On the road...again!!!
                                                                                                                          Afghanistan to Zambia
                                                                                                                  Chronicles of a Footloose Forester
                                                                                                                                By Dick Pellek

Demise of Donald B. Overrocker

You don’t get to know many people well in Basic Training, and that was true for Overrocker. The short period of a couple of months saw us together on five-mile marches, on the rifle range, and filing into the barracks where all of us were more concerned with washing off the mud and hitting the sack as early as we could. But the name tags sewed above the right breast pocket on our uniforms did allow us to put a name and an opinion to any and all training exercises. The talking and getting to know one another took place at the mess hall and while polishing the floors and the walls of the barracks where our company bunked. C-Company, Corporal Material Maintenance Battalion was where Don Overrocker and the Footloose Forester met and got to know one another, just long enough to make quick friends. It was not that Overrocker was a fellow draftee and a graduate of Ivy League Cornell University, it was because, even as a draftee, he was hoping to be assigned to the Language Training School on the Monterey Peninsula and make the most of his conscripted military tour. And he also knew that he would not be shunned by the Footloose Forester, another college graduate who had also been drafted. The same circumstance was true for Wayne Peterson, who was another draftee and a graduate of Sacramento State University. We were not close pals, but we did have a common bond.

Thus, it was that when Don Overrocker took off on a week-end pass during the Thanksgiving holidays, he got himself killed. He was run down by a car at a highway cloverleaf offramp in the San Francisco area. Sergeant Ronald Miles, our platoon sergeant, kind of knew that Wayne and the Footloose Forester could identify his body, and arranged for us to be driven up to the Presidio near San Francisco to confirm Overrocker’s identity. Besides, we were in California and his parents lived in Westchester County, New York.

After viewing his ashen colored face, silent and still on that white-sheeted gurney at Graves Registration on the Presidio Army Post, the young soldier in attendance told us that he had contacted his parents by phone and asked what the US Army should do for internment. The soldier told us that the father, who was an attorney, did not want his son’s body back. Instead, the senior Donald Overrocker said to throw him into the ocean, he didn’t care. Or to bury him in a potter’s field.