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Jerry W. "Slats" Jackson
our old hometown hangs heavy in many of my ramblings in this book. It was home to me from the time I “discovered America” back in 1932 until I was induced into Uncle Sam’s Army after graduating fro...view moreour old hometown hangs heavy in many of my ramblings in this book. It was home to me from the time I “discovered America” back in 1932 until I was induced into Uncle Sam’s Army after graduating from Texas Tech in 1955. Incidentally, those two years in the military were enjoyable ones. We had just quit shooting in Korea and hadn’t resumed the practice until Vietnam. I lucked out by landing at Fort Ord, Calif., for basic training. Nice spot for that duty, just a stone’s throw from such exotic places as Pebble Beach and Cannery Row. (Actually, I wasn’t much of a gung ho soldier. I was lousy on the firing range, where “Maggie’s drawers” – a euphemism for that white flag that another soldier waved when one’s bullet missed not only the bull’s-eye but the entire target – was commonplace in my case. But what you must understand is that the only other gun I had fired previously was a weapon of minimal destruction – a Red Ryder BB gun – so what could you expect?) So they figured that I was a good candidate for clerk-typist school and sent me, following boot camp, to 5th Army Headquarters in Chicago at 51st and Hyde Park streets – hard by Lake Michigan – where I typed up reenlistment assignments to my heart’s content before talking up to my CWO boss that I really, really would like to do my typing in Germany. So he had this friend, CWO Emerick, with the 8th Infantry Division Headquarters at Fort Carson in Colorado Springs, who he said would soon be “gyroscoping to Germany” (that would make a great song title, eh?) and he prevailed on him to take me in. So I spent that summer of ’56 (a good season to be there) at Carson before switching places with the division in Germany, my promised land that was full of joy and contentment.view less
Books by Jerry W. "Slats" Jackson
In the Rearview Mirror: A Perspective on a Selective Collective of Reflexive Reflectives and Recollectives, Sans Invectives