Capt. Childs’ Scissors

This is a sequel to my previous post "My Shining Hour in Uncle Sam's Army."

Capt. Childs was a clean-desk man, a do-nothing man, a lounger in the officers’ mess, and his

Tripler Medical Center

favorite tool for passing the time in our personnel department was a shining pair of scissors with eight-inch blades like little hinged bayonets. In the personnel department, of which he was head, his chief occupation was making symmetrical arrangements of the things on his desktop, which occupied the window-lit corner of the room and made him master of all he surveyed. In his spare time he occupied himself cutting paper with the long the blades of those shining shears. What the purpose of the whacking and snipping was, I never learned, but I could see the pleasure of it. Like cutting out paper-doll chains. Unlike the short zigzag whacks made by the usual scissors, however, his blades cut with military precision. Long lines straight as a ruler that he could dress by rank and file.

The personnel work was done by enlisted men like myself, and such ordering about as was required was done by Staff Sergeant Crenshaw, a lean black man from Cleveland, a lifer but outside the office he had funny stories about officers. With six stripes on his sleeve, he was waiting for the seventh. He contrasted with Capt. Childs, who was stocky, running to fat, with a florid complexion and reddish blond hair in the obligatory military crew cut.

We had enough to do. Maybe twenty of us clerical grunts to maintain a couple thousand “live” personnel folders for men at Tripler Medical Center, official personnel (doctors, nurses, caretakers, and grunts like ourselves) or invalids--the wounded and maimed from Nam, if they were lucky, doing rehab therapy--learning basics like the use of prosthetic arms and legs. Plus the countless dead files for the legions who’d come and gone. The army is a bureaucracy, and every bureaucracy runs on paper. Capt. Childs didn’t lack material for his scissors, for we were the receiving end of the vast paper production the army ran on. We sorted documents and filed them, he whacked and snipped them into ruled lines then trash-canned most of the result. 

For the first time in my life, I had a regular job--nine hours a day, five and a half days a week--an easy life, and I hated it. The chief defect of this regularity was living in the barracks, which at any time of the non-working day was filled with the jarring jocularity of men gathered without purpose and against their will. We were all there for the same non-purpose: to put in our time and to get back to “the world.” In the midst of this chaos and cacophony came my release: a key. We grunts had keys to the offices where we worked. We weren’t supposed to have them, there’d be a heavy Article 15 for anyone found with one, but have them we did. We cherished them like talismans just for the fun of defiance. When a guy got short (became a short-timer) and ready to go back to the world, he left his key with a buddy, and thus it happened that I was blessed with one. What this allowed me to do was visit the personnel office on Sundays when all was quiet, and sit at a blessed desk with a blessed typewriter and write to my blessed bitter heart’s content.  

Thus it was that there came to me the opportunity to borrow Capt. Childs’ scissors. Sunday after Sunday, it was more temptation than I could bear. They seemed to gleam with the words “take me, take me.” So one Sunday I put them in my pocket. Mid-morning the next day Capt. Childs reached for his trustworthy blades and didn’t find them. He searched his desk drawers. He asked Sgt. Crenshaw. He had Sgt. Crenshaw ask us clerks. By this time Crenshaw had tumbled to the joke and had trouble hiding his laughter as he went around from desk to desk asking us. Even dull-witted Capt. Childs’ got it. He may have heard someone snickering, but however it was he got it and he was not amused. He began to snort and fume. Clearly some enlisted grinch had violated his sacred space and stolen his totem toy. And what was he to do? He couldn’t hand out Article 15s to twenty men for the crime of one. That would look like he couldn’t maintain discipline and delay the granting of the sacred grail, which was to make the rank of major. He could only gnaw his bowels and stew in his own juice, while the steam rose from his pink ears.

Thus it came to pass that as I processed out of this man’s army in September of that year, deep in my duffel bag wrapped in my fatigues was a shining object. I have kept it fifty years, and as I write it’s still in my desk drawer. For me it’s a trophy, all I have left of my two year tour of duty, more meaningful that the row of five medals we called the Vietnam pack which was received by every soldier in the 9th Division, which thought to improve its own standing by awarding lots of medals to the men who didn’t have too many Article 15s. Over the years they’ve all disappeared, as I gave them to girlfriends who eventually trash-canned them after we parted. I gave the last one to my daughter Shelley when she was about three, a brass circle hanging from a red and yellow ribbon. She liked it for a day but quickly found something more to her taste. Canvassing every drawer, shelf, and closet of our house in the way that a three-year-old will, she found the scissors--a long, sharp, pointed tool for cutting paper, perfect for the passions of a three year old--and she loved them. They spoke to a child’s heart.

One thing she quickly discovered, though. Those long straight blades were no good for cutting out paper-doll chains. For those you need short-bladed scissors that can whack and pink and follow a curved line.