THE ARMY YEARS -1

I touched on my time in the army in the last post.  I was in the army from September 24, 1956 to September 23, 1959.  I would like to call your attention to the fact that no country even tried to attack us while I was in the army.  Of course, I don't claim the total credit for that but you do have to wonder.  

I took my physical a couple of months before I actually went in the army.  I took my physical at 12th corps in Atlanta.  They gave you a stack of different colored papers and told you to strip down to your underwear and follow the colored lines painted on the floor in the hall.  You would be walking down the hall with women going from one room to another.  How friendly.  You may be following the blue line into a room and some guy in a white coat suddenly gets very personal and tells you to turn your head and cough, writes something on your forms and tells you to follow the red line.
  
The red line, for example, may turn into a doorway and in that room they were drawing blood.  I entered the blood drawing room and one guy wrapped a rubber band around my arm and another one stuck a needle on the end of a hose leading into a test tube kind of thing into my arm and told me to hold the tube and stand over there.  I looked and there were a line of guys standing there bleeding in their tubes.  I moved over and lined up with the rest of them.  It all happened so fast that I didn't realize what was happening until I was bleeding into the tube.  Suddenly a big guy rounded the corner and they stabbed him the same way and told him to hold the tube and stand in the line.  He looked down and saw his blood running into the tube and passed out.  They quickly caught him before he hit the floor and they acted like it was just a normal thing.

The rest of the physical was conducted normally with different stations checking for normal things like weight, temperature, blood pressure, do you like girls, do you hate your mother, etc.  At the last station they told us to get dressed and the guys who were going in the army that day to go through one door and the ones like me who would be going later to check out through another door. 

The object of war is not to die for your country but to make the other bastard die for his.
George S. Patton
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