Basic Training Story 4722

I'm doing basic training at Fort Knox in the winter of 1990. For some reason, they loaded my platoon onto several buses and took all of us into Louisville to a large church. Maybe they allowed this because it was close to Thanksgiving. The members of the church fed us a nice meal and we reloaded the buses. On my bus, we noticed a private was missing.He had snuck out of the church to make a liquor run. We're in a panic because we all know that if he gets caught, we're all going to get smoked.

A DS gets on the bus and calls roll. Some guy in the back says "here" for him and the DS didn't do a headcount.So, the buses start rolling back to Knox short one private. Unknown to all of us is that the private is hiding in the bushes watching all of this. He's trying to get onto our bus without getting caught. As the buses leave, he flags down a cab, hops in, and says, "follow those buses".When we arrive at Knox, he pays the cabbie and gets out about a half a block away. In all of the milling around and confusion of several buses emptying, he calmly rejoins my platoon with no DSs being made the wiser. We all felt like that we "got away with it" and no one ever told a DS what happened.The private was grateful we covered for him and the spoils of the liquor run were shared with everyone.