Stories
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When I was transferred to Greece it proved to be a perfect environment for the practice of non-intellectual procedure. Whereas many of my fellow servicemen spent a lot of their spare time in bars, I spent my time walking the streets and sitting on benches watching. Greece was totally unfamiliar and I couldn't understand the language. This meant that I did not overlay intellectual values and preconceived prejudice on everything. It was sensory experience and I was free to make whatever I wanted of it. Since I didn't understand what people were saying, anybody could be anybody and be and say anything. Being young and not understanding how the worlds of economics and politics worked, I could make anything out to be anything I fancied, and make it more than average and mundane.
An AWOL, absent without leave, turned up at HQs DC one weekend. He was AWOL from Greece. He had a litany of woe to tell about the army in Greece where he was stationed. At that time I did not pay a lot of attention, not knowing that I would be assigned to the same unit in future. When I got my orders I imagined and others agreed, that I would probably be assigned to the embassy or some such cushy job in Athens wearing civilian clothes. How wrong could I be? And when I got to Greece I heard about that same AWOL. I was in the same unit as he, and though he an enlisted man, he had been best buddies with the commanding officer the Major. When he went AWOL the Major was all broken up about it or so I was told. His attitude changed and not for the better. Maybe that was when he started sending all the low ranking enlisted men to the psychiatrist in Germany.
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