The freak of Fort Gordon, a friend and I got orders to go back to Fort Gordon.

We had recently been pinned with sergeant stripes and completing more advanced training

was one of the conditions. The U.S. Army demands to keep those stripes. We'd both been

to Fort Gordon, Georgia before. There's new boots, fresh trainees, out of basic training.

But now returning as non-commissioned officers would yield many nice benefits. The main

one being staying out of reach of the duty rosters. The duty roster was a list of all detail,

and detail are all small odd jobs that sprinkled the artillery of all lower enlisted soldiers

everywhere. These little jobs were a pain in the butt too.

There were all sorts of guard duty, bat guard, fire guard, roving guard, crossing guard. There

was driver detail where you'd show for a certain hire-ups round the base. And then there

was KP. Yep, kitchen patrol, where you'd sometimes wash dishes and pots and pans to the

wee hours of the night. They really do make you peel potatoes too, which I always felt

was one of the worst and most humiliating of all detail next to digging shittles. But

the best of it was guarding signal tower. Or so we thought, until various tales caught

up to us reporting that signal tower was haunted, that all of Fort Gordon was haunted.

This big old building sat in the back middle of Fort Gordon. It's a big, ominous presence,

and it's not unlike a step pyramid in South America. And it looks down on all the other

buildings as if they were mirror-broil subjects. Or even better to me, it reminded me of that

devil's tower in close encounters.

What was good about roving detail at signal tower was that our barracks sat in a shadow,

a double parking lot away. For a battalion level detail, which usually took you to some

remote part of the fort to later be staged to another location. We were glad there was

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