Quoted:
Before I retired, a young soldier came up to me and asked, quite seriously*, if when I first came in the Army we had to take care of our own horses or if we had someone to do that for us. I explained to him that we had people like him to shovel out the stables but that he wouldn't have been trusted to take care of the horses.
We then went for a "tour" of the post. For the first three miles he was pretty cocky. Then he realized that we hadn't turned around yet and I was still going.
*(He was a pretty good smart-ass!)
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This past summer, at Camp Perry, one of the Marines there asked me why I chose Army instead of the Corps. I pointed at a Master Gunnery Sergeant and said,"Blame him!"
Master Guns asked what he did. I told him the following tale:
At Tun Tavern, I got there on Nov 10, but the recruiter saw my birthday was Nov 12, and he advised me that if an NCIC check brought out that I joined before I turned 18, I'd get booted out for fraudulant discharge. So I decided to hang out a couple of days.
'Ol Master guns, who was a PFC at the time because he got a buddy to enlist, didn't ship until the 12th, even though he signed up on the 10th. He spent the whole day of the 11th bending my ear with stories about what it was like in the Old Corps, and I decided I wasn't going to spend my whole hitch listening to that crap, so I caught a ride up I-95 to the Valley Forge exit and took a job taking care of Gen'l Washington's white horse, which wasn't really white.
Master Guns gave me a really dirty look, but everyone else was howling. As to be expected, he was a pretty good sport, and he got me back in spades a couple days later.
(George Washington's white horse was really light gray. Fact is, most colonial cabins had nothing but black and white TVs, so the horse LOOKED white on the 5 O'Clock news.)