GI's

One of my good friends was a GI. When I reported to Camp McCoy, Wisconsin, the Commanding Officer was a Colonel Bruner. B-R-U-N-E-R. He told me I was a one person order and I was scheduled to go to the First Battalion of the 417^th Infantry as the Plans and Operations Officer. But he sat there at his desk and said, ‘I’m going to change that’ and called in the adjunct. He said, ‘I’m changing the orders for Captain Busch. He will become the Commanding Officer of the Antitank Company’. That’s all he said! It was changed! That was it! They have all sorts of authority! So the adjunct called the company, ‘Send someone over! You have a new Commanding Officer!’ So they did and I went in. I went in the First Sergeant’s room and sat down. We had a First Sergeant who the senior, non-commissioned Officer. He was a Staff Sergeant, one rocker. Eventually as I got to know him, I said, ‘Where is the First Sergeant?’ A First Sergeant is two rockers. He said ‘He is down at the Motor Pool’. ‘Motor Pool?’ ‘Yeah, the guns needed cleaning, he took a detail.’ ‘Well, who is running this outfit?!’ I learned that that Staff Sergeant was a stevedore off the docks of New York and he was running it! The First Sergeant was taking orders from a non-commissioned staff Sergeant.

So I got rid of the First Sergeant, made this guy the First Sergeant, and so on. 

Sara interjects ‘I bet they loved you!’