IN THE ARMY NOW! WHO...ME?

Happy Hump Day! Wednesday not particularly notable to me, as I rarely worked a standard work week. That is, until the Army. Once past the dreaded basic training, I was stationed at Ft. Myer in Arlington. VA. That's was the first time I realized some people actually get two days off in a row.

All you persons in the military, I send my praise and thanks to you. I know you are humping it on this Hump Day.

Yep. I got this letter in 1972, from Uncle Sam. It started out with the word "Greetings" and went down hill from there. I was the last group drafted into the armed services, and I went. Reluctantly, but I went.

It was just I didn't much want to get my a$$ shot off in Vietnam. Ironically, the closest I came to an injury during my time in the service was when they announced they were taking only volunteers to Vietnam. I nearly hurt myself stepping backward.

Aw well, basic training, where they tear you down to build you up. One of the tearin' down things was kitchen duty...you older vets knew this as KP...worse, they had something called "Stand by KD". That was seventeen hours of grueling, greasy, nasty work that you didn't even know you were going to have to do. Here's how it worked. Primarily on weekends, they would assign some of us as standbys.  Now, if you had an off post pass, you could still go off post. If your bunk was empty...well...they'd just go on to the next one. This search for victims usually took place around 3 am. Weird thing was...regular kitchen duty ran about ten hours, but if you were caught as standby, it was seventeen hours. Go figure.

So there I was...I had an off post pass, but couldn't afford to go anywhere. I was content though, to hang around, read, maybe catch a film at the post theater. I was on standby, but they hadn't had a round up in sometime.

Saturday morning, I heard them. The barracks were divided by a long row of tall standing lockers and on the other side, I heard them. Rousting for Standbys. Panic raged through me like a sickening current of electricity. This can't be happening. What can I do?

The bunk above me, we'll call it Charley's, was empty, he was off post and not on standby. With little regard for country or honor, I jumped out of bed, made it up so tight you could bounce a coin off of it, and leaped up into Charley's bunk. All, I might add, in the length of time it took them to make the other bay and come around the corner to mine.

There I was, in the bunk above mine, covers pulled up over my head, not daring to even breath. They stopped at my bunk. "Well, he's gone," I heard one say, then the sound of paper rustling on a clipboard. The sound of footfalls echoed down the bay away from me. Near its end, they got one. Poor sap!

Now, you may think me a shirker, but I did everything I was ordered to do while in the service. The job I was doing was even offered to me as a civilian as my discharged loomed. Had I been called to go wade across rice patty fields, dodging punji sticks, mines, and sniper's bullets, I would have done it. I was raised that way. I wasn't raised to be the dummy caught in the sack and doing seventeen hours of crud on my day off. But that's just me.