After a year or so serving with the Army Criminal Investigation Division (CID) as a Special Agent (SA) was spending some time at Fort Ord, CA working on the General Crimes Team, Vehicle Recovery Team, and later the Semi-Covert Drug Team at the Fort Ord, CA CID Office.
In the late 1970's criminal investigations were up in the Army, the Ord CID office had about 28 SA's working and each SA had no less than 9 investigations to work and solve at any given time. Solve one case and get two more investigations.
During my time at Ord, never did understand why the majority of the SA's at Ord were into practical jokes, but they were, and you never knew when you would walk into strange situations.
My memory is not all that great anymore and the SA who perpetrated this practical joke may have been other than SA Nhoj Syam but since he was the wildest practical joker in the CID office I am listing him, if I am wrong, the real practical joker can come forward and tell their version.
At the time SA CW3 Syam Nhoj , the Economic Crimes Team Chief (ECTC) was having a war of the practical joke with the Operations Officer (OPO) SA CW4 Jack Bennett (RIP) and the Assistant Operations Officer (AOPO) SA CW3 Dick Condon, strange things were happening all over the main CID office on a daily basis. As mentioned previously, back in the day Army CID SA's worked hard and played even harder to solve crime in a timely manner and stay sane.
Most days I and several other bachelor SA's who lived next to the CID office in what was called the Trap (WWII building not in great shape) would always be early to get started, no commute, just a quick three minute walk. On Monday's the Ops would come in to check the case status board, work with the AOPO on the previous weeks case status to talk about closed, open, solved and unsolved investigations at the Monday morning meeting.
Back in the 1970s we did not have computers and hand held gadgets to crunch numbers and or stats, we did statistics the old fashion way, fingers and toes, charts, tag boards and graphs. On that Monday morning so long ago some unknown SA went into the OPOs office, looked about, got a Polaroid camera (no digital then) from the equipment locker, took several pictures of the case status board and slipped the snapshots into a shirt pocket.
Some how all the small circle case tags from the status board fell off the hooks and into small plastic bags marked appropriately for the sections of the board they came from. One side of the case board was then slipped off the nail holding it up and allowed to swing down to the floor giving the appearance it had fallen in the night and all the case tags had fallen off. The mysterious SA then left the OPOs office and waited for the excitement that would explode once the OPOS and AOPOs arrived.
Just as I finished making coffee the OPO and AOPO entered their office and the air did seem to explode as they both saw the status board askew and all the status tags missing! There was a lot of commotion as they moved closer they realized something was not right, the tags from the status board were not all over the floor in a large mess, they were neatly packed in plastic bags marked with their locations on the status board. Almost in unison they yelled for SA Syam.
Not sure what happened after that, SA Syam came walking down the hall with a smile on his face and the snap shots in his hand.
As we all headed for the Monday morning meeting around 9:00AM we walked by the OPS office, the case board was on the wall and all the tags in place.
I was with CID as part of a new team of uniformed MPs in was was called the Criminal Information Group. Our job was to post crimes from the previous night's log and then look for patterns in criminal activity. What was the unit designation for CID there? I, for the life of me cannot remember it.
ReplyDeleteLooking for any CID Agent contacts to anyone stationed at Fort Ord prior to base closure in 1994. Where did that unit move to?
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