As television minister Joel Osteen says, “I like to start off with something funny.” While watching the unfolding Trump family debacle, if you think you may have failed to do your best as a parent, consider this: Do you have individual courtroom sketches of yourself and of your children? If not, you did a good job.
Enough about Trump family dysfunction and on to mine. Even though Veterans Day has passed, still in a military state of mind, I’ve been running around in my 54-year-old army field jacket, thinking about the good old days when I worked in G-1 Officer Assignments at Eighth Army Headquarters in Seoul, Korea, where, coincidentally, I assigned incoming officers to various posts throughout South Korea. When our office received names of arriving officers on IBM cards (remember them?), we’d check out their 201 Files that contained information on their education, military performance, career goals, etc. It was our duty to choose the best assignments for them to gain the experience necessary to advance in Uncle Sam’s war machine.
Working in an office mostly manned by draftees, we very often became bored with this mundane military routine and developed a more entertaining way to assign officers, implemented when the boss was away. One of the guys would snatch the flattened cardboard box stored behind the file cabinets and spread it out on the floor. On it, drawn in grease pencil, was a large circle with a small circle in the center. The large circle was divided into pie-slice sections. Each section was labeled with a division that had openings to fill withresh, commissioned, khaki meat.
Next step, and especially critical to the success of the assignment routine, was to capture a large cockroach, fairly easy pickin’s in our building. A volunteer would grab a coffee cup, capture a big creepy-crawly, shake it up, and release it in the small circle in the center of the board. Whichever pie-shaped section the dazed bug stumbled into was where the officer on the top IBM card was assigned. This continued until all the cards were gone and every incoming officer had a duty assignment. With his services no longer required, the newly-commissioned, official G-1 cockroach was set free to perform other cockroach duties.
The last step was to send a friendly, welcome, letter to the soon-to-be-arriving officer. It was a standard form letter we rolled into our typewriters, where we’d fill in the blanks. The words were something like, “Welcome to the Land of the Morning Calm! Based on a thorough review of your records and career aspirations, you have been assigned to _.” Job done. When’s chow?
On my second-to-last day in Eighth Army (and any army for that matter), I was walking to the Bank of America to close my account. Coming toward me was a captain, fumbling with a manila folder. I heard “Hold on there,” and thought, “Now, what. Am I gonna get hassled on my second-to-last-day here?” I turned to him.
“Don’t give me all that saluting and ‘sir’ bullpoop. I’m on my way out. I’m going to headquarters and throw all this stuff right in the general’s face! You know why?”
I began to get a bit fidgety. “Really I don’t, sir.”
“Stop that ‘sir’ bullpoop!”
“Sorry,” I said.
He continued. “I’m an Air Defense Artillery Officer. I’ve been in prestige Army-level positions. I get a welcome letter saying that based on my experience and to advance me on my career path, my assignment was made with my best interests in mind. You know where I went? What I did?”
“Umm…no.”
“I was up at the DMZ freezing my behind off, in charge of cooks! You know what I know about cooking? Not a bleeping thing!”
Uh-oh, I thought. He was displeased with the decision of the official G-1 cockroach. I’m glad he never asked where I worked. If you hadn’t noticed, I cleaned up his outburst considerably. The Voice is a family newspaper.
After some more ranting about right-wing warmongers, communists, and Nazi pinkos, or something, he wandered off. I continued to the bank thinking how sad it was that, with all the strife going on in the world, some people just can’t take a joke.