During the time I was sent to Fort Leavenworth, Kansas to attend the Combined Arms and Services Staff School (CAS3), our class teacher or facilitator was Lieutenant Colonel Wood. Lieutenant Colonel Wood was a Field Artillery guy, and he took favor with certain students. I am not sure what his criteria was for choosing the students that he favored, I just know that he took a liking to certain students. Now, I happened to be one of the students that he took a liking to. One of the very first projects that we were assigned to do was to put together a branch briefing. Since I was the token Ordnance officer, I figured I would do the Ordnance branch briefing. Of course, I figured wrong. We had no Field Artillery branch officers in our class, either. So, the good Colonel decided I should give that briefing. I told him, “Hey, Sir, what gives you the crazy idea that I have even the slightest clue about the Field Artillery?” He replied, “Captain Masters, I have faith in you. You have the most experience of any Captain in this class. Plus, you’re my best Captain. You’ll do fine.” Yeah. I wasn’t even close. I had a stack of slides maybe 100 deep with Field Artillery guns. I had another 10 or 15 on how the branch was organized and its history. I got the part about the branch and its history nailed. But when it came to the guns, I got maybe half of them right. He was correcting me on every other slide. So finally, I just started looking at him every time I started to mention a gun to see if I was even in the ballpark. There was an airborne Ranger in the class who naturally gave a briefing on the Rangers. The Ranger’s name was Brad Wendell. He and I were diametrically opposed on several issues. As a result, we locked horns and argued openly in class. Many of our fellow classmates thought we hated each other. Truth be told, I didn’t dislike anybody. I don’t think that Captain Wendell disliked anybody either. I know that he didn’t hate me. I just liked to debate topics that were current and controversial, and I am sure that he did too. Hot topics that perennially came up for debate were the justification to go into Iraq for the (first) Gulf War, President George H. W. Bush and his Thousand Points of Light campaign, and the Democratic presidential nominee, Bill Clinton. Captain Wendell was very conservative, and he was an obviously staunch Republican. While I claimed to be a Republican and most times voted Republican, but I was (and am) a closet Democrat. I had more progressive views on most issues. The arguments between Captain Wendell and I became so animated that even Lieutenant Colonel Wood believed we hated each other. He started dividing the class for purposes of volleyball and other small group efforts to ensure that Captain Wendell and I were never on the same team or in the same small group. Then something happened. Our class took an off-site trip to the Holladay Distillery in Weston, Missouri. I’m not sure what we were supposed to accomplish during the off-site other than to tour the distillery and get drunk. I say get drunk because, back in those days you could go into the distiller’s sampling room and off sale, after a tour of the distillery. In the sampling room, you could purchase 10 shots of their Holladay Bourbon for a dollar. Do the math. That’s $.10 (ten cents) a shot. And that bourbon was some damn good tasting bourbon. After taking about half of the tour, I decided I had seen enough. I headed for the tasting room. When I wandered in, I learned that Captain Wendell had beaten me to the punch. He was already nursing a dollar’s worth of shots. I walked up to the bar and asked, “So, tell me, what do you have that’s good?” The guy behind the bar poured a single shot of the Holladay Bourbon and said, “Try that.” “How much do I owe you?” “That one is on the house.” “Much obliged. Thank you.” I tried it and said, “Damn! That was some good shit.” “You liked that, huh?” “Like I said, that was some damn good shit. Set me up.” “You want all 10 shots of just that?” “Yes please.” So, the guy behind the bar set me up with 10 shots of Holladay Bourbon. Before we left, I was chatting with Captain Wendell and invited him to come to karaoke sometime. He asked me for details, and I supplied them. I also bought two bottles of the Holladay bourbon. I decided I needed to have some of that to take with me for the road. Captain Wendell also bought a bottle. True to his word, Captain Wendell came over to the officers club to check out karaoke. He subsequently sang a Born to Be Wild duet with me. We had a blast entertaining the crowd. Then he told me about a sock hop that was happening the following Saturday and asked me if I was in. Hell yeah, I was in. I didn’t know they still did such things. The following Saturday, we went over to the sock hop in downtown Leavenworth. I hadn’t been to one of those kinds of events since I was in high school. My school teacher friends were at that sock hop, and I introduced them to Captain Wendell. He asked me how I knew them. I explained that they were part of my karaoke fan base. During the sock hop, the hosts held various contests to award prizes for various trivial things. For example, one question that they asked was for somebody to produce a coin purse. I always carried one, since my earliest childhood days, so I was the first to produce one. As a result, I won two free drinks. Then they asked for the first person to show them argyle socks. Captain Wendell had on argyle socks. We got two more free drinks. Next, they asked if anybody could produce a Kennedy $.50 (fifty-cent) piece. I always carried one of those too. The reason I carried it was because I thought that it was a lucky piece. Well, that’s not entirely true. In all of my different military schools, I told my classmates that it brought me luck. Of course, they bought the bullshit hook, line, and sinker. So, naturally, they always made outlandish offers to buy that Kennedy half-dollar from me. But, of course, I would never sell it. You can’t sell good luck. You know what PT Barnum had to say about that, right? “There’s a sucker born every minute.” When I produced the Kennedy half-dollar, we got two more drinks. The hosts asked us if we had somebody working on the inside. How could we know what questions they would ask? We couldn’t of course. But we explained that we had been to sock hops before. We were used to being asked bullshit questions. A couple of weeks later, our class had an outing in Kansas City. Captain Wendell asked if he could ride with me since he didn’t have transportation. I said sure. On the way down to Kansas City, I introduced Captain Wendell to the music of the B-52s. He had never heard them before. I had been listening to their music for over 10 years, and I was pretty sure he would like it. I was absolutely correct. He loved the B-52s. He especially loved the Wild Planet album. He loved it so much, in fact, that he asked to borrow my Wild Planet cassette tape(the things before compact disks). I lent him that cassette and I never got it back. The sorry bastard kept my Wild Planet cassette. Not to worry, I have long since replaced that missing album in my music library. At the end of the evening, when it was time to leave, Lieutenant Colonel Wood was trying to ensure that everybody had a ride back to Leavenworth. When he got around to Captain Wendell and asked who his ride was. Captain Wendell said, “I’m good sir. I’m riding with Captain Masters.” Lieutenant Colonel Wood looked at him in surprise and asked, “You’re riding with Captain Masters? Did I hear that right? How much did you have to drink?” I looked over at Lieutenant Colonel Wood and said, “You heard right, Sir. Captain Wendell is with me. We came down together.” The whole class seemed shocked to hear that Captain Wendell and I had come to the outing together. During our entire time together, we had been diametrically opposed to each other, and always arguing. Yet here we were as friendly as two peas in a pod. So, why shouldn’t we be friends? For those of you that don’t know, CAS3 is, after all, just another exercise in futility.
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