"Who WAS That Masked Man?"

Whenever I look back on my two-branch military career, I will forever hold my year & a half in Italy as my favorite tour, hands down. The duty was good, even "intriguing" at times, I don't think I ever worked a single weekend in the entire 18 months, my "stage career" started there, and it was just a nice break in my life. There were some funny times too.

The guy who lived next door to me in our barracks, got drunk as a skunk one night, shed all of his clothes and "streaked" the WAF Barracks. But he lost his balance, fell down, and a couple of the gals SAT on him while another one called the Security Police!

The Security Police raised the flag for "Reveille" every morning at 0800. One morning they got there only to find there was something already "flying" at the top of the flagpole. Three pairs of women's panties, in "correct" red, white & blue! (courtesy of "Linda" over at the WAF Dorm, who had patriotically "donated" to our little ritual). (I confess to being "in" on that one!------it's the old "Potrero Hill syndrome" that still has to get OUT every now and then!)

There was a guy in the barracks just across from ours, who decided, for whatever reason, he no longer wanted to live, but it was the strangest attempt at a suicide I'd ever heard of. He was using a big heavy buffer up on the second floor. Pulling the plug out of the wall, he tied the end of it around his neck, then picked up the heavy buffer and tossed it out the window, waiting for the cord to get tight and just quickly snap his neck.

Problem was....it was only about 12 feet to the sidewalk, and there was a good 50 feet of cord! The buffer hit the walkway with a huge BANG, knocked out chunks of concrete, damaged the buffer (it was lucky nobody was walking by at the time), and there he was..... when the guys downstairs ran up to the 2nd floor and found him just standing there looking confused, with the end of that cord still tied around his neck!

The cops hauled him off, and that was pretty much the last anyone saw of him.

I could probably write steadily for the next couple of days just telling you about some of the funny things that happened over there. I won't though, except for the "MAIN comic." if you want to call him that...........a sick, twisted character....... a "phantom" that no one ever saw, yet he had in his own way, become a "local legend."

When TSgt Jackson was initially helping me get checked-in, and was showing me around.......we took a little break in the Rec Center over coffee and he said "Oh, I need to tell you about one other thing around here, and you won't find THIS in your base brochure......"

"I guess I'd better warn you about the Mad Crapper (we'll use the word "crapper" for blog purposes----but you can figure out the actual word!).

"The Mad CRAPPER?"

"Yeah........we've got some guy running around here over the past few months who doesn't always use latrines! Whoever it is even left a "present" in the 1st Sergeant's waste basket a week or so ago! He thinks he's slick, but if he keeps it up, somebody'll catch him."

I started busting up! I couldn't BELIEVE what I was hearing! Here we were at a special "communications base" if you will..........you had to have a TOP SECRET CLEARANCE to even BE here........and some dude is running around "laying eggs" shall we say?

YOU GOTTA BE "--------" ME!!!"

"No, but THIS guy is! Oh, he's not really hurting anybody, but we need to catch him if we can. Just keep your eyes open, and watch where you WALK around here, and you'll be alright."

Oh boy. THIS was gonna be a "unique tour."

It really WAS a good assignment, though, and this "phantom", whoever he was, made his "presence known" every now and then, but no specific "pattern." He hit the movie theater once, the NCO Club and in a DARING gesture, the backseat of the Base Commander's staff car!

Different places around base, but very spiradic--------he might go a MONTH without doing ANYTHING, then "strike TWICE" in two different places, 2 days in a row!. He drove the brass crazy. We even thought at one time, this "phantom" might be a FEMALE, after the WAF Dorm was hit, because it was "off limits" to us guys and a male-presence would certainly be noticed. But OUR dorms got hit on occasion too..........so then, we really couldn't pin it down to gender.

But life went on, there was too much to do without letting this nut divert us from our jobs. Like Jackson had told me, you just watch where you step, and get on with the day.

THEN CAME THE O.R.I......a NON-aircraft base, we didn't call our big annual inspection an "ORI" like they do here, and I forget now what we DID call it, but it amounted to the same thing. The BIG yearly inspection by the USAFSS.

Col Brunzell gathered us all up in the NCO Club for the usual pre-inspection "pep talk"........you know....."be polite, be helpful to the inspectors, don't VOLUNTEER anything.......da-da-da-da-da......."

We still had no clue who this "Mad Crapper" was, and the brass hats were very concerned that he might "strike' while the INSPECTORS were here..........what an "opportunity" eh?.........I mean, you could just PICTURE some visiting Captain with a clipboard in his hand, opening up a file drawer somewhere, and..........

The boys in charge were "nervous-in-the-service" as we used to say.

Now, the NCO Club was the one building large enough on base to pretty much get all personnel IN there at one time for the pep-talk, and after Brunzell had finished, he made a final statement that went to the effect of......."OK. NOW I want to say something to this character out here who everybody is calling the "Mad Crapper"...........I know you're in here listening..........I don't know who you are.....but you had BETTER STOP WHAT YOU'RE DOING!"

Almost on "cue", about 200 of us in there started laughing uncontrollably. The Colonel was steaming mad and yelling into the microphone for eveyone to "settle down!" When order was finally restored (somewhat), he went on to say that if San Vito FAILED this inspection because of some "crap strike"......heads would roll and we'd ALL be working around the clock, and life would be more miserable than anyone could ever imagine.

THEN he said something that had a genuine APPEAL for those who DIDN'T like the remote duty at San Vito..........."IF ANYONE KNOWS WHO THIS "CRAPPER" IS, YOU CAN TELL ME ANONYMOUSLY............AND I WILL CUT SIX MONTHS OFF OF YOUR TOUR AND YOU CAN GO BACK TO THE STATES EARLY!

A hush fell on the crowd, and for the next week or so prior to the inspection, everybody was watching EVERYBODY! You'd come back to the barracks after evening chow, and as soon as you swung the door open at the end of the barracks, you'd hear 2 or 3 OTHER doors open further down the hallway, and guys would be peeping their heads out to see "who it was" and what they were doing. All of a sudden, we had a BUNCH of amateur "Columbo's" lurking in corners, trying to catch the "Crapper."

I have to believe he was sitting back, having a good time with this. He might be sitting right next to you at breakfast, might even be the WAF you took to the MOVIES last night. Everybody was suddenly suspicious of everybody else!

The INSPECTION came and went. We passed with an EXCELLENT rating and nothing eventful happened. I think probably, just KNOWING the brass was sweating bullets, was MORE than enough satisfaction for this "phantom." He had caused considerable "inner-chaos' without ever ONCE risking being caught.

Whoever this guy (or gal-----but most likely a guy), WAS, he was most likely a 1 or 2-striper at the most. I can't imagine an NCO or above, risking an entire career if he was caught.

He struck our warehouse once, and I got to be the victim this time. A truck had come in with some pallets of supplies to be unloaded. I wasn't busy at the moment, so I hopped on our forklift, warmed it up and started unloading the truck. By the time I got to the last pallet or two, something was smelling AWFUL and a "stenchy-steam" was starting to roll out from under the engine hood. I unloaded the last pallet, parked the lift & shut it off. Jumped off and looked under the cowling.

You guessed it!

For MONTHS, I had chuckled along with the rest of the crowd, but it wan't all that funny NOW! We rolled out a water hose and washed the engine down after it had cooled off.

Pretty soon, the "phantom" stopped. He either decided to quit before he DID get caught, or (more LIKELY), HIS 18 months were up and he just rotated back to the states somewhere.

I had once entertained the idea of sending a story about this guy to Reader's Digest, under that feature they have about "Unforgettable Characters"...........but I figured they probably would never print it.

POST-NOTE to this, though..........roughly 10 years later in 1986, I was at Norten AFB attending the NCO Academy, and the topic one day was human behavior. I DID share the story with my classmates and during our morning coffee break, one of them, who had just come back from Clark AFB in the Philippines, told me that THEY had just encountered a guy like that, who THEY never caught EITHER!

"THIS guy" had been going around "making deposits" in AIRCRAFT COCKPITS!

Well.............an Air Force career is a MINIMUM of 20 years........comparing notes, there'd only been about nine years between our boy in Italy, and THEIRS at Clark...........

Could be!

For you civilians out there..............please note that this in NO WAY is reflective of "normal behavior" in our military. This was ONE guy for every 100,000 GOOD ones, who just happened to "slip through."

But we never DID catch him, so no one knows where he's from. He's surely retired now, and out there SOMEWHERE.

All I can say is............wherever you go in this country...........watch where you step!