Sometime after the Korean War, the Army decided that not everyone needed to be a sergeant, but everyone needed to have regular promotions and raises to be enticed to stay in the Army. They created the "Specialist" ranks, for folks who could do well at their job but weren't necessarily good material for leadership. In many of the combat service support MOS's (Military Occupational Specialty) this was actually a pretty good policy. For example, in my world, I have had many excellent drivers who were able to master all the aspects of motor transport operations but were not (and many did not want to be) leaders. As specialists, they could be rewarded for their good work without having to be in charge of soldiers, scheduling, or any other duties normally reserved for NCOs. But the unintended consequence of this policy was the phasing out of corporals, and a constant bickering over who was in charge (a Specialist five with ten years in the Army doing the job would not take kindly to being supervised by a buck sergeant with half that much time in service). By the mid sixties, Corporals were almost entirely replaced by Specialists except in a few of the combat arms (those are the guys who do the actual shooting) MOSs. Then some genius came up with a policy called "UP or Out". It meant that you could only stay in the Army if you continued to move up the ranks, which also meant that you would eventually have to become an NCO. But anyway, in the first several years I was in the Army, I only met one real corporal...Gordy.

The day that I met Gordy, it was because he was a corporal...or in fact, it was because he had been chewed for behaving in a less than corporally manner in front of trainees. The assistant team leader of the instructor team Gordy was on had lectured him at length about being a clown when he should be acting like a professional. The assistant stressed the point that Gordy was "...probly da onliest real true corporal in the Army...". Gordy came into the barracks in hysterics looking for someone to share the story with. I was the only person in the barracks at the time so he spent the next fifteen minutes frantically going over and over the chewing he'd received, imitating the sergeant's accent and trying to ape the assistant's demeanor. By the time he had wound down, he had become my new best friend. I asked him how he became the onliest real true corporal in the Army and he spun an intricate yarn of the sad, sad tale. The short version is simply that he had been promoted to sergeant, went to the club to celebrate, got drunk, and ran off his mouth at some higher-ranking sergeants; fists flew, and Gordy wound up being demoted...but the Colonel who reduced him had pity on him and made him a corporal, something he did have the authority to do. And that is how a truck driver became the onliest real true corporal in the Army.

We discovered that we had a lot in common. We had both recently returned from Vietnam; we were both from Southern California; he was from L.A., me from San Diego. We were both Pontiac fans: he drove a '60 Bonneville Convertible; I drove a '65 GTO; we both had the kind of sense of humor that was not so popular, or understood, by the powers-that-be, and an accompanying lack of control over expressing that sense of humor. Gordy was one of those people who could tell you a story about how his mom broke her leg and have you rolling on the floor in laughter. He was a funny guy.

One time, he stopped his car in front of an old folks home in Tucson when he saw several elderly Navajo women in the front yard, bending over, working a small garden plot. James and Bobby Purifoy were on the radio singing their latest and Gordy turned it up and sang out to the old ladies, "Bend over let me see you shake a tail feather.."

Gordy greeted good news with a hearty "Yea, Neat!" Less than good news was greeted with "Yea, F***". When he met MamaCharlie for the first time, and an occasion arose to express displeasure, he blurted out "Yea, F...uh...the other!" So for many moons "Yea, Neat" and "Yea, the Other" replaced all other expressions of evaluation in our circle.

On a weekend jaunt to Los Angeles, Gordy drove into one heck of a sand storm. It took the paint off the front of his car, frosted the glass and chrome, and got into the engine, screwing it up pretty bad. But he drove it more than two hundred miles looking out of the side window to see where he was going, nursing the sputtering, jerky, smoking motor all the way. He limped it home to L.A. and his insurance company repaired it all...new motor, paint, glass, and chrome. It was like a brand new car.

Gordy was my co-pilot and provocateur the night I got in a drag race with a '62 Corvette on Speedway, one of the busiest streets in Tucson, blasting along nearly a hundred miles an hour. I shocked the heck out of that Corvette-boy when I blew by him in second gear and left him a good three car lengths behind; just then the light-bar lit up on one of Tucson's Finest about a half-mile behind us. We cut off the lights, turned off Speedway onto residential streets, and raced back the direction we came. We got away; don't know about the Corvette. We were as giddy as a couple of little girls all the way back to Fort Huachuca, bodies burning off all that adrenalin.

We were roomies in the cadre-room of the WWII barracks we lived in. The light was provided by a single bulb with a pull string in the middle of the room. We would race to get in bed so we wouldn't be the one who had to turn out the light. If we both got in bed at the same time, we would argue about who had to get up and turn it off. One night Gordy came up with a solution. He called out to Dave, who was in the next room, to come over for a minute. When Dave stuck his head in the door, Gordy asked him to turn off the light. The next time, Dave refused; Gordy (with some help from his roomie) continued to call to Dave, and Dave refused, and we continued and finally Dave came over and shut off our light.

Gordy was my best friend; we shared a lot of adventures. We covered a lot of Southern Arizona together. I don't remember the last day I saw Gordy. We were all there waiting for that magic day: ETS...the day we got out of the Army. Some of us stayed longer, some left pretty quickly, and I honestly don't remember at what point I lost Gordy. I was kind of distracted, I was busy falling head-over-heels, madly in love with MamaCharlie.

I guess if this has a point, other than a kind of tribute to an old friend, it is that there have been lots of Gordys in my life. No, there was only one Gordy. There have been a lot of people that were important and precious in their time, like Gordy, but they drifted out of our lives and we lost them forever. I don't have any idea what became of Gordy, where he wound up, what he became, where he is today. But wherever or whatever, I am grateful to him for the friendship, the adventures, and for goading me into punching it when that Corvette burned out at the light...and for the opportunity to know the onliest true real coporal.