By Will Dabbs, MD
Brad was one of my warrant officer pilots back in the day. A former NCO who had gone through the warrant officer course with a little grey around his temples, Brad was a card-carrying curmudgeon. He was also a great soldier and a fine friend.
Extra Duties
When one serves as Battalion Staff Duty Officer (SDO), he is expected to do several things. Principal among them is to stay up all night ready to answer the phone if the nation goes to war. Thankfully, that doesn’t happen very often. Additionally, the SDO is supposed to wander around the battalion area and verify the security of the hangars, barracks, and motor pools. Many of us sort of pencil whipped that. Brad, by contrast, did not.
Back then, barracks were segregated by gender. Nowadays, we can’t seem to define precisely what gender is, but it was a different time. Regardless, the responsible SDO was supposed to connect with the barracks Charge of Quarters (CQ) and do a walk-through of the facility to ensure there were no shenanigans going on. As I said, most of us didn’t do that, but Brad did.
The CQ was the junior enlisted version of the SDO. He or she would stay up all night at the front desk for some reason. I don’t recall exactly why. Likely this, I suppose.
Serendipitous Discoveries
As Brad and the young female CQ serving as his escort were strolling along the halls of the women’s barracks late in the evening, they heard jungle noises emanating from the communal bathroom. Brad stood guard outside, while the CQ went in to investigate. Inside, she found Private Jenkins playing hide the sausage in the shower with some civilian dude from town.
If it is possible for a human being to have a nemesis, Private Jenkins was mine. She was forever in trouble. She attacked her roommate with a boot brush, stole a fellow soldier’s debit card and emptied her bank account, wrote bad checks, and fabricated the most outlandish excuses not to participate in field exercises. I’m sure she had some latent laudable attributes, but I was never able to identify them. And now she was doing the no-pants dance in the barracks shower area in the middle of the night with a male civilian.
Brad immediately took charge. He directed Private Jenkins to get dressed and report downstairs. In the heat of the moment, the wet interloping copulator had abandoned his clothes back in Jenkins’ room. Brad felt disinclined to allow him to retrieve them, so the poor kid wrapped up in the only thing he had handy. This was Private Jenkins’ microscopic flimsy red see-through negligee. In this sordid state, Brad frog-marched the poor slob down to the CQ office and notified the MPs.
The Chemical Formula for Awkward
Now, imagine the scene. It was winter and maybe 28 degrees outside. Even indoors, the air was a bit chilly. This unfortunate stud was soaking wet and clad only in this lacy insubstantial thing from Victoria’s Secret. Brad knew Jenkins was, as an active duty soldier, a captive audience. She wasn’t going any place. He took it upon himself to educate this guy.
I don’t know if it was technically illegal for that young man to be in the barracks or not. He was probably supposed to sign in someplace. Knowing Jenkins, he most assuredly had not done so. Regardless, while they waited for the MPs to arrive, Brad explained the situation.
Brad informed him that Private Jenkins was government property, and that doing the horizontal mambo with Uncle Sam’s stuff was a high crime punishable in the severest of terms. A few minutes into this diatribe, this poor dude believed he was about to be breaking rocks at Leavenworth until the sun burned out.
The Great Escape
Brad left the room to call the sordid mess in to battalion headquarters. When he returned, he discovered that the sodden Don Juan had pried open the office window and made his escape…soaked, shoeless, and functionally unclothed in the harsh frozen weather a couple of miles from the nearest exit. Brad called the MPs back and explained that now they needed to be on the lookout for a wet naked man escaping and evading through the hinterlands. They scooped him up in short order and gave him a free ride to the nearest gate.
For this modest crime as well as many others, I transformed Private Jenkins back into a civilian soon thereafter. Of all the things I accomplished during my career as an Army officer, that was one of the most satisfying. As for her moistened paramour, I can only hope he learned his lesson and avoided any future opportunities to abuse government property.
