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Upstarts
Col Pierce said the best way to pitch a pup tent was not to use the poles, which
only got in the way, but to tie the guy ropes overhead, to a tree branch. So Johnson
conscientiously pitched his little tent that way, and probably slept in it if he ever got a
chance. Col Pierce, a small man, never used a tent himself. He slept curled up on the
front seat of the command car.
There was one more minor hazard to riding with Col Pierce. He had heard about
the layer principle for dressing warmly, and since he felt the cold even more than the rest
of us, he would start out a field exercise on a winter morning dressed in layers: on top of
his basic woolen undershirt and wool flannel shirt, he wore, starting from the inside, a
sleeveless sweater, a light field jacket, a suede leather jacket, a heavy field jacket, and an
overcoat. If he had not been a slight man, he could never have stuffed himself into the
command car. When the sun got well up, he would find his garments burdensome, so he
would remove the overcoat, the heavy field jacket, the suede leather jacket, the light field
jacket, and the sleeveless sweater. Placing the sweater on the seat beside him, he would
then re-don the light field jacket, the suede leather jacket, the heavy field jacket, and the
overcoat. During these operations, Johnson learned to hold his right elbow high to avoid
being slapped across the face by a loose sleeve.
As the day wore on, Col Pierce continued this process, next removing the light
field jacket and replacing the rest, and so on, working from the inside out, until mid-
afternoon, when finally he took off the overcoat and added it to the stack of outer
garments on the front seat between him and T/5 Johnson. By this time it was high enough
so they could not see each other. However, as the sun grew lower, the temperature
dropped, and the colonel would resume first the overcoat, then the heavy field jacket, et
cetera.
One day when some busybody was going through records to find men who were
reasonably intelligent but not smart enough to be shipped off to officer candidate school
(OCS), he saw Johnson's name. OCS required an AGCT score of 110 or higher. Johnson's
was 108. He was worth a tryout with the fire direction center (FDC).
Although Col Pierce was the kind of man for whom the term "officer and a
gentleman" was coined, I think you will understand why T/5 Johnson might have been
willing to stop driving for him in favor of a job with more future. So he was soon sitting
with a graphical firing table in his hands, computing firing commands for the batteries.
He showed a natural aptitude for it, particularly since he never got excited and lost his
presence of mind. He went on to master the jobs of horizontal control operator and
vertical control operator too. And almost before you could say, "Complementary angle of
site," he had become the Chief Computor and was wearing the stripes of a Staff Sergeant.
Even in his new-found eminence, he still remained low-key, conscientious, and diffident.
And unflappable in his loyalty to Col Pierce.
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