We got a weekend leave from the fort and the five of us squeezed into Private Olivegreen’s brown bug and bugged out for the nearest big city, about 80 miles away: population 280,000. We were trainees in an occupational specialty school: MOS 63B20 – Wheeled and Track Vehicle Mechanic. There wasn’t much to do off hours around the fort, and with weekend leave you escaped extra details, kitchen police, or the bad boredom of the Post Exchange and its watery 3.2 beer. There was no movie theatre, no library, no gym, no swimming pool. There were no girls. The barracks were large two-story open wood walls and waxed linoleum floors and the latrines were not for holding privy. I was the only teenager still of the five. The others had already finished college before being inducted, and they treated me like a kid brother. In the small town just outside the fort there was one bar with one pool table. I went there one night with Mississippi, the hustler from Alabama, who cleaned up on a few locals. The guys from the southern states were run-on talkers with long drawn out tales and jokes told like we were not in the middle of hysterical winter. I was the only surfer of the five. In our Basic Combat Training weeks they had been somewhat envious of the ease with which I completed the calisthenics and confidence courses. We were all cut on the same orders, Basic through the AIT (Advanced Individual Training) schools, and presumably beyond (rumor said stay in schools as long as you could), and we hung loosely together throughout.
The weekend leave plan drafted by Ward was to land at the University downtown and stay at his fraternity’s house nearby off campus. But the house folks weren’t comfortably receptive to five GI Joes invading their space, and on top of that the individual rooms were taken and the common area wasn’t very big and the facilities were sparse. It was just a house, not a mansion. So we canned the frat house idea and got a motel room. The Army paid you in cash monthly. We had no credit cards and anyway there were no ATM machines, no card swipe machines. Maybe a couple of the guys had bank accounts somewhere. I did not. This was an era prior to cell phones, personal computers, social media. Radio and TV – that was it. And mail call.
The motel room had two double beds. It was quickly decided who would sleep where and I got the floor. We got pizza somewhere, and we then broke up and went out on the town, and Hunter and I hitchhiked our way up and down the local bright lights big city dubious drag strip, drifting and delving into dive bars where I might or might not have been asked for ID for a glass of beer. At some point Hunter and I got separated. Some time later I found myself in the backseat of a car full of high locals cruising one of the outlying highways. I got hit with a jolt of paranoia and told them to pull over and let me out. They were incredulous, we were now miles outside of town, going where there seemed no inkling, and they didn’t want to just let me out on the side of the road, but I insisted. They pulled over and I hopped out and they drove off laughing and yelling. The road was empty. I jogged along the shoulder back into the big city, illuminated on the highway every few hundred yards or so by the overhanging streetlamps.
I made my way back to the motel. It was now very late, or very early. I knocked on the motel room door. I hadn’t been given a key. No one answered my knock. Olivegreen’s VW was in the parking lot. I knocked and knocked but no one opened the door. The motel was two linear stories, doors opened to the outside, the second story rooms onto a narrow balcony with metal railing hanging over the parked cars. I bedded down outside on the balcony concrete floor, curling up like an alley cat against the door to the room, not even a doormat for warmth, and fell asleep. I woke up shivering cold and banged hard on the door and Hunter suddenly opened it stupefied and I stumbled in and fell back to sleep on the floor, no pillow, no blanket, still in my street clothes.
The next day we crammed back into the bug and crawled back to the fort and I was glad to get back to barracks and a hot shower and the cotton cot with wool blanket and fell asleep listening to Baton Rouge tell all about how much work he’d completed this weekend on his correspondence course toward becoming a cub reporter when he got out of the Army.
The Coming of the Toads 