COME IN OUT OF THE RAIN, YOU IDIOT!

In military basic training, you spend an awful lot of time in class, which is usually a tent or wooden building out somewhere in the boondocks where you gotta march to in the hot Southern Texas sun.

These classes are designed to make sure the dumbest person in the class "gets it." So the classes are boring - stuff you already knew taught by people who never knew, over and over until you fall asleep sitting up with your eyes open.

One day, I swear to God (although I shouldn't), We all saw this HUGE rabbit off in the distance. I had often heard of Texas rabbits, but I thought that was just the "Big Texan" myth. It's no myth about the rabbits. Looked as big as a German Shepard. Everybody went, "Looka the rabbit! Looka the rabbit!"

One day four of us were told to report to somewhere, I forget just how it came about, but all four of us had gotten a perfect score on our entry tests and they were recruiting for military people to work on IBM machines and one guy they wanted for Intelligence school - to learn Russian.

It so happened that every one of us had enlisted for only one year and they insisted if we wanted to join them, we would have to extend our enlistments to three years. None of us did. I think we were the only four out of forty 'cruits that were offered these "plum positions." The smartest guys enlisted for the shortest time. How poetic is that?

The recruiter told me my commanding officer would be a Colonel and so nobody would mess with me. Even as dumb as I was, I knew that just because he was a colonel, that didn't mean HE wouldn't mess with me.

I found out years laterthat Colonels were insane - at least the ones in SAC were.

One of them gave us NCO's a lecture and told us to watch the lower grades because if they were prone to littering, the next thing you know they'd be burning down the barracks. I'd hate to be him, having to rely on people like us to keep his bombers flying. Might have to put an armed guard on each of us.

The biggest drawback to turning down the offer was that it turned out that I served twenty-one years anyhow, so two more tacked on to what I was already in for would have been nothing. Besides, I was eighteen years old. What's the hurry getting out at that age? Huh? And I could have had an "in" with the IBM people way back in 1949. Maybe later I could have gone to work for them, got into their stock options program and today I could be sitting in my sauna while I have my secretary type this that I am typing. I coulda been a tycoon. I woulda looked good.

I was always scared of inspections. I was always sure that I had done something wrong. Years later, when I had four stripes, I was standing inspection and the Major looked me over, passed on, the First Sergeant looked me over and passed on, then the Tech Sergeant, the one that writes down demerits the Major tells him to, looked me over and whispered, "You stripes are falling off." I looked at my right sleeve and sure enough, my sewed-on stripes were literally hanging by a thread.

Also, at that same base during that same time period, we were out policing up around the building where I worked and a buddy said, "Hey Reynolds. You got on brown shoes." Hah! Sure enough. I had mistakenly put on civilian shoes. The rest of the day I felt like I was in one of those dreams where you're naked in a crowd of people.

I was working on a plane one day and got to talking with my co-worker and he told me that when I first reported to work after Tech School, Master Sgt Minough took one look at me and slowly shook his head. I was wearing clean but wrinkled one-piece fatigues (boy, those were comfortable!), needed a haircut, hair not combed, black but not polished shoes. Thank heaven I shaved that day.

I went to a USO show one afternoon, just me and another guy was all the audience they had and it was a good show. I was surprised thatthey did the show, seeing as how sparse the audience was. I liked it a lot, thought it a shame more people weren't there.

One day a few of us were sent to another part of the base to pull K.P. The barracks and the mess hall were not painted white like ours - they were tar-papered. This was where the "Coloreds" were stationed when the military was segregated. You would have thought that congress, the military, somebody would realize the cost of the buildings was being paid by the people and if each citizen had to pay maybe three pennies more to get the whole base looking the same, it could have been done.

After basic I was shipped to Dennison Texas, the birthplace of Dwight D. Eisenhower, about fifty miles north of Dallas. The base was a training base for flying cadets. I was assigned to the motor pool as a mechanic.

The county where I was stationed was dry, Dallas was in a wet county, so me and another guy made a coupla bootlegging runs for the troops. It was easy to sell the stuff. We didn't do it too long, thank heavens. Getting caught would have ruined my career.

I once went to visit a friend of a friend who was in the county jail. Him and a friend had gone with their two girlfriends to the girlfriend's farm for horseback riding, took the saddles and sold them.

I didn't know anything about auto mechanics and I was to learn by O.J.T. (On the Job Training), but I never did. A friend worked on the grease rack with the buck sergeant in charge. They used to have to grease the vehicles with a hand-held grease gun - a lot of work, but they had gotten a pressure gun so the work was easy. The two of them had the grease shed fixed up so's one of them could go up by the rafters where they had a cot and could sleep or read magazines. They told me that the Master sergeant thought that they still had to work hard because of when they had the hand-held grease gun. My friend asked the buck sergeant to ask the Master sergeant if he could have another man because they were overworked and the Master Sergeant said OK, so I went to work there three. Three men for a one man job! Military.