By Ken Drenten

Arlo walked into the U.S. Army recruiting office on Main Street.

“Is this where the registration is, Colonel?” he asked a sergeant in an olive drab uniform who sat behind a desk, eating his lunch.

“I’m not a colonel, I’m a sergeant,” the sergeant said in a bored, annoyed tone.

He looked up to see a young man with shoulder-length brown hair, a beard and mustache, wearing faded jeans, a tie-dyed t-shirt and sandals.

Then he sighed and answered the young man’s question.

“That depends on what you’re registering for,” he said. “If you’re registering to vote, no. If you’re registering to join the Army, then you’ve come to the right place.”

“I want to join the Army then,” Arlo said.

“Then sit down on that bench over there, but don’t get too comfortable,” the sergeant replied. “I’ll be with you as soon as I finish my lunch.”

Arlo walked over and sat on the scarred, graffiti-carved bench. He noticed the words “Group W” on a sign next to the bench.

“Rotate that sign, would you?” the sergeant told him.

Shrugging, Arlo did so. Now the sign read “Group Q.”

“What’s ‘Group Q’ mean?” Arlo asked.

“Qualification,” grunted the sergeant between chews and swallows. Arlo gave him a blank look.

“It means Qualification,” he repeated gruffly. “We need to find out if you’re qualified to join. We’ll be finding that out in a minute, don’t you worry.”

“Sergeant, I’m beginning to think you want to sell me something. I just want to join the Army,” Arlo said. “I don’t know about all this qualification stuff.”

The sergeant slammed down his hands on the desk. He wiped his greasy fingers with a napkin, swept up the remains of his fast food lunch and dropped them into a wastebasket next to his desk.

“I see. We got ourselves a real thinker here.” He turned his bullet-shaped head toward a hallway and yelled, “Corporal!”

“Yes, Sergeant?” A thin, tidily-uniformed man with a reedy voice and a large adams apple appeared from a doorway.

“Take this young man into your office and see if his qualifications coincide with our requirements.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Don’t ‘Yes, sir’ me. I’m a sergeant, remember?”

Arlo walked behind the corporal into the office. “What did he say?” he asked the corporal.

But the corporal just pointed him to a chair and motioned for him to sit down. At the same time, the corporal got out a clipboard, a sheaf of papers and a pencil. He asked him so many questions Arlo could barely keep up.

The corporal wanted to know his name, address, phone number, birthdate, birthplace, Social Security number, where he had gone to school, where he had worked and when, his parents’ names, any pertinent hobbies or activities . . . so many questions that Arlo was quite tired when the questioning was over. But it wasn’t over.

Another man came into the room. He was a white-coated doctor with slicked-back hair and horn-rimmed glasses, and he had a lot more questions to ask. The doctor looked in his mouth and ears, tapped on his knees with a little hammer and listened through a long-tailed instrument that he held to Arlo’s chest.

The doc asked all about what diseases he’d had as a child, what medications he currently took, and what conditions he had now, and on and on. Arlo answered the best he could, and the doctor nodded, wrote a lot of notes on the papers, handed several more sheets to the corporal, and left the room.

The corporal studied the sheets for a moment, then left the room too. Arlo sat by himself, looking at Uncle Sam posters on the wall, which were the only decorations the room had. By his own reckoning, he had now been in the office for at least an hour.

“Exemplary,” said the corporal when he came back into the room about 10 minutes later.

“Huh?”

“Your qualifications look exemplary. You meet all the criteria for joining the Army,” he said. “Let’s go see the sergeant.”

The two walked back down the hallway to stand at the sergeant’s desk. The corporal stood at attention, saluted, then handed the sergeant the clipboard with the sheaf of papers.

“Sergeant, we have completed the first steps of the induction process for Mister, uh, well, that doesn’t matter. It’s on the form. You’ll see Forms G-1, Q-2 and L-3 are all filled out, as well as Form K-4. He meets the qualifications to become an infantry soldier,” he said. “All we need to do is have him sign a few forms and swear him in.”

“An infantry soldier?” blurted Arlo. “I thought I was joining the Army!”

“Well, what did you think the Army was?” asked the corporal, incredulously. The sergeant stared at him too.

Well, I saw that bag of the Colonel’s Chicken Fingers on the sergeant’s desk here. I thought this was where I signed up to be in the Chicken Fingers Army, like they say on TV,” Arlo said. “See, I need a job. I have experience as a fry cook, like I told the corporal in there.”

The corporal clapped his hand to his face.

The sergeant’s eyes got real wide, the veins in his neck swelled and his face turned red. Then he started to use a lot of strange-sounding words in a loud tone of voice.

Arlo figured that was the start of the swearing-in part, but something told him not to stick around to hear the rest of it.

The next thing he knew, Arlo was running out of the Army recruitment office. He ducked as a clipboard and a half-dozen papers sailed over his head.

(Note: If you’re reading on or before Thanksgiving, be sure to listen to Arlo Guthrie’s story-song Alice’s Restaurant Massacree It’s a humdinger of a story that can’t be beat.)

Ken Drenten is creator and editor of Dusty-Tires.com, a travel blog for out-of-the-ordinary places in Ohio.

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