The Hero

What a crappy couple of weeks. A motorpool was a dicey place almost by definition, but add the word Army in front and it became downright scary. It wasn't that the vehicles came back shot up; this was Biloxi for christsake. Okay maybe they did come back shot up once in a while, but that was just dumb yahoos feeling their soldierly oats. The point is that the vehicles were always in bad shape. We never had enough parts, let alone the right kind. The only stuff we had in abundance were creative mechanics, baling wire, and some wonderfully sticky tape.

We needed that stuff too. Two weeks ago for instance. The general's jeep needed a new fuel filter; the old one was so clogged the engine wouldn't start. We hadn't changed it for a couple of years cause there was never one around when it came in for service. Well the captain that towed it in said the general wanted it fixed chop chop. I told him there wasn't a filter available and you want to know what that SOB did? He walks over to the shelf I've got all my filters on and grabs one off and tosses it to me. The box label says Fuel Filter - Sherman Tank. "Uh, sir....", but he cuts me off with a glare, says "Make it work and that's an order", and stomps off to the Officer's Mess.

Funny thing about orders. The best ones usually give some leeway in how to perform a task to the guy who will actually execute the work. That said, specific orders aren't necessarily bad and dumb orders by themselves aren't necessarily bad; specific AND dumb orders though... Well, you know its bound to go wrong.

To make a long story short the tank filter was a damn site too big so I had to take a cutting torch to the jeep hood. Some baling wire and a couple rolls of that sticky tape made the thing stay in place, but boy it leaked like a sieve. It looked kind of funny with four inches of fuel filter coming out of a hole in the hood, but all in all it seemed to fit.

The captain came back after a couple of hours and I thought he was gonna have a heart attack while looking at the hood. Next thing you know the air raid sirens are shrieking and people start running around in a panic! The captain jumps in the jeep, starts the engine, and gets about five feet before the engine catches fire. He stands up in the seat and knocks the hinged windshield right on the filter which was made of glass and of course shatters and causes a small explosion from all the fuel in it! The captain catches more smoke than fire, but after jumping out of the jeep and rolling in the dirt he looked a serious mess.

Well, finally the air raid sirens got turned off; seems it was just a drill put on for a Movietone camera crew. Well these camera boys followed the firetrucks to the jeep and start taking shots of the captain and filming the jeep. I didn't see too much more because some MP's marched me straight to the stockade; never mind it was that damn captain's fault. Two weeks I was in there before they let me out. The capper of this shitty story was catching today's Stars And Stripes. There's a shot of that captain's dirty mug topped by the headline "BILOXI HERO FOILS NAZIS". Seems the propaganda guys were short on news with the war just about over so they wrote up this bullshit story. Now that SOB captain is scheduled to go around selling war bonds with Audie Murphy. Goddam army.