If I hear one more Vietnam war story out of either presidential campaign I might just sit out this election. But the documents "60 Minutes" recently revealed as proof of President Bush's dereliction of military duty made me want to send my old Army sergeant out to Dan Rather's office. He had a way to deal with misguided trainees - he'd whack us with his "Ugly Stick."

After high school I enlisted in the US Army, the only clear alternative for a teen without college plans in the late 1970s. I had two options: a rifleman posting or an administrative position. As a Grateful Dead democrat, I chose typewriter keys as my weapon. After basic training, I was sent to clerk school at Fort Jackson, S.C. There, in concert with thousands of push-ups and hundreds of grueling force-marched miles, I learned how to type in 1980.

And nearly a decade after the dubious "60 Minutes" documents were allegedly created, military-issue typewriters were still unable to produce such memoranda.

The clerk's Bible at Jackson typist training was Army Regulation 340-15, "Preparation and Management of Military Correspondence." Our Moses: Staff Sgt. Phillips, a tall, balding Vietnam veteran whose starched fatigues belied his smoke-stained teeth and eye-burning breath. He was quick with quips in his thick Southern drawl and just as fast to anger. Speed was our only goal as we tapped out "the quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog" on our Olivetti manuals. Too slow? Do it again. Errors were acceptable, but only a few. And no backspacing or correction fluid was allowed; that was considered cheating and we always got caught.

If a trainee stepped out of line, he got the Ugly Stick. Sarge brandished the remnants of a golf club with its head broken off in what was surely a fit of rage at the nearby Ft. Jackson Country Club. He spun it, Chaplin-esque, as he wandered the classroom rows of sweating trainees.

Normally, Phillips would bring the club shaft down on an errant GI's desk with a crack that stopped all typing. Sometimes, he might clip you with the sharp end.

More important, we had to quote AR340-15, chapter and verse. Don't remember the salutation for a Congressman? You get the Ugly Stick. Can't recall the margins on an official memorandum? Ugly Stick. Get a signature block wrong? Duck, and fast.

After training, I was shipped off to the 25th Infantry Division in Schofield Barracks, Hawaii. At the division public affairs office, I suffered one recurring error: In the final signature block, after carefully typing through paragraphs and pages, I couldn't seem to add the "TH" after the "25" without fouling up the entire document. When my new sergeant caught the first such error, he made me fetch AR340-15 and recite the relevant guideline aloud. By the time my enlistment was up, that page in the manual was dog-eared and brown with fingerprints.

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