Shortround

We met Shortround at the Induction Center in Kansas City.  That’s where all draftees and enlistees from Missouri began their military journey—the prodding, poking, eye-testing, “bend over and spread your cheeks” place where they decided if you were healthy enough to die for your country. (An Induction Center is where you find the “Group W Bench” made famous in song by Arlo Guthrie.)

We didn’t call him “Shortround” at the time.  A Sergeant at Fort Leonard Wood would give him that name.  Rocco, from St. Louis, called him, “You Stupid Little Shit.”  Rocco was a poet.

He was the shortest, scrawniest guy in the group going through medical.  He looked 15, but was proud to tell us he had just turned 17, dropped out of High School, and got “my mama” to sign the waiver so he could enlist.  He had an older brother already in the Army, and loudly-proudly let us all know, “I'm going Airborne.  I’m gonna kill Cong!”  He already had a US ARMY gym bag/carrier in which all of his prized possessions were carried.

“Airborne,” he proclaimed repeatedly.  “That’s where they teach you to be a real killer.  You learn to kill Cong with knives, guns, your BARE hands.”  About the time we were all truly sick of hearing this rant, his lethal bare hand was needed by a medic, so that his finger could be pricked for a drop of blood.

At the sight of that drop of blood, our Cong killing recruit fainted dead away and dropped to the floor.  Without a parachute.

Thus began a two-day drama that had several future veterans taking bets on events.  Every time a needle approached Shortround, whether to take blood out, or to put vaccine in, he fainted.  Of course, any time he was conscious, he was still proclaiming his plans at Airborne Cong slaughter.

(An explanation:  A “Shortround” is a shot from an artillery gun that, due to malfunction or misloading, falls short of its intended target.  Usually causing damage to friendly troops.  It is also a common name applied to vertically challenged soldiers in basic training.  Drill Sergeants being known, of course, for their depth of concern for the feelings of the recruits placed in their charge.)

Back to this particular short round.  He fainted on the finger prick.  He fainted on the inner arm blood draw.  He fainted on the tetanus shot.  And the typhoid shot. And the DPT shot.  From the Induction Center in Kansas City, to the Reception and Processing Center at Fort Wood, he seemed to spend as much time on the floor as on his feet.

The first thing as you step off the bus at the training center—Fort Wood in this case—you are “invited” to step up to a box and deposit all “contraband.”  These are the items the Army does not allow a recruit in training to have.  Contraband ranges from weapons and drugs, to candy and pornography.  Upon inspection of that Army gym bag, Shortround was relieved of three pocket knives and four Playboy magazines.  I never did quite figure out the relationship or the ratio of those two sets of items.

The final winner of the Shortround Sweepstakes, though, was when we were given the polio vaccine.  These were the days when the medical world was changing from the Salk vaccine injections to the Sabin oral vaccine.  So, each soldier was handed a sugar cube with a cherry-flavored drop on it.

Shortround popped his in his mouth, promptly turned white-faced, and dropped to the concrete. He awoke upchucking the vaccine and about 5 recent meals.

For the next couple of months of training, Shortround continued to proclaim his lofty goal of Asian carnage.  All the while struggling to complete nearly every training task.  He nearly failed Basic Training.  (Yes, you could fail Basic.  Either the physical fitness part, the “mental” parts, or, of course, the marksmanship requirements.  If you did fail, though, you didn’t get sent home.  You got “recycled”.  Sent back to do the whole Basic Training thing again.)

Shortround squeaked under the low bar, still proclaiming, on the day of graduation, his aim to “go Airborne and kill Cong.”

The Army was smart enough not to give him his wish.  Why put a Platoon or Company of expensively trained Airborne troops in that kind of danger?   Shortround spent the war under trucks in the motor pool, changing oil.  But he was the most badass wrench monkey in the whole US Army.