I have briefly mentioned Fort Lost in the Woods (Leonard Wood), Missouri, here and there in several different posts. But I haven’t really talked about anything that happened there. Here I will go on record and state that I was in fact stationed Fort Leonard Wood as my first duty station in the Army. Oh yes, I have many fond memories of Fort Lost in the Woods because that is where I was inducted into the Army and took basic training. I am sure everyone remembers their basic training experiences with the fond memories it brought them. The hundreds, possibly thousands, of push-ups that you may have executed. The numerous miles that you ran. How about the many miles you marched? Back in my day, you had to do at least one 25-mile road march. Perhaps there are a few things you don’t remember. The horizontal ladders a.k.a. the monkey bars. Those were lateral bars that were elevated off the ground about 7 feet. And there were a series of 14 bars separated by a space in between the bars of about 12 to 14 inches. The bars themselves were over an inch in diameter and consisted of a solid steel inner bar surrounded by a rotating metal sleeve. To successfully maneuver a horizontal ladder, you had to traverse the ladder down the 14 bars turn around and traverse 13 bars back to the beginning to complete a total of 27 bars to pass the station. Sounds easy, huh? Yeah right. It was a lot more difficult than it looked. By 1983, the Army did away with that station as part of the physical fitness test. Oh yeah, that used to be part of the physical fitness test. Even though the Army had gotten rid of that exercise, I still had to do that horizontal ladder every time I got in line to enter the mess hall when I was going through Officer Candidate School (OCS) in 1983. Such a joy. I think they just made us do it in OCS as a harassment tactic. Another exercise station on the first PT test when I came into the Army was the crab walk or the inverted walk. That was where you had to get down on your hands and feet with your butt facing the ground and your stomach and face facing the sky. Then, you had to walk on your hands and feet forward 25 meters, and then walk back to where you started from in the reverse direction. But I digress. My fondest memory of Fort Lost in the Woods was of a particular drill sergeant by the name of Staff Sergeant Bobby Farmer. Staff Sergeant Farmer stood only 5 foot one with his boots on and he weighed all of 105 pounds. A good gust of wind could practically lift him off his feet. He walked, rather marched, with a little bounce in his step such that it looked like he was actually doing toe raises each time he took a step. I say it was the little bounce, but the bounce was actually very noticeable. And once you knew him for more than a day or two, you caught on as to why he was doing that. He was doing it to make himself look taller albeit rather ineffectively. I always wanted to tell him, “Yo drill sergeant, that bounce in your step. Yeah. It ain’t working. You’re still a short little runt.” And another bad habit he had to try to make himself look big was that he smoked these big Antonio and Cleopatra cigars. The big fat suckers. He always liked to copy this Colonel on base who also smoked cigars. That Colonel was a short little runt too. One thing about Staff Sergeant Farmer that really irritated me was that he always deliberately mispronounced my name. My name isn’t that hard to pronounce. Two basic words. Wright and Masters. Seems pretty simple. I mean even if he got the spelling wrong, Wright is right, and Masters is Masters. It would be pretty hard to screw the pronunciation of those two words up, don’t you think? Invariably though, he would call me white marsh tears, Private mash tours, and private marsh steers. He seemed to pronounce everybody else’s names correctly. He would only screw up mine. I got the distinct feeling he was screwing with me. Okay. Two people can play that game. He drove a 1976 Jeep CJ7 ragtop. So, whenever I saw him driving by, I’d yell out, “Hey drill sergeant how is that cheap junk (CJ). Basically, the ragtop on those old CJ’s were all plastic including the entire door assembly. They made a god-awful racket when you got them up to speed on the highway and that plastic started flapping in the breeze. You could not hear yourself think inside those vehicles out on the highway. Finally, I finished all the requirements for graduation, but then I got sick and got sent to the hospital for four days. As a result, my training company held me over. It’s probably one of the reasons why I got jerked around when I got sent to Fort Benning accidentally to go to airborne school. I can’t swear to it, but if it walks like a duck and it talks like a duck, there’s a damn good chance it’s a duck. Anyway, when you’re running around at Fort Leonard Wood in November it’s not really snowing but it’s not really raining, it’s kind of in between. So, it’s really cold in the morning but really warm in the afternoon so you really can’t dress for the weather. A lot of trainees were getting sick. I was just one of them. When I got back to the unit as a holdover, Staff Sergeant Farmer made me his assistant instructor. Go figure. Suddenly, he knew how to pronounce my name perfectly. It was magic. Suddenly, I was Private Masters. And by the way, no more walking for this private. No way José. Suddenly, I was always riding shotgun in Staff Sergeant Farmer’s cheap junk (CJ). My oh my, how times had changed. Staff Sergeant Farmer even offered me a cigar here and there, but I never accepted because I don’t smoke. And on the one or two occasions when we pulled duty together, he took me out to drink afterward like we were old buddies. It almost made me want to overlook the fact that for eight or 10 weeks the guy was needling and ridiculing me and singling me out from all the other soldiers in his platoon. Why did he do that? To this day I have never figured that out. Instead I used and abused his feigned kindness at the end of my tour at Fort Leonard Wood as a fair exchange for what was otherwise an exercise in futility.
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