Vern Holmberg

Mulcahey's Meatheads: Infantry Training - 1953 Vern Holmberg

TEXT FOR AUTHOR BIO: Vernon D. Holmberg made sculpture for twenty-seven years and supported his family with military-industrial complex editorial work before taking to writing fiction in 1984. He has written over two hundred short stories, finished two novels, drafted two more, and finished a collection of essays in Sport is Dangerous to your Health. TEXT FOR BOOK DESCRIPTION: Mulcahey's Meatheads are 200 civilians in transformation to infantry riflemen. Fat and lazy Ernest Ohmstead is one. Drafted in to the U. S. Army on St. Patrick's Day, 1953 he gets into trouble with questions in Fort Sheridan and subsequently in Camp Polk, Louisiana. His curiosity attracts the attention of Sergeant Mulcahey, the First Sergeant. Mulcahey makes it his personal vendetta to break Ohmstead's body and spirit and subjects Ohmstead to degradation and scorn for his person and ideas. Because of his Reserve Officers Training Corp experience in college and his dismal performance at military athletics, Ohmstead is maliciously promoted to acting sergeant. He is forced to be mean and nasty to the eight inept men he is assigned to teach to march. He and his 'spastics' (the fifth platoon) are constantly called for extra duty in the blistering heat doing dirty, sweaty, labor. Mulcahey constantly reminds the meatheads that they are worthless human trash. He uses military training techniques with them to mold them into obedient soldiers. Ohmstead resists, yet succombs to the training method. he emerges a professional infantryman: lean, mean, fit, proud, and trained to kill. So much so he is disappointed at the armistice signed at Panmunjon.