Birth of the Blue Missile

PART 7
The rest of that year and that summer were pretty uneventful at the academy. My adventures with Ted during that summer are chronicled elsewhere in the story.
The next year when I arrived I was given the rank of Sargent First Class. I was told that I would have been made an officer because of my grades, but because of the trip down the boulevard, I was not officer material. That was fine with me. My only concern was getting into a good college.
During those first weeks recruiting for the various activities took place. I was actually approached to join the drill team called the Fusiliers. They convinced me that this was a cool thing to do and best of all you got out of government inspection as far as your room was concerned. Little did I know how cool this was really going to become.
There were twenty odd cadets in the team of all ranks and ages. We drilled almost every day after school and one of the things that kept us all together as a team was that we were all stoned. I’m sure you are saying just how could that possibly be an advantage?
Here is the point, we trained to perform a choreographed routine, and after a while we had learned all the moves and memorized the routine. The problem with memorizing the routine is the commander of the team was still out front calling the routine. It seemed if that if he made a mistake in what he called, because we were well adjusted, we would not be relying to our memories and actually be listening to what he said and do what he called.
These routines were not simple. They contained a lot of rifle twirling, overhead exchanges, face to face exchanges, and so forth. It seemed that the more challenging the routine the more fun it was.
During that fall we performed at a number of Georgia Tec games. We would form up under one of the goal posts travel down the field do our routine and travel back. I remember the reception as warm and the applause and cheers as overwhelming.
We were later told that we were ranked as the top drill team in the state of Georgia, this was including all of the college ROTC programs.

While we were in Georgia we also had a chance to serve as the honor guard at the military funeral of one of the members of staff who passed away. NO the cadets had nothing to do with it!
Now in order to serve as the honor guard and perform the twenty-gun salute, the armory had to issue firing pins and ejectors for our rifles. The entire core of cadets carried M1-A1 rifles that were fully functional except for pins and ejectors. We were also issued a full ammo box of blanks to use for the occasion along with clips. I can’t tell you the fun we had with a thousand rounds of ammo at our disposal.
As it turns out later that year in Florida we had to perform another military funeral for another member of staff. Just like the last time, we reported to the armory and were issued pins, ejectors, ammo and clips for the occasion.
Normally we practiced on the asphalt behind the main building, which is where we gathered for this particular practice. As a mater of fact there is a picture in the yearbook of that gathering, and as it happens, I am in the center of the group sitting on the ground rolling a joint. Remember we had to keep it together. Now for some reason, which escapes me, we were having practice for this event on the main parade field in the grass rather than behind the building. Perhaps it was because the graveside was in the grass, who knows.
Now the social climate was no better this year than the year before. The military was still hated and the Vietnam war was still raging. It had also come to our attention that the “Townies” besides just hating us, had come to the conclusion that the entire core was just a bunch kids with play guns playing soldier.
Now as I stated the parade field was bordered by the actual traffic circle. Even though we were only a group of twenty plus, we never felt that there was any danger from the towns folk during the day.
During the middle of this practice a couple of guys with long hair in a VW Beetle stopped by the edge of the road, pulled of the shoulder onto the edge of the field and parked. We thought they were there to watch us practice, because this is what happened every Sunday. They then sat there for a little bit and then they got out of the car. Until this point we were paying little attention to what they were doing. When they got out of the car we noticed that each of them was carrying a baseball bat and that they had started to walk across the field towards where we were formed up thirty yards away. At that point their actions were brought to the attention of the team leader who was facing us and away from them. Please remember we were quite stoned and we had full clips and the ability to take advantage of that. Curt turned around and saw what was happening and with a big grin on his face ordered the squad to do a flank left and then ordered the first row down on one knee. He then gave the order to fire at will. The magazine of an M1A1 carries twenty rounds. So in a matter of seconds there were four hundred plus shots fired towards these two Bozos. While these were blank rounds, at the end of each round is a plastic plug so the powder doesn’t spill out of the round during handeling, I don’t know if they were actually hit by any of the plugs but their reaction was priceless. At the time this was happening there was a wall of smoke and flames coming sideways out of the flame suppressors on the barrels. The look on their faces was of pure terror, their eyes were a big as saucers, and all of the color had drained from their faces. Our response caused these two to drop the bats and run on air back to their car. They jumped in and sped off with little regard to even looking for traffic as they entered the circle.
We however like good military men, all fell on the ground laughing our asses off. Needless to say that was the end of the practice for the day, we all had to go clean our rifles before returning them to the armory.
After the service we turned in our pins and ejectors and the balance of the box of ammo. I however collected all the spent brass and started a small business making hash pipes out of two shells fastened together. They even had a leather holster in a military fashion.