Uncle Sam and Highschool drama overlapped. In high school, a girl liked me. I liked the girl. The girl had a boyfriend. The boyfriend said he’d beat the crap out of me. Joannie was the blond. I had 5 sisters and they teased me so much I was afraid of having a girlfriend. Joannie found ways to spend time with me. I met her mom. One day I went over to her house, and she was in the middle of an argument with her mother. When her mother say me, she turned to Joannie and yelled, “No you CAN NOT stay home alone this weekend. You’re going with us. I don’t trust you.” She pointed at me. “I’d let you stay home alone with Mike. I trust HIM. He’s a true gentleman!”
That was nice of her to say but was a bit of an insult, even if true. Well the boyfriend, also named ‘Mike.’ I’ll call him Mike T., came up to me after a morning class and told me to stay away from his girlfriend. I told him we were just friends. He said he didn’t care and to meet him behind the school that afternoon.
Well, I figured he’d, at worst give me a black eye and maybe a bloody nose. I’ve had both before. You get over them. They’re not so bad and I wouldn’t run off. I was raised to understand sometimes you had to fight for something. Our family didn’t have extra money and I didn’t want to spoil the meager clothes I had. The yard where my home abutted the school property. I ran home at lunch time and changed into my oldest jeans and a flannel shirt, worn through at the elbows. I rolled up the sleeve and headed back to school. My buddies asked my why I changed. I told them I didn’t care if I got blood on them.
Friends! Sometimes they can make things better, sometimes worse. They started feeding stories to Mike T. They said I went home for my fighting clothes. They asked him if he had ever seen me with my shirt off. They told him my dad fought in the Golden Gloves boxing world when he was in high school. After class was a shocker. Mike T. apologized to me. He said it was Joannie he should be mad at. I told him he was crazy to be mad at anyone.
So now the overlap. Four years later I got drafted by the army, It was the era of the Vietnam war. Along with 400 guys I got off a bus at Fort Campbell, Kentucky. It was a U.S. Army training base. A couple drill sergeants had us line up, six or seven rows deep. I looked at the guy next to me and couldn’t believe who it was. There stood Mike T.
I said hello, but at first he didn’t recognize me. When he did, he asked me if I was worried about going to fight in the war.
I said, “There are enough things in life to worry about. I don’t have room for another. Did you and Joannie stay together? We need to catch up. Any minute I bet a Drill Seargent is going to pick on someone, just to scare us. I wonder who it’s going to be? Good thing we’re in the back…”
Mike T. stood stiff, his arms straight and at his sides. He motioned with head, kind of like a chicken pecking at something. I turned to face forward and my nose was almost touching the nose of a drill sergeant.
“What are you two sisters talking about?” he yelled, almost spitting. “Drop down and give me ten pushups!
I did what he said. I was in great shape. Ten were easy. I finished and jumped back up, trying my best to stand at attention.
“Tire you out!”
“Not really sir.”
“Don’t call me sir! Officers are ‘SIR.’ I’m a working man! I enlisted. You refer to me as Drill Sergeant!”
“No. Not tired, Drill Seargent.”
“Good. Then give me 20 more!”
I did the 20 and stood. He glared at me then moved on to yell at someone else.
“That was not good,” Mike T. said.
“I you think that guy could yell, you need to hear my dad chew me out. Now he can yell. That guy didn’t come close to my Dad. My dad didn’t like me to call him sir, either.”
So much for the overlap. When we final got our barracks, bunks and stuff (another story). We had a set routine.
Each morning we’d get up, head over to the mess hall, come back for inspection and had mail call. Most of the draftees were eighteen or nineteen. I was twenty-one. Older, in my case just meant I was more accustomed to being in trouble.
The highlight, if there was one, for each day was mail call. We all lined up in the barracks. The drill sergeant stood ten feet from us with an armful of envelopes and sometimes a package. He’d hold up an envelope at arm’s length. He’d squint and pretend the address was hard to read, He was teasing us and would finally call out a name, and fling the letter toward one of us.
On the day of this story, we stood. The drill sergeant held out an envelope. “Plink, plink, plink, sounded as something from the bundle of envelopes under his arm dropped to the tile floor. He looked down, seemed to ignore it, looked back up and called a name. He took another envelop. About five more plinks sounded. When he looked down, a shower of colored dots plinked.
“I see lots of ‘M’s’,” he said. “There better be some ‘O’s. I’ve got a mom too. He kicked some of the colorful round dots. “Nope. Don’t see any ‘O’s’.” He held up a different envelope. It looked pregnant. When he tipped it, it released the rest of it’s M&M candies. “Let’s see who’s going to clean this up. He checked the address. “Private Blumer,” he said, pointed at the floor and shrugged his shoulders. “Find at least one ‘O’ and no KP today. Otherwise. Report to me after dinner.”
