It was a sunny morning;  I was in a three-axle dump truck, southbound on I-17, crawling along in morning rush-hour traffic. The Arizona National Guard was convoying up the north-bound lanes; 2 1/2-ton cargo trucks, jeeps, fuel tankers, the usual assortment of rolling stock. The composition was so familiar to me. I had spent seven years in the Army Transportation Corps, participating in various phases of that sort of operation.  Then something happened. As I watched the convoy moving north while I sat waiting my turn to roll forward another ten feet, I realized I was in the wrong line of traffic. I belonged in that convoy. That was who I was. The economy in Phoenix was falling apart.  I was only working a few days a week;  the oil embargo was creating lines at gas stations, high gas prices, and more heat than the Arizona sun could manage (there were actually shootings over a place in line to buy two gallons of gas!) I was not happy, not productive, not moving.

Later that evening I discussed this with MamaCharlie and we pretty much came to the conclusion that returning to the Army might actually be the right course for us. At least it was worth looking into. So we did. I talked to the Army recruiter in town. It didn't look good. The war in Vietnam was over and the military was down-sizing. There were very few "slots" for prior-service guys like me. But he would try to squeeze me in. After a couple hours of phone calls and teletypes and other voodoo moves (there weren't any computers or internet then), the recruiter lined me up with a dream deal. I would go to New Jersey to some high-power electonics school and then on to Maryland for some high-tech missile maintenance school;  then on to someplace where those missiles were. MamaCharlie and I were impressed with the options that were provided and all the strings that were pulled (kind of like watching a car salesman, you never know how much is show and how much is substance). But on the way home, we began to discuss the rest of the story, like where were she and the boys going to live while I was in these schools? What was she going to eat while I was gone, etc. Where was the new baby going to be born? We had just found out about that wrinkle in March.  We had dealt with difficulties before and knew we could figure things out, but the more we talked about the deal the recruiter had gotten for us, the wronger it felt. It just wasn't right. We decided to approach the problem from the other angle. Where did we want to be? What did we want to be doing? What was the right thing for us to do?  And we came up with a course of action that we felt good about. 

We went back to the recruiter the next day and told him we wanted to go to Fort Ord.  We needed a school that would allow us to stay at Fort Ord after graduation (it had been determined that I could no longer be a truck driver;  the Army was overfull of truck drivers so I had to pick another job). He was hot!! But he scrapped everything he had done the day before and re-aimed at Fort Ord. The only school that would allow me a follow-on assignment at Fort Ord was the Army Cook school. I didn't want to be a cook, but I knew the Army Truck Driver school was at Fort Ord, too, and I was sure that once we were there, we could get around the other stuff and get assigned to the truck driver school. Because of my prior service, I was to be allowed to re-enlist as an E-4 (I had been an E-6 when I got out) and since I had not been out of the Army more than 36 months I didn't have to go through basic training again. Things were lining up nicely. We even got a thirty- day delay en route which allowed us to wrap up a lot of other problems. More on that in a later post.

A month later we showed up in the Monterey Bay area and stayed with my brother for a few days.  I signed in to Fort Ord, and a lot of that was covered in a post about the power wielded by a senior NCO. Sadly, I found that during the nearly three years I was doing my "civilian tour" in Phoenix, the Army had computerized its personnel system. That meant that my name was plugged into cook's school and by golly, I was gonna be a cook. I was really bummed. I completed the course and was assigned to a mess hall to begin my service as an Army cook. The mess hall that fed the students in the truck driving school...talk about insult to injury! In the old movie Support Your Local Sheriff, James Garner had a line that he repeated often. He told the town and its leaders, "I've never made a secret of the fact that basically, I am just passing through on my way to Australia." I paraphrased that so often that all the cooks in my mess knew and repeated that I was "just passing through on my way to the motor pool". But in reality, it was looking like I was going to be in the mess hall for some time.

After a few months of flipping eggs and hand mixing fifty pounds of meat loaf, I was required to attend a "records check". Back in the day when most admin functions were still done by hand, the personnel folks would visit units and audit each soldier's personnel file. You would walk down a line of clerks, each with an expertise in some area of records-keeping or another. I was in front of one of the specialists who flipped through the papers clipped in my folder, back and forth, comparing entries on one form with those on other forms. The battalion Sergeant Major was strolling up and down behind the desks, looking over the clerks' shoulders, looking at or for who knows what. When he stopped behind my clerk, my throat got tight. I didn't want to draw the attention of the SGM.

He saw something that really got his attention. He picked up my folder and began reading through it in ernest. He looked up at me and asked, "You prior service?" "Yes, Sergeant Major!" "64Charlie?" "Yes, Sergeant Major!" "Instructor qualified?" "Yes, Sergeant Major!" "Why are you cooking in my mess hall when I am critically short of instructors in my drivers' school?" I explained about the trail from Phoenix to the records check, emphasizing the computer and all the changes that had happened in personnel management since my departure from the Army. He listened to the whole story patiently and attentively. Then he said, "You report to MSG Smith in the motor pool tomorrow morning at 0800." I was stunned. For the third time in less than a year, a senior NCO had wiped away all the obstacles and changed the course of my life... and given me exactly what I wanted. The Post Sergeant Major had intervened on my behalf when poorly- written orders and poorly-motivated housing officials had me, or more acurately, MamaCharlie and the boys, over a barrel. With one phone call, the Sergeant Major instructed the personnel people how they should be reading the orders and magically, the way was clear for my family to be housed while I was in school. Later, my new First Sergeant "overlooked" the fact that I was less than thirty days shy of being authorized a complete clothing issue and signed the paperwork to get me some uniforms. And now, my battalion Sergeant Major had erased all the rest of the obstacles and pointed me to where I REALLY wanted to be. I didn't even ask about who would inform my mess sergeant or who would replace me on the shift, I had no thought about what to do with my cook whites.  I knew how to get to the motor pool. All I could say was, "Yes, Sergeant Major!"

And that's how I got back in the motor pool!