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Upstarts
"Yessir. Hor'zontal slidin' wedge."
"Good. Now go and straighten out your men before they get the wrong name
fixed in their minds."
"Yessir." Sgt Rogers saluted, returned to the piece, gathered his crew around the
breech of the howitzer, and said at the top of his lungs: "Now, gentlemans [pronounced
gemmuns], I jus' got done tellin' you this is an eccentric screw type breechblock, which
the lieutenant says it ain't, but is a hor'zontal slidin' wedge. And from now on I don't want
to hear none of you some bitches callin' it nothin' else!"
And they didn't.
Sgt. Rogers' mode of address may have charmed his subordinates, but it was not
always suitable in other company. He tried it on an MP [military policeman] who stopped
him in downtown Abilene for having liquor on his breath and a necktie at half-mast, and
ended up with a delinquency report [DR] which came through channels and ended up on
the desk of his battery commander, Capt Merton Munson.
Many battery commanders would have taken away his stripes and busted him to
private, but Munson was a humane man. Furthermore, he knew that good sergeants were
hard to come by, and at the moment he had no one who could adequately replace Rogers
as chief of the third section. So the captain roundly rebuked him, warned him not to let it
happen again, and restricted him to camp for two weeks. Sgt Rogers was duly grateful
and worked hard to become Capt Munson's most loyal subordinate.
However, when his period of restriction was over, Sgt Rogers went to town to
celebrate his freedom, and had a few drinks to aid the celebration. [Abilene was a "dry"
town, but bootleggers were to be found.] Anyhow, he eventually realized that it was now
1:15 a.m., and that curfew had been at 11:00 p.m. The sidewalks were figuratively rolled
up, and he saw no cruising taxicabs to take him back to Camp Barkeley. He certainly had
no intention of calling on an MP for help - in fact he had been ducking them all night. So
he stumbled through a residential area, wondering if he could walk back to camp before
daylight. Then he saw a lighted window.
Ah, he thought, there's someone still up. Maybe if I knock on their door, they'll let
me use their phone to call a cab.
Inside the house was a young mother who was awake to give her baby his two-
o'clock feeding. It was not her house: houses were hard to find in wartime Abilene, so she
was staying at her sister's home until she and her husband could find a place of their own.
When she heard a rap on the door, she turned on the porch light and saw a man in
uniform outside. Since her brother-in-law was in the army, she assumed the soldier was
looking for him, and she called, "Oh, Merton! There's someone here to see you." And that
is why, when a bleary-eyed Captain Merton Munson came to the door in his robe and
slippers, he found Sergeant Rogers standing there, more drunk than alive.
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