Gus Angelos and the USO Truck

This is one of the few stories Marvin Miller told about his service. He shared it with his son at an unspecified date before his death in December 2005, and it is reproduced here from his son's memory of that conversation.

Marvin told it in the context of describing firebase conditions — specifically the absence of privacy and the scarcity of comfort. The shower setup at a firebase was a field expedient: a tripod erected near the road at the entrance, with a black rubber bladder hanging from it to hold water. There was no enclosure, no curtain. Soldiers showered in the open, in view of anyone passing.

A soldier in the unit named Gus Angelos — described by Marvin as "crazy" or "wild," meaning he had a large, outgoing personality — was, apparently, alert to opportunity.

Word came around that a truck carrying girls from a USO show was coming through the entrance of the firebase. Angelos made his decision immediately: he walked to the tripod shower by the road and began showering, in full view of the entrance, precisely as the truck came in.

Marvin did not say whether anything came of it — no conversation, no reaction from the girls recorded. The story ends with the image of Angelos, naked under the rubber bladder, positioned at the road, as the truck went by. The memory Marvin carried was not of any outcome, but of the decision itself: the timing, the deliberateness, the complete absence of self-consciousness.

This is a comedy. Marvin told it as one. It belongs in the archive alongside the heavier accounts not in spite of that, but because of it — it is evidence that there was laughter, that men found ways to be ridiculous, and that fifty years later a soldier's son could still hear his father's amusement in the telling.

Two USO shows are documented in the record of Marvin's tour: January 24, 1971 at FSB Silver, and approximately September 5–6, 1971 near FSB Jeffreys. A photograph in the Miller collection, taken by Marvin himself, shows four female performers in matching yellow dresses on a wooden stage platform — likely from one of these two shows. The Angelos story may belong to the same day.