Stealing Watermelons by Fred Plocher

Author:Fred Plocher
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: North Star Press of St. Cloud
Published: 2014-08-04T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 23

October 1963, eight weeks later

Bjorn

Staff Sergeant Hamerski spoke to me like a normal human being instead of in his drill-instructor voice. “Hey, Olson, the Company Commander wants to see you in his office right now. I’m going along.” Basic training was over, and I had almost finished packing my duffle bag. Bad memories of the last eight weeks wandered through my skull.

During basic, I’d often wondered how my buddies back home would have reacted to whatever God-awful training activity we were doing at the time. Shu would do okay. Ozzie and the M.P.s would be familiar with each other quickly because of Ozzie’s temper, which would have been aimed both at other troopers and at the drill instructors. Because swearing was elevated to an art form in basic, Pope would have set a modern-day record for saying, “You know I do not like that sort of language.”

“Okay, Sarge. What’s he wanna see me for?”

“You’ll find out soon enough,” he said with a rare grin.

Sarge and I entered Lieutenant Huber’s sparse office in a temporary building, which had been thrown up during World War Two. It was still in use and had seen a lot of wear and tear. His office had a bare, unfinished wood floor and no curtains on the one small window. The interior walls consisted of a view of the two-by-fours holding the exterior siding. We each rendered a snappy salute and stood at attention. The lieutenant said, “At ease men. Have a seat.”

The lieutenant was probably about the same age as me, maybe a year or two older, and was an ROTC grad from North Dakota. His spit-shined shoes did not have the gleam of a career military guy like Hamerski’s and the creases in his uniform weren’t as sharp. Unlike some other company commanders in our battalion, he was liked and respected by the men under him and openly depended on Sergeant Hamerski to help him wade through Army protocol and endless paper work. The sergeant had told me he had suffered through assisting other officers who didn’t want to admit they needed help from a non-com.

“Private, I suppose you’re glad basic is over, eh?” Huber said.

“Sir, don’t know how to answer that. Either a yes or a no might not sound like the right answer.”

“Okay, I’ll withdraw the question. Let’s get to the reason for this meeting.” He tapped his finger on a file folder. “This file, which you will take to your next post, contains a Letter of Commendation. In this training cycle, the battalion had fifty-three squads in nine companies. As the squad leader of eleven seemingly difficult personalities, you led them to be the best squad in the entire battalion.”

Sarge said, “Private, I picked you as a squad leader based on your qualifi­ca­tion tests. For once, the army got the testing right. Your squad would have followed you over a cliff.”

“Well, that’d be one way to get an early discharge,” I said.

The lieutenant chuckled. “Of fourteen measurable training activities, out

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