A Tale Of Two "Johnsons"

A story of high intrigue, freebrickers and fortean weirdness in the U.S. Army in 1982

When Private Johnson showed up at our unit in the Fall of 1982 and began unpacking his duffel bag, my room in the barracks was nearly empty. It’s a long story but all the incredible ratbags who were there initially got shuffled out one at a time until all these winners were gone, leaving me alone before a new but pretty much equally sordid crew showed up to replace them. We’d been through three sergeants, each of them justification for another flood by God at some point.

Johnson showed up as a Private 2nd Class, he was fresh from Basic Training. I spoke to him very briefly as he was unpacking. He was a tall white guy in thick bifocals, around 6’4 or so, two inches over top of me. In speaking to him for ten minutes I would have guessed his IQ to be around 80. He was chain smoking, complaining about still waiting for his filipino wife to join him and hinting how he missed having sex with her. He was also bitching about losing his football scholarship after a sporting accident which ruined his knee on his high school astroturf leaving him no options but to join the military.

Johnson appeared to have been transferred to another dimension of reality at some point and replaced with a doppleganger as a placeholder.