Major Joinagain

He said he preferred the hospitals to being in his unit. And he did and was hospitalized most of the time, with appendicitis and one thing and another. And I was to witness how he did it. Holsue was short and rotund, a baby-face blonde with glasses. We were doing a bivouac or army overnight, out on the stretches of arid earth, rock and scrubby olive trees a couple miles from our compound toward the mountain. Someone had put a ration can into the fire around which a bunch of us were sitting, probably to heat it up and forgot about it. And it blew up ! a piece of something hitting Holsue in the eye. Of course he had to be hospitalized. As an aside, this area on the Greek Air Base was leased from the local landowners who really didn't seem to use it for anything. They were not going to plant anything being that there was no water out there. Maybe they got some olives out of it from the scattered olive trees on the rocky terrain. But there they were with a tractor and plow, gouging the sandy soil and rocks all around us all evening. Speculation consisted in two theories or that since the local town of Eleusis, we called it Elefsina, was known to be politically a communist stronghold, it was said that the farmers were spying on us. The other was that since it was their land, they were simply emphasizing the point.

When I got there every man in the unit below Sargent, had been to the psychiatrist in Germany. Not because any of these men were crazy, but because Major Joinagain who sent them there, more than likely was. Or as some said, he was the most stupid brain in uniform. Every man had been demoted at least once, some as many as three times.

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