I previously mentioned three momentous events that occurred on one significant day, December 10, 1985, when I was working At the Directorate of Matériel, 593rd Area Support Group, Fort Lewis, Washington. Those events, in no particular order, were that I would become the new commander of the 508th Maintenance Detachment, my wife and I had received news that she was pregnant with our second child, and my wife had been sworn in that day as a naturalized citizen of the United States. For us, that was a very momentous day indeed. We subsequently learned that our second child would be a boy. As time progressed, I prepared for my change of command, which was scheduled to occur in April 1986. Meanwhile, my boss at the Directorate of Matériel, 593rd Area Support Group, decided that I needed to prove myself one more time before I took command. As if I hadn’t already proven myself. The guy was new. What could I say? Yeah, yeah. I know. The obvious answer was that I could say no. I could even tell the guy to go pound sand up his third point of contact. You know. His rectum hole. And I am sure that I could even find one of those big wooden mallets that we used to drive GP medium and GP large tent stakes into the ground with, to help him pound that sand. But he might not have appreciated that. You know how some people get. And then there was the small matter of efficiency reports and what that might look like if I said no. Some people just don’t have a sense of humor. So, I jumped on a plane and flew down to California to conduct a nuclear surety field artillery gunnery evaluation. Somewhere along the line back when I was a Lieutenant, somebody had sent me to school to become nuke surety certified. As with all things Army, I thought it was just another opportunity to get away from my unit for two weeks and sham it up. Shit! Was I ever wrong. Ever since I had been assigned to this staff position, I had been going on fly-away trips to evaluate National Guard units. While they conducted their nuclear surety field artillery gunnery. Let me tell you. That is the most exciting shit in the world. Watching Cannon Cocker’s shoot their loads. And when it’s Cannon Cocker’s from the BB gun brigade, those sons of bitches couldn’t hit the broadside of a barn even if it were five feet in front of them. But let there be a stray cow or two in a pasture between where they were shooting from and where they were shooting to, and those sons of bitches would be sure to hit the goddamn cows. Go figure. You gotta love it. And of course, I couldn’t just have those part-timers standing around twiddling their thumbs while they were waiting to shoot their loads just in case a Colonel or a General came by. Oh hell no. So I came up with these little brochures that fit into a soldier’s hip pocket that covered various topics such as preventive maintenance on wheeled vehicles, preventive maintenance on the M-16 A1 rifle, and individual first-aid procedures. I called the brochures hip pocket training. During a visit to one nuclear surety field artillery gunnery evaluation, a General actually saw my hip pocket training being conducted and took that idea back to somewhere. That somewhere being echelons above and beyond reality. As a result, the Army subsequently started publishing some of those brochures as little pocket-sized booklets. So, I guess something good generally usually always comes from something bad. Finally, April 1986 rolled around, and I took command. My son was due to be born at the end of June. When it was time for my son to be born, I was well settled into my new role as a commander. However, the end of June came and went, but my son hadn’t been born. The Army doctor who was seeing my wife at Madigan Army Medical Center was coincidentally the same doctor who had handled the birth of my daughter in Korea. My wife was very comfortable with her and trusted her. Plus, it helped that she already knew her. And the doctor knew her previous medical history. That also helped. So when the doctor said there was no need to worry, we didn’t worry that Junior was taking his sweet time and dragging his feet about getting his ass out into the world. But you know, sometimes portends like that are indicators of things to come. If only we had known that my son was going to present my wife with some hard labor. But there is no way we could have suspected that Junior was going to be a troublemaker. Could we? The doctor said give him a week. Maybe it’s just not time yet. So, we waited a week. The only problem was that my wife had to go into the prenatal ward every damn day of the week. And that started to get really old after about the second or third day. After a week went by, Junior still didn’t want to come out. Now I was starting to get worried. I started asking the doctor basic questions like, “Are you sure you know what in the hell you’re doing?” Of course, that’s probably not the wisest question to ask the doctor when you’re expecting your child to be born. Especially if you expect the doctor to do a quality job. Well, the doctor asked us to give it another week. Of course, that meant coming into the hospital every damn day of the week again. One day, when we went into the hospital, the doctor got alarmed and said, “Oh shit! We have to induce labor right now. Go home and grab your wife’s things and change and come back to the hospital, Captain Masters.” I asked, “Do I have time to go home and do all that? Cuz it’ll take at least an hour round-trip.” “Oh, sure. No problem. Your baby probably won’t be born for at least two or three hours.” “Okay. If you say so.” So, I started walking down the hall. As I walked down the hall, I thought to myself, “Yeah. This boy is giving my wife a run for her money. He is going to make her do some hard labor.” But I didn’t even make it to the end of the hall before one of the orderlies started running after me yelling my name. I stopped and asked him what he wanted. He said that I had to come back because my wife was going into labor right then and they were taking her into the operating room. As soon as I saw the doctor I asked, “What in the hell happened to the ‘two or three hours’?” And the doctor gave me an answer that I would never in a million years have expected. She simply said, “Shit happens.” No shit. Nothing about the birth of our son was even remotely similar to the birth of our daughter. As I said, hard labor. He even had to grandstand his entrance into the world. Nothing was going to be easy with our son. Just three days after my son was born, my unit was alerted for deployment. But that is another story. Though the birth of my son seemed to be an exercise in futility, he brought great joy to our family.
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