Odd this day

19 June 1959

GOD ACQUITTED OF POTATO ABUSE

…or something like that. To be precise, on this day 66 years ago, Private First Class Andrew God Jr. (no, really) was cleared by a court-martial of destroying government property, despite being charged with the heinous crime that he

having knowledge of a lawful order … to peel and eye potatoes as directed, an order which it was his duty to obey, did … fail to obey the same. [He] did, without proper authority, willfully suffer potatoes, of some value, military property of the U.S., to be destroyed by improper peeling.

Oh, yes. We are covering properly vital history today, friends. None of that inconsequential nonsense.

Pfc. God was on kitchen patrol, or K.P., duty in what Time magazine calls

fancy-pants Fort Myer, Va., just across the Potomac from Washington

I assume it’s a ‘fancy-pants’ place because of its proximity to Washington, and particularly the Arlington National Cemetery, but anyway, young God had been an architect in Detroit before he was drafted, so may have felt frustrated at performing such a menial task, and may not have been carrying it out with due care and attention.

Or perhaps he was doing it diligently and carefully, and the mess sergeant had taken against God. We don’t really know. We do know that said mess sergeant, Holger M Johnson, was unimpressed by Soldier God’s technique, telling the court later that God and another young troublemaker, Eugene J Jaskiewics, were

whacking away

at the poor, innocent (and, crucially, government-owned) potatoes. According to The Atlanta Constitution, the two men were

slicing out the eyes instead of digging them out.

(Why the knobbly/rooty bits are called ‘eyes’ has always been a mystery to me, but this is America we’re talking about. Not much is explicable there. Anyway…)

This was causing inexcusable potato wastage. Or, as Time put it:

The prosecution’s case was clear enough. The mess sergeant testified that Pfc. God, knife in hand, had removed the eyes in thick wedges, sliced off random peels in flat slabs (instead of removing them nice and thin) … [he] was fairly hacking the daylights out of the spuds, so his mess sergeant reported him for goofing off.

God, though, was aware of a code of military justice introduced in 1951, so, when

Sent up before Captain Thomas Woods, his commanding officer, for disciplinary action, Pfc. God refused a company-punishment sentence of two hours of hard labor every day for 14 days, [and] demanded a summary court-martial, as was his right — even in such absurd cases as this

…and this turned out to be a wise move. The prosecution, for a start, overplayed its hand. Mess Sergeant Johnson

armed with a potato and peeler, earnestly re-enacted the whole business, slashing ruthlessly away until the potato looked like a candidate for a shoestring fry.

The God in this case may not have been omniscient and omnipresent, but he had friends in the right places. A mess sergeant from another company

testified that Pfc. God’s peelings were quite normal, considering that the accused had had only a knife to work with instead of a hand potato-peeler.

Pfc. God added to this:

You can’t jab a potato with a knife and dig into it. If the knife slips, you’ve got it in your hand.

(This, I think, might be the heart of the matter. The young private was showing more regard for his own welfare than for that of the spuds. Mess Sergeant Johnson today would probably be on Joe Rogan’s podcast, bemoaning how very ‘woke’ such thinking was.)

The prosecution’s case really fell down, though, when Captain Woods produced what he thought would be a decisive piece of evidence. Back to the Atlanta Constitution:

Capt. Woods had been saving some of the God-sliced peelings for a month. He had a whole pan of them.

This is where Mess Sgt. Johnson’s earlier performance becomes crucial. He had, it turned out, hoist the prosecution case by its own petard.

Defence counsel Lt. Bruce Segal proved to the court’s satisfaction that the peelings sliced off by the mess sergeant weighed more than God’s.

If Johnson hadn’t exaggerated how much Pfc. God was wasting, they might have succeeded. Which is, perhaps, why the Associated Press photo of him after leaving court is slightly reminiscent of the thug life meme (©Young People on the Interwebs).

Mind you, the most inadvertently entertaining note struck throughout might be the army press officer desperately trying to hold things together while addressing the media:

The whole thing may seem ridiculous to someone outside the Army.