Tux:
>>    Does this pack overview help you?

AnomalousMonk
>>  See also perlpacktut.

Your sage advise to RTF_PACK_M was supererogatory in this case.
Reading the first reply from Tye, one would have seen that the
PACK code was correct:

>>  by tye on Aug 15, 2015 at 05:39 UTC
>>  Congratulations, you did it on your first try.
>>    printf("... c16=0x%04hx ...",  ..., $c16, ...;


Examining the original post, the salient parts of the perldoc, 
pack.html manual were quoted directly, credited and even
correctly applied:
--------------------------------
http://perldoc.perl.org/functions/pack.html
pack TEMPLATE,LIST
The TEMPLATE is a sequence of characters that give the order 
and type of
values, as follows:
        S  An unsigned short value.

$count=17767;  # C=0x4567=Dec17757
$c16 = pack("S", $count);  # Pack COUNT to
----------------------------

The transcript shows extensive manual labor and 
myriad attempts of variations on the theme to figure the 
"PACK" problem out before bothering The Monks. 

As Tye pointed out, the problem was NOT with PACK. The 
bonehead maneuver was trying to use printf to verify packed 
values.

Unpack was necessary to debinarate the data to values 
printable by Perl. This might be a useful caveat for the 
Tutorial. Don't do this at home!

I knew it would be something simple that was right in front 
of me. 

To quote Homer, D'oh!  << the Famous Homer 

    Brian