National Affairs: The Word from God

On K.P. duty in the G.I. mess hall at fancy-pants Fort Myer, Va., just across the Potomac from Washington, Pfc. Andrew God Jr. was supposed to be peeling potatoes. But like many a soldier before him on many another potato pile, Soldier God, a Detroit architect before the draft caught him, was fairly hacking the daylights out of the spuds, so his mess sergeant reported him for goofing off. Sent up before Captain Thomas Woods, his commanding officer, for disciplinary action, Pfc. God refused a company-punishment sentence of two hours of hard labor every day for 14 days, demanded a summary court-martial, as was his right-even in such absurd cases as this—under the new (1951) Uniform Code of Military Justice.

Last week word drifted out from Fort Myer about Andrew God’s court-martial. The trial had all the trimmings of the customary military tribunal, even a heavily worded bill of specifications: Pfc. Andrew God, 25, “having knowledge of a lawful order … to peel and eye potatoes as directed, an order which it was his duty to obey, did . . . fail to obey the same. [He] did, without proper authority, willfully suffer potatoes, of some value, military property of the U.S., to be destroyed by improper peeling.”

The prosecution’s case was clear enough. The mess sergeant testified that Pfc. God, knife in hand, had removed the eyes in thick wedges, sliced off random peels in flat slabs (instead of removing them nice and thin). Then the mess sergeant, armed with a potato and peeler, earnestly re-enacted the whole business, slashing ruthlessly away until the potato looked like a candidate for a shoestring fry.

The case for the defense was stronger, and just as reminiscent of TV’s Sergeant Bilko and his Fort Baxter friends. A mess sergeant from another company earnestly testified that Pfc. God’s peelings were quite normal, considering that the accused had had only a knife to work with instead of a hand potato-peeler. Moreover, defense counsel (an officer picked for the job) was able to prove that Pfc. God’s peelings (saved as evidence by the company commander) weighed less than those carved by his own mess sergeant.

That did it. The two-hour trial was over; Andrew God got off scot-free, and not even Bilko’s Colonel Hall should have been surprised. “The whole thing may seem ridiculous to someone outside the Army,” suggested a press officer superfluously last week, as he tried to explain the strange turns of the Army’s crunching, newfangled wheels of justice. How ridiculous, indeed, only God knew.