The Hunting Trip Read Online Free PDF

“borrowed” the Notary Public stamping tool and a dozen or so sheets of paper and returned to Manhattan. He went to his father’s apartment at 590 Park Avenue, got the doorman to admit him, and once inside wrote two letters on his father’s typewriter.
    One was to his father, in which he said he realized he had shamed the family more than enough, and was going to join the Army tospare the family any further pain. The second was To Whom This May Concern.
    The second said the undersigned had no objection to the enlistment of his son Philip W. Williams III in the Army. He signed the letter P. Wallingford Williams, Jr., and Marjorie B. Alexander, Notary Public of the State of New Jersey, and applied the stamp to it.
    It took him three tries to get it right, but finally it looked legitimate.
    He took the letter and the previously altered birth certificate from where he’d hidden it in a copy of
War and Peace
on his father’s bookshelves, and went back to Newark, this time to the Recruiting Office in the Post Office Building.
    He didn’t get to join the Army that day. But the Army put him up overnight, and the next morning, after a physical examination, swore him in and put him on a bus for Fort Dix, New Jersey.
    It wasn’t until his father returned to Manhattan three days later that his family learned what he had done. A family conference was held on how to get him out of the Army—“My God, he’s only sixteen!”—and then what to do with him when he came home.
    His grandfather, who was after all a lawyer, offered a suggestion:
    For the time being, do nothing. Give him a week or so’s taste of Army life, having barrel-chested sergeants yelling at him, marching, et cetera, and he’ll be begging for us to get him out of the Army. And maybe when he’s learned his lesson, he’ll behave.
    Every once in a while, despite what they would have you believe, lawyers are wrong. And this was the case here. Phil took to the Army like a duckling to water.
    [ FOUR ]
    U.S. Army Reception Center
    Fort Dix, New Jersey
    Monday morning, October 7, 1946
    O n Phil’s first day in the Army, he was issued about fifty pounds of uniforms and given inoculations against every disease known to medical science. In the morning of his second day, he was given the Army General Classification Test, known as the AGCT, to see where he would best fit into the nation’s war machine.
    In the afternoon, he faced a Classification Specialist, who took one look at Phil, his AGCT score, and then arranged for him to take the test again.
    â€œSecondary school dropouts” are not supposed to score 144 on the AGCT test. All it took to get into Officer Candidate School was an AGCT score of 110. The second time Phil took the test, this time under supervision to make sure no one was slipping him the answers, he scored 146.
    The next morning, he faced another Classification Specialist, this one an officer, who explained to him the doors his amazing AGCT score had opened for him in the nation’s war machine. Heading the list of these, the captain told Phil, was that he could apply for competitive entrance to the United States Military Academy at West Point. If accepted, he would be assigned to the USMA Preparatory School, and on graduation therefrom be appointed to the Corps of Cadets at West Point.
    That suggested to Phil that he was being offered the privilege of jumping from the frying pan into the fire. He had had experience with a military academy, specifically the Bordentown MilitaryAcademy, and it had not been pleasant. He had been sent home after seven weeks of military service, so to speak, after having been found guilty of having talked a fellow cadet, PFC Edwin W. Bitter, into stuffing three unrolled rolls of toilet tissue down the muzzle of the saluting cannon. When the cannon had fired at the next morning’s reveille formation, it looked for a minute or so as if Southern New Jersey