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His weekends were free. He spent most of them in Manhattan, in a relentless but ultimately failing attempt to get a tall, thin, blond seventeen-year-old named Alexandra Black, who lived in the apartment directly above his father’s, to part with her pearl of great price.

Close, but no brass ring, so to speak, which caused Phil to suspect that he and Alexandra were the only seventeen-year-old virgins in the world.

—

On the Thursday of his fifth week as the dis- and re-assembly cadre instructor, one of the officers, Captain Barson Michaels, head of the Fort Dix Skeet and Trap Shooting Club, needed someone to operate for him the “trap” at the Post skeet range while he practiced, and his eye fell upon PFC Williams.

The “trap,” Phil learned, was an electromechanical device that, when triggered, would throw a frangible clay disc into the air at great speed. Captain Michaels showed Phil how to load stacks of the discs, which were called “birds,” into the trap, and handed him the trigger.

“When I call ‘pull,’ Hotshot,” Captain Michaels ordered, “you push the button, which is the trigger, whereupon the trap will fire, the bird will fly, and I will shoot at it. Got it?”

“Yes, sir, Captain Michaels, sir.”

Perhaps forty-five minutes later, during which time PFC Williams had flawlessly carried out his orders, and most of the carton of birds had flown, Captain Michaels, perhaps because he had heard a probably EXPLETIVE DELETED!! story that the kid was some sort of Annie EXPLETIVE DELETED!! Oakley in pants with an M-1, decided he could afford to be a nice guy.

“You ever fire a shotgun, PFC Hotshot?”

“No, sir.”

“Let me show you how it’s done, and then you can have a try at it.”

“Yes, sir.”

Captain Michaels then handed Phil a shotgun. It was the first shotgun he had ever had in his hands. He later learned that it was a Remington Model 11, but at the time all he knew about it was that it was a semiautomatic weapon into which one fed—through the side, not the top—shotgun shells.

He was given a sixty-second course in its operation—Drop the shell in, push that little button, and you’re ready to go.

Captain Michaels put Phil in position.

“Anytime you’re ready, son.”

Phil called “pull.”

Captain Michaels pushed the trap’s trigger. The bird flew. Phil fired. The unscathed bird kept flying.

Captain Michaels then imparted to PFC Williams the First and Great Commandment of Skeet and Trap Shooting, to wit: Shoot where it’s going to be, Hotshot, not where it’s at.

“Yes, sir.”

The second bird at which Phil fired disappeared in a cloud of dust.

And the third and the fifth—not the fourth—and the sixth, and the seventh, und so weiter, until the twenty-second, which he also missed, and then the twenty-third, -fourth, and -fifth, which were also reduced to puffs of dust.

“You sure you never did this before, Hotshot?”

“No, sir. I mean, yes, sir, I’m sure I never did this before.”

“I’ll be a EXPLETIVE DELETED!!,” Captain Michaels said, his mind full of images of the greenbacks he was going to take from his pals at the next skeet shoot after betting this innocent young enlisted man could beat them.

“Get another box of shells, my boy, and we’ll have another go at it.”

“Yes, sir.”

Phil went “straight”—that is, broke all of the twenty-five birds—in his second “round” of twenty-five birds.

—

Phil repeated the feat the next Saturday morning—in fact went fifty-two straight—at the weekly competition of the Fort Dix Skeet and Trap Shooting Club, following which Captain Michaels handed him two twenty-dollar bills with the explanation he’d made a small bet for him. As PFC Williams was being paid fifty-eight dollars a month at the time, this was a small fortune.