John Schmidt
Member
Posts: 15224
a/k/a Stuffy. '99 I/S Valk Roadsmith Trike
De Pere, WI (Green Bay)
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« Reply #1 on: January 21, 2010, 09:09:03 PM » |
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Worked harder in a Boy Scout bivouac actually. Kinda glad for that though, but it was a result of applying my gray matter when taking the battery of tests the first week. I was determined to do the best I could because I didn't want some deadbeat assignment. A lot of guys got tired of the testing and just buzzed through a lot of them just to get through. I scored high enough so I had my choice of anything the Air Force offered except those requiring either a medical degree or officer status...I had neither. I, along with two other guys, ended up doing some special work for some young babe working on a doctoral research project. She was a trip, in the mid-50's she was a forerunner of the "flower child" of the 60's.
We did have to pull barracks guard duty however, and our head DI was a little guy that came in drunk on his butt most nights. My turn came on a Sunday night and he wanted to be awakened at 5:00am, two hours after he got in. I knocked on his door and got a little grunt, waited a couple minutes and opened the door and spoke to him loud enough to get a stir...nothing more. I went out and waited five minutes then went back in, he's still out and snoring like a banshee. I picked up the foot of his old steel cot(remember those comfy racks?), lifted it up to my shoulders like lifting a barbell, then dropped it with a crash. I yelled "it's 5:20am, sir" then dashed out the door. He staggered down the stairs to the latrine, I heard the shower running a long time and he was asleep on the floor. Some of the other troops were already up and didn't dare go in there, I just turned off the hot water and stood back. Within 12 minutes flat, he was dried off, shaved, dressed, and out the door. The last day of basic, he came to me in person and thanked me, but from that night forward he never came in drunk again.
Later in Denver where I was to go through tech school, I was approached by some people in civies...myself and three others in my outfit that scored rather high on testing. Over the next couple months, we were put through some rather rigorous training....we were told it was to fill our time until the next scheduled school started for our chosen field. I became a bit curious why none of the others in our outfit were involved, many were going to the same school, but they were mum on the subject so I went to the CO about it. They finally gave us a clue....it involved foreign service of some kind. My reaction....NO THANKS. They weren't too happy with that decision but the special stuff stopped...and I ended up pulling KP four days a week for the next three weeks until school started. But, I'm still here, two of the guys that continued were dead in less than a year....one in France killed in his sleep, the other in Germany while cycling on the weekend.
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