Buffalo Soldiers could be deployed in World War II.

Jones went on to serve in Italy and the Philippines. After the war, he worked as a postman in Cincinnati. A 30-below-zero winter in 1953 sent him packing to Los Angeles, where he found a job as a janitor at MGM Studios. Later he worked as a foundry foreman and, finally, as a county sheriff’s court deputy.

“Last year’s riots didn’t surprise me,” Jones said. But he says the destruction to his neighborhood of 25 years was sickening. So is the continuing city violence.

“The boy across the street is constantly in and out of jail. And when he’s out I see him in front of his house with his hoodlum buddies talking on his portable phone,” Jones said. “A kid was killed right down the street three weeks ago--the shooting sounded like the O.K. Corral.”

In the next breath, he adds: “These kids can be saved.”

But leading the charge to bring Buffalo Soldiers to Los Angeles can be as bruising as a tenderfoot’s first horse ride--or an old-timer’s first ride in 50 years.

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Months have passed since Jones began circulating his Buffalo Soldiers proposal around town. So far he has only received one reply: Peter V. Ueberroth wrote back that it sounded like a good idea, but was not within the realm of Rebuild L.A.

One of Jones’ friends responded, however. He said the modern-day Buffalo Soldier concept sounded remarkably similar to a rehabilitation program run by a private Arizona corporation named VisionQuest.

Jones had never heard of the 20-year-old organization. But he has learned plenty about it in recent days--particularly that it is controversial.

Besides the horseback excursions, the highly structured program sends court-placed juvenile offenders on wagon train caravans and voyages on “tall ship” sailboats on the East Coast.

But a dozen youngsters have died on various outings over the years. And officials say placement of youngsters is expensive--about $45,625 a year per child--contrasted with the $28,000 cost of juvenile camps run by the state and $41,000 for Los Angeles County placements.

VisionQuest co-founder Bob Burton said he supports Jones’ proposal for a Buffalo Soldiers program closer to Los Angeles--even if run by a group other than his own. “Most inner-city kids feel disenfranchised. When they start hearing of their history they start feeling like they have roots and are part of the fabric of America.”

But even if Jones’ suggestion might seem risky to authorities, one “old soldier” at least got a chance to show that he had not lost his will to get in the saddle.

Jones’ interest in re-creating the Buffalo Soldiers prompted Burton to invite him this month to ride with the young troopers at their encampment near Naco, Ariz.

He had not been on a horse since his war years. But he quickly fell into step. He returned home stiff and sore--and feeling stronger than ever, he said, that Los Angeles must try something innovative to save its inner-city children.

It is time, Jones said, to call in the cavalry.