Due to unforeseen circumstances, I was eventually transferred off the mess decks. Though I’d continued to bathe ’n’ put on clean underclothes daily, it’d been a month since I last changed my pants. Because I had no other pants to wear, I couldn’t throw ’em into the laundry when they got dirty. To protest my predicament, I simply allowed them to get so filthy ’n’ foul smelling, even I could barely stand to wear them. So I wasn’t too surprised when I began to hear snide remarks from some of the lifers as they passed through the mess line. Nor was I any more surprised when one of my detractors finally blew up that Sunday. Fortunately for me, I had made the terrible mistake of serving him while standing over the pan with my fly wide open. In the ensuing furor he raised with the chief of the mess crew, over the unsanitary condition of my dress, I was relieved of my duties and sent back down to First Division.
As I pondered over this small victory, I learned a very important lesson, that a man can stand up for what he believes and prevail, in spite of the most incredible odds against his ever doing so, but only if he stands for the truth.
So here I was, taking on the Navy, on the basis of some foggy notion that I should free myself from this indenture to butcher other human beings in some Southeast Asian slaughterhouse. Although humans sometimes got their way with animals, I wasn’t too sure I’d get mine, in this instance. Nonetheless, with this small success as a feather in my cap, I was sure gonna try.
