Midnight Requisition

D Vautier
11/2006

There is a long respected belief among some in the service that if equipment or material happens to fall into your hand just by occasional chance or simple design, it constitutes basically a redistribution of military resources and is not to be considered anything at all bad or undesirable, (like theft or stealing).

Oftentimes these resource redeployments occur under cover of darkness and are more commonly referred to as “midnight requisitions.”  I myself was taken up from time to time in this more interesting activity.  This occurred before my conversion, of course to more honest living.

What better example of the biblical phrase “God giveth and God taketh away” than the case of the Chaplin’s jeep.  Our party chief desperately needed a new radiator for his jeep, so we decided to help God a little bit.

Jeeps are very useful in the field especially for a survey team. Typically there was one jeep and two ¾ ton trucks in a survey team.  Jeeps can go places where the bigger trucks can’t, and it was especially advantageous to have a working jeep in order to set and retrieve range poles, "recon"  forward stations, and just to keep the team from getting into difficult terrain.  But our jeep was deadlined, and we had some important survey work coming up.  The new radiator on order would not arrive for three weeks and things looked grim.  That's when the Lord stepped in.

One evening me and one of my good friends were having a few beers--maybe more than just a few beers.  He worked in the motor pool as a mechanic.  He wasn’t a very good mechanic, but he had a way of getting things done, often in any way he could.  On that occasion I was lamenting the predicament we were in, and that our jeep was deadlined with a bad radiator, and that it would take weeks to get a new one, and I just couldn't see how we could operate without a jeep.

It was at this moment of greatest insight that together we struck upon a most ingenious plan.  One of the gun batteries had their motor pool right next to us.  In the back was the Chaplin’s jeep.  It was a beautiful jeep, all shiny and nice, hardly ever used, and it had a most blessed and devout radiator, just waiting and eager to do a little more of God’s holy work.  When I pulled motor pool, I often glanced across the wire fence and wondered if that jeep was ever going to do anything in the way of real work.  So my buddy suggested that we go that very night do a little resource reallocation—a most excellent idea.

Fortunately it was a dark night and a gentle rain was falling, but in my exhilarated state of mind and body, I didn’t much care what the whether was like anyway.  A guard stood in front of the other motor pool smoking a cigarette, (you weren’t supposed to smoke on guard, but he knew the duty sergeant’s routine).  I snuck into our own motor pool, which we never bothered to guard anyway, and went to the back just opposite the jeep.  My buddy lifted the lower fence while I slipped under the wire.  I had all the necessary tools with me, and I know just where the radiator bolts were located.  I was able to retrieve the radiator in less than 5 minutes.

The next morning we heard something about a missing radiator on the Chaplin's jeep.

Next week we had a really good field trip.