Avalanche of words

 Every square foot of our barracks at Third Platoon, Charlie Company, Armor Officer Candidate School was governed by an absolute standard, especially the meticulous staging of the displays of Army Regulations and training manuals on racks below footlockers.  Each of the 35 platoon candidates maintained a fan of 27 such reading material volumes all arranged in an exact, prescribed order.  That platoon library consisted of 945 books in total.

Then the reckoning.

On a particular Spring evening in 1967, as we returned to the Company area following a difficult and exhausting day of tank gunnery training we were met with an unorganized array of randomly strewn books in the center of the ground level quad directly below the fourth-floor balcony of our third platoon domicile.  The truth of an ugly horrifying event quickly sank in. 

While we were away, our assigned TAC Officer had single-handedly taken to the balcony and heaved 918 of those regulation books - nearly a ton of military doctrine - over the railing and onto the concrete below.  The silence of our gaze was deafening.  

It wasn’t until we had climbed the 60 or so steps to our home quarters that we were truly aware that only the third platoon was impacted by the newly created paper mountain below.   Upon glancing at our empty book racks, we all realized that one rack, and only one, still held its perfect, untouched arc of 27 books. The sole display that had escaped the catastrophic purge.

Obviously, that one, in-tact, display was deemed by the TAC man to be the true presentation standard since it departed from the sequencing of manuals shelved by the other 34 candidates.

The collective message was immediate and agonizing: Retrieve every single one of those 918 manuals, carry them four flights up and re-shelve them in the 34 each, correct, newly revealed sequence.  Failure by one meant repeating the Sisyphean task until every man adhered to the one, new, flawless standard.