THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Friday, May 24, 1996 TAG: 9605240517
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: GUY FRIDDELL
LENGTH: 52 lines
The Army is bent on privatizing Kitchen Police, or KP - an intention it has been proclaiming for 25 years. KP keeps hanging on.
During World War II, KP acclimated masses of civilians to the military. To an inductee at a sink piled high with pots and pans, it said, ``You're in the Army now!''
Few drawbacks in daily affairs were comparable to dressing in clean khakis on a Saturday morning and arriving at headquarters to pick up a pass into town, only to find one's name on the day's KP roster.
It was the pits.
When our outfit waited 60 days on red alert to leave camp at a moment's notice and go overseas, the Army kept its eye on us by putting all 380 men on KP at once.
We manned early and late shifts, feeding 5,000 at a time through a massive kitchen at the center of four huge dining halls.
Among many chores, the most prized duty was that of a six-man crew that ran the dish-washing machine. After giving each tin food tray a quick brushing and a dip at two huge sinks, the GIs stacked the trays vertically in wire, wood-framed racks.
A chain pulled the racks on rollers along a waist-high track over a course as big as half a tennis court. At three stations, each rack of trays rolled through a soaping and two steaming rinses.
This mechanized operation was a vast advance over that at most mess kitchens where a GI, bent over a sink, washed dishes by hand.
The wide-ranging, clattering contraption looked as if it had been put together by Boob McNutt of the comic strip.
We had pulled perpetual KP for a week when somebody, inspired, sent his green fatigue hat, soiled and floppy, through the dishwasher. When it arrived clean at the end of the line, he clapped it on his head and bowed, to applause from all.
The crew sent through a rack of hats. GIs elsewhere, hearing the jubilation at the washing machine, drifted over and threw in their hats. Ere long every other crate conveyed hats.
Such schemes escalate. In no time, some wag dispatched his shirt. The area of the dish-washing machine was taking on the air of a Chinese laundry.
Drudgery had become fun. It took one back to one's childhood. Operating the newly merged dish-washing, fatigue-cleaning laundry was as diverting as running a Lionel electric train. GIs whistled, laughed, as they worked.
The ornery KP Pusher, when he saw what was going on at his dishwasher, flew into a rage. But what could he do? How punish souls already going through nine circles of Hades on perpetual KP.
He could put them on old-fashioned pots and pans, that's what he could do.
And did. ILLUSTRATION: Cartoon by CNB