Anybody who has been in the military as I have can tell you many stories about their experiences. I was in the Army during the Vietnam era for three years, but was stationed on a missile base in the United States. My Army battalion had joined forces with the Air Force at the time and although we were on an Army base and there was no Air Force personnel in sight we did eat Air Force food. I can tell you six days a week we had excellent food and all we wanted to eat. When the cook used to make steakes he used to ask us anyone wanted seconds. It was that seventh day that was a killer, because on the seventh day you had C rations. I remember many people running to the civilian cafeteria to get their dinner. Enlisted men didn’t have to pay to eat, officers did and there was always some officer trying to walk past the person collecting the money which was an enlisted man. One day the unthinkable happened. The military decided to experiment on us with a new type of food, it was a dehydrated pork chops. If any of you are familiar with balsa wood, this is what these things looked like. They were roundish and about two and a half inches in diameter and you had to soak them in water overnight to reconstitute them and they were terrible. Someone on the base had gotten a hold of some of these before they were soaked in water and nailed him to the mess hall door. We thought we would surely get in trouble for this, but instead we never had dehydrated pork chops again. Apparently the officers didn’t like them either.

Originally I was assigned to the motor pool as a punishment. I had been assigned to intelligence which was known as S4, but I had dared to ask the commanding officer for time off to get married and was told he wouldn’t deny it, but if I insisted on doing it he would adding me to the motor pool is a punishment. I certainly wasn’t going to let him back me down, so I told him I would take the punishment. Little did I know at the time the best place you could work was in the motor pool. A warrant officer was originally in charge, but he had been reassigned. I didn’t know what he was doing at the time, but I saw him load up a truck with tires. These were brand-new tires. I realized later on he was stealing them and selling them to automotive dealers in the town. As time went by I got promoted to specialist E4 which was about the equivalent of a corporal. In the motor pool we had a list of trucks and cars called the deadline list. For some reason they were never fixed and there was over thirteen on the list. Since the highest ranking people in the motor pool at the time were both E4’s which included me, I decided to bring all the mechanics together and myself and fix these vehicles. We fixed all of them except for one tactical vehicle that needed special parts which we didn’t have. I gave it no thought after that but to my surprise about two months later I was promoted to E5. I didn’t know the company commander had the same list in his office and when he saw these vehicles were all fixed he promoted me. I never expected this to happen.

As anybody who has served in the Armed Forces knows, the military loves inspections. One time when the company commander was on vacation and another Captain took his place he decided to call for an inspection and when I tell you the quarters were spotless it is the truth. The replacement Captain saw this and had a Sergeant take out a pocket knife and go to the staircase and dig between the steps with the blade and stated “look at this filth” and said you were all restricted to base for the weekend. It just so happens this was the same officer who sent me to the motor pool for punishment. We in the motor pool were very lucky as inspections go. When you work in the motor pool your clothes get holes in them from battery acid and sometimes stains which never come out. One day when the motor pool platoon was told to fall out for inspection I stood at the head of my men while the First Sergeant looked us over and our company commander watched. Then I was called into the company commander’s office and the Sergeant said never fall out for another inspection instead go hide somewhere. From that day on to the day I got out of the Army I never had another inspection. This didn’t mean we didn’t have to help prepare for inspections. An example of this was the time the motor pool platoon was assigned to clean the bathrooms. The bathrooms were very large and I brought the platoon into one and started assigning the duties to each individual person. When I got to one soldier he didn’t like the duty I assigned him and punched me in the eye. I fell to the ground and couldn’t get up and yet I knew it wasn’t because of the punch. I was taken to the hospital where they found out I had been weakened by mononucleosis. In those days the army’s idea of treatment for this disease was to give you incredible amounts of protein. As I lay in the bed in the hospital, platters of meat were brought in. No one in the world could have eaten all of this food. I counted twelve chops on one platter. Eventually I got out of the hospital determined to find the guy who punched me and get even, but I never saw him again and I don’t know what happened to him. I can only assume he might have been court-martialed.

I was always looking to make extra money on the side and on the base our job was more or less 8 to 5. The reason I needed extra money was I lived on base with my wife and we could barely make it on the small salary we were receiving. People would pay me to take all sorts of extra duty and I continued to do this even when I made E5 which angered the First Sergeant when he saw me on KP duty. KP stands for kitchen patrol and it was just something people at the rank of Sergeant never did. I got chewed out that day and told if I liked KP duty so much he would gladly make me a private again. Needless to say I did no more KP duty. Instead I would take other people’s Duty Driver assignments. This was an assignment Sergeants also got after hours. It meant driving from base to base delivering orders and other things. I remember going on to one base and going to the war room and it looked just like something out of the movies with large screens and electronic maps all over the walls. I guess this was so they could track the missiles if they ever had a fire them.

I only had a few months to go when a warrant officer was assigned to the motor pool and put in charge. He was another one of these people who no one liked. He was ill mannered, threatening and just all-around awful. He always insisted I drive him everywhere and then would complain about the way I drove. One day he had me take him to a mall in the town and I drove into the parking lot and a woman was parking her car in one spot over and this guy got out of the back, went over to the woman got on his knees and to her horror looked up her dress. At that point I grabbed him, opened the car door and throw him in the car and drove back to the base with him threatening to kill me all the way back. The last day on the base when I was mustering out with another soldier we decided to get even with him. There was a huge soldier who was a master sergeant and as we stood outside of his window we talked to each other about how mean the motor officer was and said we couldn’t understand why he was saying such terrible things about the Sergeant, because everybody like him. We went around the other side of his building and watched. The huge Sergeant came running out and ran across the street to the motor pool, grabbed the warrant officer with one hand lifting him off the ground and banging him off the wall repeatedly while the warrant officer was screaming he didn’t know what the Sergeant was talking about. At that point we left. Our work was done.