"You think that's crazy? I can top that."
It was Friday night in the sergeants' mess and the weekend bull session was on. As usual, the stories had turned to the strange things that happened in the army. Staff Sergeant O'Leary was in the hot seat, a glass of ice-cold lager in front of him. Having worked in the stores for the last ten years of his career, O'Leary's stories tended to deal with the idiosyncrasies or army bureaucracy.
"Did I ever tell you about the time that one of the junior lieutenants ordered a kettle?"
Sergeant Kelly raised an eyebrow. "Hey - a wetback can screw up anything. Your point is?"
"Ah," said O'Leary, "in this case, the consequences were rather interesting."
Kelly pointed at O'Leary's glass. "If it's as good as you say, I'll stand your next round."
O'Leary gave his colleague a pitying look. "You know about NSNs?"
"Nato stock numbers? Who doesn't. Everything's got a number."
"Even kettles," O'Leary reminded him. "Well, this nameless junior lieutenant decided he wanted a kettle for his platoon office. Now, I could have ordered it for him, but I had better things to do. So, I just gave him the book and let him fill in the forms himself."
"So, he got the numbers wrong." Kelly shook his head. "You think that's a good story?"
O'Leary tapped his roman nose with a long finger. "Ah, but you should have seen how wrong he got it. A week later I was doing orderly. The corporal of the guard called me from the gate to tell me that there was a convoy that had turned up, and I needed to come and deal with it. So, I went down to the camp gate.
"The first I saw was a personnel carrier full of marines. Then, behind them was some kind of comms vehicle covered with every antenna you could imagine. There were also four civilian police cars blocking the main road on either side. And in the middle of this was the biggest truck you ever saw - a Mammoth Major."
"For a kettle?"
O'Leary shook his head. "No. These guys had come all the way from the sunshine factory in Aldermaston. You see, it turns out that the NSN for a kettle is only two transposed digits away from a tactical nuclear weapon."
Kelly looked stunned for a minute, then laughed. "Yeah, right. So the wetback ordered a bomb rather than a kettle. So what?"
O'Leary took another sip of his lager and smiled. "Well, they may be easy to order, but have you ever tried to send one back?"
أنت تقرأ
In 500 Words Or Less
القصة القصيرة'In 500 Words Or Less' is a collection of short stories, all of them 500 words or less, written for the WattPad WriteOn Writers Weekend WriteIn.
