While I was in command of my first unit at Fort Lewis, Washington, I developed a really close bond with my First Sergeant. Our bond was so special that the commander of my sister unit became jealous. His jealousy grew to the point where he started calling my First Sergeant names. His behavior was actually quite childish, and I told him that on a few occasions. I understood. He had issues with his First Sergeant. Some of the issues he had with his First Sergeant were borderline disciplinary. My Equal Opportunity NCO was receiving a lot of complaints from soldiers in my sister unit that I was obliged to report to the area support group headquarters. That only added to the tension between us commanders and our two units. Meanwhile, my First Sergeant and I got along just fine. Several nights a week we got together to drink a few beers at the minimart. We always started off talking shop, but our conversations usually ended up gravitating toward maintenance and cars. My First Sergeant’s pet car was a Triumph TR-7. It seemed like he was always tinkering with something on the engine of that damn thing to keep it running. I always thought that the Triumph was the biggest piece of shit on the road. That is, of course, if you could get it started and get it onto the road. Most of the time, you couldn’t even get the damned things to start. But my First Sergeant loved his Triumph just the same. He was always replacing the carburetors on his Triumph. I know he tinkered with three different types. The ones that stuck in my head were the Weber, the Mikuni, and the Holley carburetors. I personally don’t think any particular one of them worked any better than the others, but he tried them all anyway. I never really had a pet car, but my pet at the time I knew my First Sergeant was my Fiat Spider 2000. It seemed like every time we got together to drink beer; we would talk about the latest maintenance horror story that we had experienced with our pet cars. Every once in a while, we would talk about the latest and greatest model vehicle to hit the market. The latest car to catch our attention was the Ford Thunderbird Turbocharged Coupe. It was the latest and greatest muscle car to hit the scene, and it was getting a lot of media attention. Our conversations always drifted around to talk of the Ford Thunderbird. Finally, we decided we had to do something about it. We decided we had to take some time after work each day to go visit each Ford dealership in the greater Tacoma, Puyallup, and Olympia market area to see if we could test drive a Ford Thunderbird Turbo Coupe. Bear in mind, we had no intention of ever buying a Ford Thunderbird. Oh, heavens to megatroid, no. We were leaving the buying to all of the suckers with no money and years to pay it back. It’s always a bargain when you can walk into a car dealer and snag a loan for a mere 18 or 19 percent interest rate. What a bargain. Hell, you might as well start the party now. Like I said, we had absolutely no intention of buying. We just wanted to drive the damn car to see how it performed. We wanted to take it out on the highway and run it through its paces. That was our plan. When we arrived at the first Ford dealership, we started looking at the Thunderbird coupes as soon as we got out of our car. The salesman who came over to assist us asked, “Are you fellas here from Fort Lewis?” Man, with his powers of observation and deduction, this guy was obviously destined to be a brain surgeon. We were dressed in our military uniforms. Wasn’t it obvious that we were from Fort Lewis? I looked at my First Sergeant and said, “Next time, we stay dressed in our normal green suits to avoid confusion.” My first sergeant started laughing but said nothing. The salesman missed the reference to the normal green suit altogether. Man was this guy slow. My First Sergeant replied, “We were interested in the Ford Thunderbird Turbocharged Coupe.” Then we started talking performance numbers and car features with the salesman. Finally, he asked, “Well, gentlemen, would you like to give it a test drive?” That was music to our ears. He had finally said the magic words. Test drive. We answered in unison, “Yes, we would.” Once we were in the car and out on the road, we asked if we could take it out on the highway. He asked us why we wanted to take it out on the highway. We explained that you cannot get a good feel for how a car handles and accelerates without taking it out on the highway. He bought that, hook, line, and sinker. Gul-e-bull. As soon as we got out on the highway, we took turns running the car through its paces. The hapless salesman sat in the back seat and kept reminding us that tickets were the responsibility of the driver. We stuck to the back roads because we were pretty sure that the Highway Patrol was out cruising Highway 512, Highway 16, Interstate 5, and Highway 101. They couldn’t be everywhere at once. We stuck to roads like Highway 7, Highway 507, Highway 510, and highway 410. When we got back to the dealership, the salesman was looking for some kind of commitment. But we weren’t into giving him a commitment because we had no intention of buying a car. He asked us to provide him our contact information. We willingly did so with a slight hitch. I provided the phone number for the commander of my sister unit, and my First Sergeant provided the phone number for the First Sergeant of our sister unit. As for our names, we scribbled in unintelligible garbage that I was sure the salesman would not be able to read later. At each subsequent dealership that we visited; we followed the same routine. It worked without a hitch with one exception. A salesman at one dealership in Olympia wouldn’t even let us take the car off the lot without putting a deposit down on the car. We told him we had no intention of putting a deposit down on a car that we might not buy. He told us a story that he had heard about a couple of soldiers going around to all of the Ford dealerships and test driving the Ford Thunderbirds with no intention of buying a Thunderbird. He said he thought that might be us. We looked at each other with that ‘well, the jig is up’ look and shrugged our shoulders. What else could we do? The tables had turned. It turned out that we were the test drive dummies. We turned around and walked out of that dealership. Test driving the Ford Thunderbirds was fun, but it had proved to be just another exercise in futility.
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Dead indited articles, Really enjoyed reading through. Loree Hube Saraiya