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He had people scraping the floors with razor blades, scrubbing everything, washing windows while he paraded around giving orders, making cracks and laughing his head off. The one attribute Whom had was that he was laughing all the time mostly to himself. Then we were suppose to wear fatigues for these GI parties. At Fort Myer we didn't wear fatigues. It was class A uniforms with tie. Then he started holding formations out back in the parking lot for drill. He would drill us, right-face, left-face, about-face, march, halt and when done with that give a McCarthy style lecture while we stood in ranks. 'Spose it was great fun for him pretending to be a gung-ho officer. The first week only one person wore fatigues. About this he was very unhappy. Each week we got a lecture and each week more and more people were wearing fatigues. He was becoming ever more fanatical and tyrannical, acting like Patton. Finally I was the last one not wearing fatigues still in civilian clothes.
The thing was Whom had a lot of power. He could get people out of the army and in a quarter of the time it would normally take. He could get people shipped out against their will to places the like the arctic. The thing was it turned out Whom had more power than anybody, which was why everyone gossiped about him and had a fierce dislike of him.
I was the loan holdout. It was him or me. I wasn't going to wear fatigues. So he had to turn me in. He sent me over to the orderly room to turn myself in to the sergeant of Charge of Quarters for the evening for insubordination. Well the sergeant didn't know what to do with me. He didn't want to mess with cadre and make any enemies.
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