DID I MENTION JOHN WAS BIG??  Big and baggy and both hands
in his pockets...that's my John.

When I wrote that last piece about fairness and the military, one soldier
kept popping into my mind. My first contact with John was observing him during a
training session. The training had to do with the care and maintenance of the
M-60 machine gun. The platoon had four M-60s laid out on tarps on the ground. As
I came up on the group, they were disassembliing the machine guns. While the
others were wrestling with the parts, John's hands moved smoothly and surely,
accurately sliding the parts from their place with a minimum of fuss...it was
like he was caressing the gun. After observing the group for about a half-hour,
it was clear to me that John, a Spc4, was better qualified to conduct the
training than the sergeant who actually was conducting it. John was always the
first done with each step and then helped the others complete the step. I saw a
natural leader with talent and knowledge. But his platoon sergeant saw a
sub-standard soldier who always looked like his uniform came out of a clothes
hamper and his boots looked like he had shined them with a Hershey bar. The
platoon sergeant pointed out that John was on and off the weight control program
and never exerted himself in any endeavor. And there was his attitude towards
authority; he was often having run-ins with sergeants, he questioned orders and
always had a smart comment.

I asked the sergeant about John's job performance. John was an excellent
driver who always completed his missions on time and accurately. His truck was
always well-maintained, clean, and ready for the road. His barracks space was
well cared for, nothing spectacular, but clean and orderly. I made a mental note
to myself to follow up on John.

Over the next couple of weeks, I learned through conversations with soldiers
and leaders in the company that John had been moved from each of the truck
platoons and everyone said the same thing about John: he was an amazing field
soldier, he knew everything about living and working in the woods, he was a
great truck driver, and was mechanically capable of doing almost any maintenance
on his truck and weapons. The leaders all thought John was borderline
insubordinate but not bad enough to file charges. The soldiers all thought he
was prickly and impatient and hard to work with. And every couple of weeks he
would have some kind of domestic disturbance.

In fairness to me, I had a lot of things going on at the time. I didn't need
to seek out new problems to worry about so I put thoughts of how to correct
John's shortcomings on the back burner while I dealt with the soldiers who were
arrested smuggling drugs into Germany from Holland, the sexual assault in the
barracks and the female soldier who wound up in the dinky-dau ward in the
hospital because of it, the up-coming Annual General Inspection, the female
mechanic who claimed a Warrant Officer had made unwanted advances to her and the
staff sergeant who claimed this same female mechanic had made physical advances
on him, and a dozen or so other problems that required my attention.

The next time I had a conversation about John, his platoon sergeant asked me
to find him a job elsewhere in the company, John was not playing well with
others and the tensions were stretching thin. For the next year John worked in
the maintenance shop, the supply room, the operations shop, and back in the
supply room. At every stop, the bosses wanted someone else to deal with him but
no one wanted to file any charges on him. I knew why. During the time that he
worked in areas where I had almost daily contact with him, I got to know John
very well. The simple truth is that I liked John. He was extremely likeable. He
seemed to know how to do everything: weapons maintenance, setting up the 292
antenae, erecting tentage, maintaining and operating pot belly stoves, and a
myriad other skills that are invaluable for soldiers to have. And he was a crack
shot with an M-16 or M-60. Every six months when the unit went to qualify with
their weapons, John and I would get in adjacent foxholes and compete for best
score. A perfect score was 40 and John and I always shot 39 or 40; often we
would tie but if one outshot the other, we would rag the other until the next
trip to the range.

When we went to the woods for maneuvers, John would be everywhere at once,
setting up commo, pitching tents, helping park trucks, showing rookies how to
camoflage their trucks or fighting positions, and doing everything with the same
grace I had first witnessed when he was handling the machine gun. And he always
made sure that I had whatever I needed to do my job.

I can't tell you how many times I would sit in my office or his work space
and talk to him about getting his garrison life under as tight a control as his
field life was. We discussed every aspect of his performance and his attitude
and getting his family life settled down. John was always respectful to me, he
listened and we talked candidly about a lot of stuff and he never showed me any
attitude, never was offended or offensive.

Then we found out we were going to DESERT SHIELD/STORM. And immediately every
one of John's former bosses wanted him back in their platoon. The headache no
one wanted to deal with was now the expert field soldier that everyone wanted. I
told them "NO"...I made John my driver for the duration. This is getting kinda
long for me but I want to keep going...I gotta tell you about our time in the
STORM.

First of all, we set up our field site at an empty tract of desert called TAA
Henry. The layer of sand over bedrock was only about a foot deep. Setting up
tents required three times as many tent ropes to anchor the tents, John and I
worked for hours trying to come up with some method of keeping the tents up. We
argued and yelled at each other until we came up with a combination of tent
stakes and sandbags and engineer stakes that worked, then we laughed and drank
warm Dr Pepper in celebration.

Then came the berm. We borrowed two huge Komatsu dozers to push up a sand
barricade to surround our compound. John showed the operators how to start a
quarter mile out scraping and pushing up a six-foot high barrier. He also got
into the dozer and scraped out a clear spot to build our air raid bunker for
operations. Once the bunker was completed, our Sergeant Major came over and
condemned it. Seems that another unit in Henry had had a bunker collapse and
injure some soldiers. We couldn't use the bunker until we could prove it was
properly engineered. John smiled at the Sergeant Major and climbed up into the
cab of the Komatsu, drove it up on top of the bunker, and proceeded to rock the
dozer back and forth and grind the treads in sharp turns...the Sergeant Major
smiled and said, "Never mind".

As the day drew near to invade Iraq, John worked side by side with me and the
mechanics to set up one of our two-and-a-half ton trucks as a "gun truck",
bristling with a fifty-caliber and two thirty-caliber machine guns. He took
pains to train the gunners carefully.

During the manuever phase of the war, John and I would trade off driving, the
guy in the shotgun seat would get beat to death from the roughness of the desert
and start complaining and yelling about the bumps and all, then we would switch
and trade roles. John, completely against instructions, procured a couple of
Iraqi AK47s complete with extra mags and ammo...the fancy paratrooper model with
wire folding stock and folding triangle-bladed bayonet.

Well, this is really a ramble but the war was only four days and there were
lots of other stories about John...how he took over the duties of the NBC
(Nuclear Biological Chemical) NCO until we could calm our NBC expert down enough
to do her job. He helped train soldiers how to use immersion heaters to heat the
shower's water tanks, how he did a million things every day to help anyone who
needed it. And every day of the STORM, some NCO or other would beg me to let
John return to their line platoon.

The first week we got back to Germany we received instructions to
re-institute all the administrative discharges that were suspended by stop loss
before we went to Saudi. One of those discharges was John...for being on the
weight-control program too many times...even though John was now twenty pounds
below his max allowed weight. I thought about making a fuss and started
considering what kind of approach might have a chance of saving John's career.
That night I had to go to the MP station and get John and take him back to the
barracks...he had got loaded and threatened to beat his wife again. His
discharge was based on a "pattern of misconduct" and I signed it; regretfully,
but I signed it. John looked at me and gave me a half a smile and said, "I know,
Top, I didn't give you no choice".

Some soldiers, and others, find their niche in circumstances outside the
norm. They thrive there; they shine! Then when back in the humdrum again, they
become bored and can't cope.  John didn't see things the way others do, and he
wasn't able to bend his own perceptions around to match the folks in charge. 
John loved the things about the Army that he loved but wasn't able to pay for
them by stifling his own vision of life.  Looking at the picture, you can see
that John seems to be enjoying a private joke.  That's just one of the
things that I loved about him.