“What?” asked Harlan.
“Come on. This is our only chance. Give me your rifle and hold your hands behind you. You’re my prisoner!” I replied.
Harlan’s eyes widened at this, but he just grinned and passed over his M-16. I stood up and manhandled him vertical, and he held his hands behind his back. We walked towards the enemy lines, and he started grumbling, so I gave him an easy shot to the kidneys and told him to shut up. He hammed it up and almost fell to his knees.
The two sentries bought it, though. They came towards us, and the first one said, “Wow! You got a prisoner!?”
Harlan protested and I punched him again. At this point the second sentry came up and asked, “Where’s your armband?” referring to my Velcro.
I looked down at my arm in surprise. “I must have lost it when I captured him.”
That seemed to satisfy both of these guys. No doubt about it, Harlan and I must have stumbled across the stupidest members of the entire Orange Army. Thank God! The second sentry promptly sat down on a log and propped his rifle up against a tree, and the first sentry turned his back on us to lead us in. As soon as this happened, I handed Harlan his rifle and grabbed the sentry from behind. By the time I had my guy on the ground, Harlan had wrapped his arms around his guy and pulled him to the ground… My guy was struggling, so I gave him a stiff shot to the kidneys and growled at him to knock it off, and then I got Harlan to sit on the pair of them while I trussed them up.
We also stole their orange armbands, which prompted an outraged, “That’s wearing an enemy uniform! You’ll be hung as spies when you get caught!”
“Well, when they put the simulated rope around my simulated neck, I’ll just say that I’m sorry I only had one simulated life to give to my simulated country!” I yanked their socks socks off and shoved them in their mouths. I then showed them my combat knife. “Now shut up and behave!”
We trussed those two up good, and tossed a shelter half over them. We searched and found a map with their position and the nearby sentry positions marked, and pocketed it. It was time to go home.
Just as we started to leave, a rustling in the brush behind us prompted us to turn and bring our weapons to bear. A grinning simulated Orange Army lieutenant stepped out. “How’s it going, men!”
Harlan looked at me. “This just keeps getting better and better!” He turned his rifle aside and said, “We caught some prisoners, sir!”
The lieutenant came bounding up, only to find himself grabbed and trussed up with the others. He had a better map on him, which we also took possession of. I looked at Harlan. “Now can we go?”
Before he could answer, things went from bad to worse. The distinctive sound of a Jeep could be heard approaching us up a path from the woods. “You have got to be shitting me!” replied Harlan.
“What, did we stumble on the Grand Central Station of Fayetteville?” I responded. Our prisoners were struggling under the tarp, so we gave them a couple of kicks and told them to shut up.
Only real soldiers could drive a Jeep, and our newest visitor was a real lieutenant, not just a cadet wannabe lieutenant. Still, he was wearing an orange armband, so we captured him, too. He was nowhere near as happy about this as you would expect. At that point, we had four prisoners, loads of info, and no way to get home. If we tried to sneak back across the field, we would get caught for sure, probably by these very assholes. Somebody was bound to show up and let them loose.
Harlan solved the problem. “Can you drive a Jeep?” he asked me.
I looked at him blankly, and then looked at the Jeep, and then looked back at Harlan. “I don’t know. Why?”
“Because we can drive back to HQ then.”
The idea was so ludicrous that I wanted to laugh, but I didn’t. I looked at the Jeep again, then back at Harlan, then back at the Jeep. “Can you drive a Jeep?” I asked him.
He shook his head. “I never learned how to drive a stick shift.”
Well, it had been many, many years, but I knew how to drive a standard transmission. I looked in the Jeep, and it was rudimentary, but it had a stick. “You’re kidding me, right?”
“No, I’m not. Look here.” He grabbed the real lieutenant’s map and laid it out on the hood of the Jeep. “We head back down the path 300 meters and then turn right. We hit this crossroad and head back this way.” His finger traced a path and had us sneaking around the backside of everybody and back to our HQ.
“You know, if we get caught, we really will be shot, and probably by everybody, including our side.”
He grinned. “Think of all the simulated medals we’ll get.”
“Simulated posthumous medals.” I hooked a thumb over at our friends. “What about these assholes?”
He grinned even more. “Prisoners!”
“Oh, shit!” Well, it’s better to be hung for a goat as a sheep, or something of the sort. We tossed our new friends in the back of the Jeep, on the floor, on top of each other, with the real lieutenant on the bottom, and then covered them up with the shelter halves. Then we climbed in and I started up the Jeep. I was very rusty, and ground the gears a couple of times, and stalled it out to boot before I got the hang of it. “Well, it was nice knowing you, Harlan,” I said.
“Drive!”
And we drove. Harlan’s cockamamie scheme actually worked. Fifteen minutes later we pulled up to headquarters (we had already switched back to our blue armbands) and turned our intelligence, prisoners, and captured enemy equipment (the Jeep) over. The response was interesting, to say the least. The maps we grabbed were used to launch a simulated attack. The simulated Orange prisoners were carted off for a simulated debriefing. The real lieutenant was thoroughly outraged and demanded Harlan’s and my immediate flogging, castration, and court martial, in no uncertain terms and in no particular order! I got the definite impression that he would have considered the final scene from Braveheart lenient! We were warned away from being around any of the Orange Army companies and from wherever the lieutenant was normally stationed. We were not awarded any simulated medals, but we weren’t court martialed (either real or simulated) either.
The warrior elite had triumphed!
Chapter 42: Junior Year
And so ended my summer at the Fayetteville Camp For Incorrigible Boys. Most of us graduated, but not everybody did. You have to meet various minimum standards to be considered as graduated. For some of us it was physical fitness, being able to run a distance in a maximum time, or pushups or swimming or something like that. (I recall Joe Bradley saying he had problems with the swimming; he could swim fine, but almost flunked the floating test!) You also needed to meet minimum qualifications with the weapons. Marksman is the minimum allowed for the M-16., then you move up to Sharpshooter, and then Expert. I initially qualified as Expert with the Colt.45 but only Sharpshooter with the M-16. Later I was able to requalify as Expert with the M-16.
If you fail, you have to come back next year and do it all over again. Fail a second time and you are history. Theoretically you have to pay the Army back for the cost of the scholarship, but I know that can change. Harry Mikulski was two years ahead of me and morbidly obese. He couldn’t even fit into a uniform. He got a waiver on both summers of boot camp, and just before graduation the Army tossed him out as unfit. He never had to pay back a cent, and never even got a bad type of discharge. He got a totally free RPI education. Of course, he probably had a heart attack by the time he was thirty, but think of all the money he saved!