Paige Sawyer and Tom Yohn were both pranksters and perfectly willing to avoid ‘needless’ work on occasion. When the platoon was in from the field, Staff Sergeant Bobby Jones insisted that preventive maintenance be performed on all of the platoon’s vehicles. It was not only a regulatory requirement but a good practice as well. After checking the oil, transmission, tires, etc., we would take the vehicles to the P O L point and gas them up. One morning, after motor stables, Paige found a 6 to 8-inch spring from who knows where. He and Tom got together, found a can of olive drab spray paint, and renewed the rusted spring. They took it to Bobby Jones and told him that they had found it under the hood of the jeep and didn’t know what it was. Jones said it was some kind of heating spring and they needed to find out where it went. An hour later, after a rest in the shade, they went back to Jones and told him they had discovered that it had come from just under the carburetor and had re-installed it. Jones thanked them for their outstanding job.
Another time, after doing maintenance on Sergeant First Class Chuck Carroll’s jeep, they went to him to report that it wasn’t running exactly right and that they needed to do some troubleshooting. After driving around downtown Nha Trang for a while, killing time, they returned the jeep and reported that it was now running just fine.
Merriam Webster offers that the word ‘soldier’ can be used as a verb meaning ‘to make a pretense of working while really loafing.’
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