4
Pretty Boy
Johnny Strange
Johnny Strange didn’t like boot camp. In fact he hated it, everything about it. He especially hated the DI, Sergeant Orval Butterworth. Butterworth was an eastern Yankee, born and raised in Providence, Rhode Island. He was a fourth generation Marine, and his face looked like someone had set fire to it and then put it out with a track shoe. This combination of physical and locational limitations made Butterworth hate three kinds of people—Johnny Rebs, Cowboys, and Pretty Boys. He called everyone from the West “Sissy Gene,” a reference to Gene Autry. Given that the preponderance of boots from the fertile fields of the Southland east of the Mississippi went to Parris Island, South Carolina, that left Butterworth free to expel his hatred on westerners, and more o
