Why I Am The Way I Am...

...is explained a lot by my thought processes regarding the title of the preceding post.

I knew that I wanted to include something about "candy stripers" in the header, just because that peculiar form of headgear was so indicative of the poorly-thought-out situation of the Special Forces in the early Eighties.

The problem was that my brain immediately seized onto the craptacular 1978 porn movie of the same name, which may well have been my first encounter with the genre as a junior in college; remember, in the Seventies porn was not the ubiquitous magilla it is today, where the entire Internet is effectively a monstrous vehicle for conveying into your home images of two strangers fucking. You actually had to go to a real theatre to see these things and encounter the trench-coated masturbaters and speculate on just exactly what on the floor was so sticky. It certainly made the whole business less...businesslike, and a lot more ridiculous.

So as I was recounting the history of the SF, circa 1981, every so often I would break out in spontaneous chuckling thinking about the, um, intersection of the hard men of the Green Beret and the hardcore women of the Silver Screen.

There's no real excuse for this, and I have this problem a LOT; it's just how my mind works like flypaper - anything and everything sticks to it, and is likely to get stuck together in inappropriate ways.

Sorry, but there it is.

The Army I Knew: Candy Stripers (SFQC I)

I arrived at Ft. Bragg in the late spring of 1981 with the idea that I wanted to be a Special Forces medic. There were a whole bunch of things wrong with that idea that I was too stupid and callow to understand but that the U.S. Army should have known - probably did know - but was ignoring right at that time because to deal with them would have been painful and inconvenient.

The first was that I had no business being there at all.

In 1981 the Special Forces was still a bit of a tough sell in an Army that was generally defined by several competing conventional war advocates.

There were the big cannons, the "heavy Army", that thought of itself as having won WW2 and was still centered around the armored formations then largely stationed in Germany training to fight the Battle of the Fulda Gap. I had no idea what that Army did and still largely don't; my service since my initial entry training has been entirely confined to the light infantry and light artillery. But there was certainly no room for a bunch of goofy types playing injuns with the natives there.

The other Army was often referred to as the "Airborne Mafia"; the guys whose careers revolved around the regular parachute infantry and artillery formations that clustered about the American Southeast; XVIII Airborne Corps and the 82nd Division at Ft. Bragg, and the Ranger battalions at Hunter Army Airfield in Georgia. (We were told that there was another Ranger battalion somewhere near the Pacific Ocean but, frankly, nobody really believed that).

The SF was an oddball outlier of the Airborne Mafia, though, and still didn't really fit well there.

It was jump-qualified, yes. But it was populated exclusively by senior NCOs and officers who had no troops to lead. And while rumor had it that these guys were superbly qualified in their MOS they were also supposed to be utterly unreliable, undisciplined wild men who couldn't lead four privates to the latrine unless the privates were half-naked Bushmen who spoke Urdu and wiped their asses with their hands.

The "heavy Army" considered these nuts somewhere between a submersible tank and a fairy story; there just wasn't any connection there at all.

The Airborne, light community had a very peculiar connection; the SF were considered both the ultimate light infantryman and a dangerous waste of perfectly good potential platoon sergeants and company commanders.

So the outfit operated in an odd kind of gray area, which for the "old hands" in the SF seemed to be a perfectly delightful place to work.

I should note here that, even as I was wandering onto the "pre-phase" area over in the old 1st COSCOM part of Ft. Bragg to sign into the enlisted version of the Special Forces Qualification Course (or "SFQC"), the SF was changing drastically and as my battle buddy jim would probably tell you, not really for the better. To digress a bit, the original notion of the outfit, what made it "Special", was its direct descent from the old OSS "Jedburgh" teams of WW2; a very small organization designed to work with non-U.S. irregulars to create guerrilla outfits and subversion/sabotage undergrounds - "Free French" sorts of things. In Vietnam the SF had worked with a lot of the mountain tribes to create guerrilla "Mike Forces", but had also been shifted into acting as trainers and advisors to ARVN line units.

The big change came in 1977 with the official establishment of 1st SFOD-Delta - the "Delta Force" of movie, comic book, and lunchbox fame. Now the SF was in the business of "direct action"; conventional small-unit tactics designed around the sorts of reconnaissance and raiding that the U.S. Army Rangers had previously monopolized. In effect Charlie Beckwith and his pals turned a large portion of the USSF into a clone of the British Special Air Service.

I think that this was and is vastly more important than has often been recognized.

Because up until that point the rest of the U.S. Army really didn't know what to do with the SF. They looked on these guys as the weird kids in the flop down at the end of the street; kinda smelly, kinda hairy, probably subversive, and just generally not really..."Army".

But a bunch of straight-up, crew-cut door kickers?

THAT, both the Airborne and the treadhead Army types could get behind.

So here we are today.

But in the late spring of 1981 I knew none of this. All I knew is that the SF seemed like a sort of thinking-man's Army; a bunch of guys who could sneak into places the enemy couldn't control, cause a lot of mayhem and creative destruction with a couple of bits of wire and some C4, and then, if everything went to hell, blow the shit out of the place and grab a hat. And I really liked that idea - the idea that even as one guy in an army of half a million I could make a difference, play a teensy part in changing the world. Mind you, I never got to thinking far enough ahead to wonder what I would be changing that world into...

But, regardless, here's the thing; think about the sort of soldier it takes to do something like that.

I can think of a lot of qualities inherent in that sort of troop. But I can think of one thing that he's NOT:

A cherry-ass private straight out of AIT.

Which, of course, is what I was.

In 1981 the U.S. Army was going through one of its periodic stupid-spells about troop training and end-strength.

The Seventies had been bad for the SF; a lot of the guys who had thrived in Vietnam were bored shitless in peacetime. Even more were not fundamentally suited to sitting around Bragg training. My buddy jim reminds me, too, that post-'72 a lot of good officers and NCO's were let go - "reduction-in-force'd" or "RIFted", and because of their hairy-ass rep a lot of good SF guys went out in the RIF. Many simply retired after putting their twenty years in.

And, remember, the regular Army still wasn't all that enthused about these weirdo Green Beanies playing Howlin' Commandos in the piney woods, meaning that for a hard-charging NCO looking to make Sergeant Major, or for a career-minded officer, a stretch in the SF could be a career killer.

And the then-policy of taking only non-first-term enlisted soldiers and non-volunteer officers into the SFQC meant that if sergeants weren't volunteering the intake numbers to SF were down. Way down. So the intake numbers for the SF groups were down, and god-forbid that the numbers should go down.

So the Army decided in its infinite wisdom that it needed to start sending privates to SFQC.

And that meant PFC Lawes went from Jump School to bunking in the old WW2 barracks over in COSCOM, spending his days speed-marching and running and generally killing time waiting to head out to Camp Mackall for the first Phase of SFQC.

When I think back to that time and the immense foolishness of the U.S. Army the thing that comes to mind is what we wore on our heads and what that said about the idiocy of the entire business. Because what we wore we had no business wearing; a green beret. With a "candy stripe".

It's been decades since anyone's seen one of these "nonqualified personnel bars", so I should explain, and in that explanation I think you'll see the point.

Because the whole idea of the beret - useless hat that it was - was purely as a sign of military skill.

The original SF beret was a sort of secret handshake. It was pure rebellion, a raised middle finger to the rest of the Army, a sign that the rebels, guerrilla fighters, and wild men were harder, stronger, sneakier, and deadlier than other soldiers. And it remained that way until JFK fell in love with the idea of super-soldier American freedom fighters and authorized it for official wear.

But it was STILL a secret handshake. Only real SF troopers could wear it; the cooks and clerks and bakers in the SF groups had to make do with regular old issue hats; p-caps, ball caps, whatever. And - if you know the Army - you can imagine the heartburn that caused the dress-right-cover-down senior officer types that populated CINCland. All these different hats in formation! How...unmilitary! Ribbon-adorned bosoms heaved everywhere...

So word came down from on high; every swinging richard in an SF unit - including an SF training unit - shall wear the funny green headbag. Regardless of what they did or could do.

Which kind of negated the symbolism of the hat, obviously, which was more important to the team guys than military uniformity.

So. The groups finagled the regulation by coming up with a gradation of hats.

Fully qualified guys wore the beret complete with the full flash - the shield-shaped bit of colored cloth that was particular to each group; white for the training group ("JFKCMA", as it was called), yellow (with the three red striped of the RVN, at that time) for 1st, red for 7th, green for 10th...you get the idea). Which, by the way, produced the term "flash-qualified" as shorthand for a fully-trained SF trooper.

The rest of us; ash-and-trash, trainees, goatherders - we wore a rectangle cut from the same flash as the assigned group. So, being assigned to training, I wore a green beanie with a little white rectangle under my "De Oppresso Liber" scroll and crossed arrows. Meaning absolutely nothing; for all that I might look the look, I was no more capable of fighting in an unconventional war than I could have understudied the lead in a Bulgarian porno film.

The thing I wore on my head was a ridiculous mistake, for me, and for the U.S. Army.

As I was soon to discover.

(Next: SFQC II, or "Indigestion on Honeybun Hill")

The Army I Knew: Light Sleeper

One thing I forgot to mention in the previous post about AIT and jump school; sleeping on the floor and burning paste wax. Both were peculiarities I encountered at Ft. Benning for the first time. They tended to reappear any time I went to an Army school, but Benning was the first.

The former was a simple expedient to having too much to do in too little time.

We learned very quickly that we were expected to keep our barracks to an IG inspection standard daily, from the uniforms on the hangers to the items in the drawers to the tightness of the bunk. Anything less meant returning from the day's training to find a nightmarish disaster that had to be repaired by the next morning.

One thing we quickly learned was that beds don't HAVE to be for sleeping. And that a tightly-made rack could easily be used as a static display whilst the exhausted GI managed to camp out on the floor using his sleeping pad and poncho liner. I don't think I spent a single night in my jump school rack until the night after the final jump. I dusted the blankets and tightened the corners, but that was all.

Let me tell you this, though; linoleum is fucking cold, and don't let anyone tell you different.

The other requirement was perfectly - and I mean perfectly - glass-like linoleum floors.

First of all, nobody - nobody who valued their lives - wore their boots into the barracks. Like little Japanese schoolboys, we took off our shoes at the door.

But the true, genuine, mirror-bright shine was only possible through the workings of modern technology which, in this case, meant Johnson's Paste Wax^TM, an electric buffer, and very small private, and a selection of terrycloth towels.

Here's how it worked.

First, you set fire to the can of paste wax; this was easy to do but hard to control - the trick was to make a sort of field-expedient handle out of a wire hanger and not mind the second-degree burns you got out of the sloshing, boiling-hot liquid wax.

You poured this liquid onto the floor and then, with a miniscule troop perched on it and a folded terry towel under it, ran the buffer over and over the waxy floor.

The effect was magical. Decades-old linoleum gleamed like jewels. I remember being mesmerized by the pure military poetry of it. Mind you, it could do nothing to close with and destroy the enemy, heal wounds, defend borders, succor allies, or defeat the enemies of my country. But it sure was pretty.

I also remember vividly one of the student leaders doling out this piece of advice regarding the floors; "You-all will want to remove your footgear before walking on my floor, because whoever fucks up my floor will be fucked up in reciprocity."

Indeed.

The Army I Knew: AIT and Jump School

So we're up to the spring of 1981.

The Army booked me a flight from Newark, New Jersey to San Antonio, Texas so as to get me to my next stage of entry training; medical specialist Advanced Individual Training, or "AIT".

(Note #1: in the Eighties the enlisted medical field jobs were given an occupational code "91"; your basic combat medic was a "91-Bravo" - the medical MOS has been renamed several times since then. The one peculiarity of military medicine is that it is one of the few MOS that is slotted into combat, combat-support, and combat service-support units. Since we were (and are) technically a CS/CSS job we were open to men and women, but the guys knew that the sweet, sweet REMF slots were going to the ladies. You had a 91B MOS and something hanging? You were going to a line unit somewhere. That was just how it worked and, I assume, still does...)

And so late in the morning after our "graduation" from BCT a handful of us were herded into a GSA van and driven to the airport, handed our travel vouchers and tickets, and pointed in the general direction of the boarding area.

(Note #2: Army commercial travel in the Eighties was - so far as I can tell - very different from today in that the only acceptable outfit to fly in was either the Class A or Class B greens. The idea of flying a commercial airliner in fatigues...well, let's put it this way; when I was permanent party in the Eighties the married guys who lived off-post could stop on the way home or the way in to get fuel. But that was it. God help you if the post MPs caught you in the Piggly-Wiggly in your duty uniform/Class C/fatigues - no matter what seven kinds of hell your Old Lady would give you for not stopping to pick up coffee creamer and tampons. Your fatigues were considered your sloppy jeans and a T-shirt, and as a professional you were expected to appear in public in the equivalent of a business suit; your dress uniform. Recruiters never appeared in public in fatigues. PAO types, ROTC cadre, career counselors...dress greens. The current enthusiasm for running around in fatigues still baffles me, but it appears to be here to stay.)

One thing I remember is how ridiculous I felt. The AG-44 "army green" Class A uniform really was a sad sack (it had only one tiny positive; it was wool, unlike the AG-489 that replaced it, which was a nasty wool-poly blend that looked and felt like a leisure suit) when you had nothing to dress it up.

The hat was the horrible stiffened-peak garrison cap, the so-called "cunt cap" which was nearly impossible to wear without looking like a conehead. The greens thenselves could not be pressed, wrinkled when you looked at them, and even when clean looked dingy and unimpressive.

As trainees were were innocent of the magic of Corfam, the insta-spitshined low quarter shoes that every trooper bought as soon as he could afford them; our black shoes looked equally dingy.

The only ornaments we sported were our bolo badges and the ridiculous "Army Service Ribbon", the so-called "Fireguard" ribbon, since it symbolized nothing more than breathing while on the government's payroll.But that is what we had, and so we shuffled onto the half-empty airplane, enjoyed our Cokes and peanuts (believe it or not, airlines actually fed their passengers in the Eighties) and arrived in San Antonio near midnight; tired, rumpled, and mildly disoriented. Luckily for us the USAMEDDAC reception had detailed a van and driver that got us onto post and into our racks before about 0300.

First call was still at 0500...

I don't want to talk too much about AIT; the training was probably very like it is today; the basics of combat first aid interspersed with some tactical advice from the cadre, the senior of which were still, at that point (as they have become once more) combat veterans. But my personal AIT had some interesting grace notes.Perhaps the best - for me, anyway - was that my little group from Ft. Dix had arrived at the very tail end of the fill for the cycle, and so the barracks of our AIT company had filled up. We ended up bunking across the PT fields in a nearly empty bay in a nearly empty barrack.

This opened up wonderful vistas for us, poor stupid trainees that we were. We were completely ignored by our trainee leaders, and the medical training cadre may very well not have actually known where we were. We "made our bunks" by folding our linens and putting them in our lockers. Inspections? None. Fire guard? Why bother?After the rigors of BCT this seemed like lotos-eating luxury, and, sybarites that we were, we lolled in it shamelessly. But we weren't fools; we knew how precarious our slovenly life was and so made sure not to draw attention to our unsupervised existence. It worked, and we remained idle bodies for ten weeks.

I hate to admit it, but I didn't take nearly the advantage of the far more lax regimentation at Ft. Sam Houston. I have no idea if the the current training environment at MEDDAC is a sort of Fellini-movie orgy but in 1981 many of the young soldiers arrived from much more strict BCT posts than the Ottoman hareem that had been FDNJ and found themselves effectively unsupervised after duty hours amid what must have seemed like a cornucopia of healthy young adults of the opposite sex.

The fucking was Homeric.

Bound up as I was in nice-middle-class-boyness and a modicum of military sheepishness I was only peripherally involved in the swiving; a kiss here, a grope-and-cuddle there...I may have been one of the handful of medics who emerged from Class 6-81 unscrewed. Alas. Si jeunesse pouvait...sigh...

I did spend a little time in San Antonio. I sat on the Riverwalk under the tamarind trees, enjoying the view and marveling at the beribboned glory of the trainees from nearby Lackland AFB (little did I know that embryonic wing-wipers got ribbon for every-fucking-thing, including marksmanship - all I knew is that the weediest of them seemed to have more fruit salad on his chest than Audie Fucking Murphy...).

I also visited the Alamo, history buff that I am, and was struck by how small it seemed, tucked away inside urban San Antonio. It was hard to picture it was standing in the middle of butt-rump nowhere as it had in 1836.

The occupiers of 1981 appeared to be exclusively middle-aged white people somewhere between 25 and 60 pounds over their ideal body weight wearing clothes that had probably looked pretty sloppy when new.

It was hard to picture it as a battlefield, and even harder to imagine it as some sort of Ground Zero for heroism.The training was fairly simple, and hours less than demanding, and it was a pleasant couple of months before I was driven to the airport and decanted onto an airliner bound, this time, for Ft. Benning, Georgia and U.S. Army Airborne School.

-----

The jump school I attended, the school that had been running as such since the Sixties, and the school (so far as I know) that still operates today, is a three-week course run by the U.S. Army Infantry School. At the time the notional military unit that comprised it was called the "4th Student Training Battalion" and consisted of four companies, 42nd through 45th.

I understand that it has been renamed after one of the old WW2 parachute infantry regiments but no matter - it's still Jump School. The round of Ground Week - Tower Week - Jump Week hasn't changed.

Interestingly, the original course as designed in the Forties was called Paratrooper School and included all the tactics needed to work in an airborne infantry unit; assembly on the drop zone, moving out as a unit, and so on. This was cut down in the late Fifties or early Sixties, perhaps largely because the school became the sole parachute jump training for the entire U.S. military (along with numerous foreign nations) and the tactical part of the POI was considered excessive.

As with AIT, the actual details of my transit were unremarkable, and there's no need to revisit them; you can find all sorts of information about Jump School on the Internets.

I will mention two moments, though.

The first was some time in the middle of Tower Week, I think. We had had a long day (they were all long days) and were somewhere in the middle of the night when one of the company cadre, one SSG Gaddy, woke us up and "cabled us down" - the formation area outside 44th Company had four long steel cables stapled to the ground on which we formed up in roster number order

(I was Roster Number 118, which says something about the bizarre sorts of things that stick in your head even after thirty-one years)

- and proceeded to bomb us with a long and not particularly coherent rant about Death, Judgement Day, and Salvation or something to that effect.I vividly remember thinking somewhere in the midst of this bizarre oration

(to this day I'm not sure if he was drunk, bored, or simply nuts, or fucking with us just because he could - unlike the dreaded Blackhats, the actual Airborne School instructors, the company cadre were a collection of casuals, transients, and (I suspect) goofballs, fuck-offs, and fuck-ups who had been assigned to babysit trainees because they could do less harm there than anywhere else - and probably never will)

that one of us - Gaddy or me, standing out there in the warm Georgia spring night when we should have been sleeping, was fucking insane and at that exact moment I wasn't sure which one of us it was.

The other incident involved a very tall Marine sergeant and the company's daily march down to Lawson Army Airfield during Jump Week.

As a private, all I had to do to get through three weeks was keep my head down, my boots shined

(and I learned very quickly that I could not spit-shine them enough to avoid the dreaded "gig pit" and scurried down to the bootblack stand at the end of the battalion area and paid up. The bootblacks painted my boots with some sort of gawdawful shiny glop (that cracked off in several hours and had the long term effect of ruining the boots with a scrofulous residue of petrochemical scurf) that got me through morning inspection and the extra pushups)

and complete five successful parachute jumps.But the NCOs and officers were graded on "leadership", which meant what the U.S. Army considered "leadership", meaning drill and ceremonies and the small change of troop leading.

Including marching.

Marching, for the U.S. Army, meant "calling cadence". This is a relatively recent feature of Army life, dating, so I understand, from the WW2 era when African-American units used chanted call-and-response cadences to keep marching step. These "jody calls" ran around the Army by the late Forties and are now considered part and parcel of "leadership" - you march troops, you gotta jody-call cadence.

Apparently this was not so in the USMC, circa 1981. The NCO in question, a very tall staff sergeant intended for a Marine Recon unit, was perfectly competent at drill commands, keeping time, and could call the step in the peculiar "'Eft, 'eft, eftrawt'eft" USMC fashion (although once, for pure entertainment, he tried to teach us an "oblique" - a disaster never repeated).

But he swore up and down he couldn't call cadence.

The company cadre (of which I've already unburdened myself) dogged him through the entire course. He had to call cadence; his "leadership" evaluation portion of the school depended on it. He needed to learn one cadence, he needed to use it, as the final week approached he seems to have been pushed harder and harder to find a way to accomplish this "critical" task...

Finally Jump Week arrived, and SSG Lanky was put in charge of the company and given the dire warning that it was this march or doom. So we right-faced and marched off on the road down through the housing area towards the airfield and our parachutes. SSG Lanky eft-eft-efting through the battalion area and past the supply sheds, with one of the cadre glaring at him and shaking his head ominously.

Finally, with less than a mile to go and the final slope through the living area and past the post elementary school in view, Lanky cleared his throat and produced his cadence, the only one I guess that he had stashed in the back of his head.

-----

Well, the story is that the adorable, tow-headed offspring of one of the majors stationed at the USAIS hopped on his mommy's lap that evening, peered wide-eyed up at her, and in his childish treble asked guilelessly:

"Mommy, what's a 'ping-pong pussy'"?

Because here's the only cadence SSG Lanky could remember:

"I know your momma,
She's a good ol' whore!
She's got a ping-pong pussy,
And a rubber asshole!
She's got knots on her titties
As big as my balls!
And the stench from her gash
Could make a dead man crawl!"

I understand that no one ever asked SSG Lanky to call cadence again.Well, the rest is nothing special; I made my jumps, got my wings, and was shoved onto a bus headed up the road for Ft. Bragg, North Carolina, where the U.S. Army intended to make me into a highly-paid, highly-trained, high-speed, air-ram, fuel-injected Special Forces soldier.

And that is a tale for the next time.

I served...

...in the wrong damn Army.

I worked with some fine female soldiers. Many of them were terrific people. Several of them were very physically attractive, as well. But never in my craziest dreams would I have described them as "better than professional model."

Let others make war; you, happy China, make gorgeous troopers better than professional model!

(h/t to Fallows)

The Army I Knew: easy to be soft

I'm jumping ahead of myself a bit here, but this occurred to me just recently due to the cartoons being in heavy rotation and I wanted to post it before I forgot.

So - I drew this little cartoon in early 1984. Before I go on, look it over and try and guess what the point of the goof is. Any ideas?So the insignia on the eagle's wing probably blows the gaff.

The caption is a bit of Eighties Army slang that may be almost forgotten, but it comes from the little spread-eagle at the center of the inverted-teardrop specialist rank insignia. Since a Specialist Fourth Class (a "Speck-Four" in the term of the time) had nothing but the green upside-down teardrop and the eagle, getting promoted to Specialist Fifth Class was "getting an umbrella for the bird".

I'm kind of fascinated by the utter disappearance of the concept of a "specialist" or "technician" from the U.S. Army. It's hard to remember now but the the idea of paying extra to soldiers who had some specialty skills came into the Army way back in the Nineteen Twenties, in other words, almost as soon as technological/industrial warfare was invented. The first "technicians" were all officially privates first class (so even at the start the Army decided that these gomers were NOT sergeant material, regardless of what sort of gee-whiz cool shit they knew how to do) with a technical endorsement. So a technician third class was a "first-third"; a private first class and a technician third.

By WW2 the entire institution of "technicians" was formalized in something like seven classes. The rank of E-5 buck sergeant had a shadow technician rank, Technician Fourth Class - note the insignia below. This guy had the same technician grade as the 1980's E-4 but wore a buck sergeant's stripes above his "T".But, again, he was NOT a "sergeant", although I suspect that in technical outfits like commo and medical units he might well have been referred to as "sarge."

It was in the Fifties that technicians became specialists and my old rank was invented, although at the time it was called a "Specialist Two". There's actually a decent Wiki entry discussing the whole business, if you're interested. There were a pantsload of these specialist grades during the Vietnam years. Pretty much anyone who wasn't a combat arms MOS got a soft-stripe rather than a hard. It really wasn't all that easy to be soft. But I liked the idea, and I'll bet there were others like me back in the day.

Mind you, by the time I got an umbrella for my bird the higher-grade specialists were getting rare. I had a SP-6 as an AIT instructor at Ft. Sam Houston in 1981 and there was a rumor that one of the other company's cadre was actually a SP-7, a beast as rare and wonderful as a unicorn. Not long after I got my umbrella even the E-6 LPN in the battalion aid station was a staff sergeant hard-stripe.

The thing was that what hadn't changed between the technicians of the Twenties and the me of the Eighties was the relationship between the noncommissioned officers and the specialists. An NCO - a "hard stripe" - was considered by the Army and, usually, the soldier him or herself as a leader of soldiers, by God. The specialist was just a nice guy that hung around and got paid like a noncom but didn't do any actual noncomming, a sort of overpromoted private.

And the thing is, I never really objected. It was worth the widely accepted notion that I was an overpaid waste of good oxygen to be able to respond to the First Sergeant when he burst into the dayroom on a Sunday afternoon looking "for a couple of hard-charging NCOs who don't owe me no money for a nice, simple, easy detail" by reminding him that I was NOT an NCO, let along "hard-charging", and was in point of fact a sort of gentleman of leisure, an idle upper-deck passenger on the luxury liner S.S.H.H.C. 1/325th Infantry. This never failed to irritate the piss out of him which had the pleasant side-effect of ticking me no end.

My lovely soft-stripe idyll lasted less than a year.

By 1985 the U.S. Army finished converting all the specialists into hard-stripe NCOs (the higher grades had been shifted over in the early Eighties) and I was informed that the Secretary of the Army would be pleased if I would but on some stripes and get on with earning my money and leading soldiers.And you can see by my expression in the picture above how gracefully I took the news and how delighted about the whole business I was.

Plus ça change,

I doodled this little thing in a spectacularly tedious class on "leadership ethics" during Primary Leadership Development Course (PLDC) at Ft. Sherman, Panama sometime in December, 1986...and this one yesterday - what, 26 years later? - in the first day of my 40hr HAZWOPER class in Hillsboro, Oregon, 2012Sometimes not only does the damn plus c'est la même chose leopard not change his spots but the damn spots don't change, either.

Hmmm. Well, not entirely.

I do note that while as a broth of a lad of twenty-nine I appear to have been obsessed with women and have spent most of my time doodling about them twenty-something years later the places my head goes when it's desperately looking for a way out of the room are somewhat less venereal and more...interesting. Although I still do seem to like to draw women.

I find it interesting that the one repeated image - although not from the PLDC doodle I posted above, is the mermaid riding the torpedo. Here she is, from "Raiders of the Lost Parts"......and here she is on the wall of what is now Missy's bedroom (she got up on the old drywall as we were demoing the old backhall closet room, and you can read aaaaall about it here although she seems somewhat Asian in this one).For some reason she seems to be an image I enjoy drawing.

There are truly some strange things that get lodged in the human cerebrum.

But I suspect that there are more doodles to come. I have three more days of this HAZWOPER stuff this week. Eeegah.

Tales from the Trail 2: Nothing Else Holds Fashion

I want to tell you another story from my years as a drill sergeant. But before I can tell you that story...well, it's more a sort of extended joke, really...I have to tell you this one.

The thing is that USAR once had something like a dozen or so entire "divisions" largely composed of noncommissioned officers, many of whom had never been on active service and who had been trained in a Reserve Component "leadership academy", as drill sergeants. I was in one of them, the old "Timberwolf" 104th Division scattered in the Northwest.

I like to think that I was a decent - not great, but decent - hat. A lot of RC hats had...issues...but that's really another story, and not a particularly humorous one.Anyway. Here's the odd thing about the way the Army used to train drill sergeants back in my day.

(And keep in mind the Army kept telling you that getting under the Hat was this big fat hairy deal and it how made you that much more of this high-speed leader of men.)

A hell of a lot of the training consisted of just flat out memorizing these little spiels - called "formats" - for drill and ceremonies and physical training.

Because at the time the drill sergeants in Basic did little of the actual tactical and almost none of the technical training. Range cadre taught Joe and Molly how to shoot, various specialty training cadre taught the commo and first aid and NBC and the rest. I have no idea if that's still the case. But it was then.All the hats did was pretty much use these little formats to teach Joe and Molly how to march and how to exercise, and then babysat them at all other times, and that was pretty much that.

So to become a drill sergeant - at least in the USAR, at least in my time - you had to be absolutely word-perfect in delivering these little "format" speeches.

They were all of a thing; an introduction, a description of the exercise or the drill position or movement, and a demonstration. For example, the one for the position of attention went something like this:

"Platoon, attention! At ease! I am SSG Blank and for the next XX minutes I will be your primary instructor on the position of attention. The position of attention is the base position for all stationary and marching movements. At this time I will talk my demonstrator through the position of attention. Demonstrator, post! You will assume the position of attention on the command FALL IN or the command Squad (platoon), ATTENTION. To assume this position, bring the heels together sharply on line, with the toes pointing out equally, forming an angle of 45 degrees. Rest the weight of the body evenly on the heels and balls of both feet. Keep the legs straight without locking the knees. Hold the body erect with the hips level, chest lifted and arched, and the shoulders square. Keep the head erect and face straight to the front with the chin drawn in so that alignment of the head and neck is vertical..."

There was a ton more of that crap, but you get the idea. You actually had to say all that stuff exactly like that, in that exact order, and you got gagged if you couldn't.

It seemed like a silly way to train "leaders" to me at the time and still does, but if I had one skill as a soldier it was learning to do what the Army wanted me to do so I did.

We memorized and recited formats for all the exercises in Field Manual 21-20, and for all the drill in Field Manual 22-5. These two GSA-paper-bound, camo-printed bibles were the Old and New Testaments for drill sergeants back when I was eager to become one, and we were told that all that was considered worth knowing was contained within their pages.

That was what we were told.

But we knew, as you all know, as every living adult knows intimately and perfectly well, there is more to life than physical fitness and military drill and ceremonies.

Sometimes, there must be romance.

Sometimes, there most be passion, the mad, heated passions that make men and women into ravening beasts, that awake the dark heats of lust that burn unslaked beneath the crispest shirtfront and frilliest blouse.

And, fortunately, there are drill sergeants there to take these untamed passions and turn them into a format. And drill sergeant candidates with time on their hands, sex on their minds, and the experience in the TRADOC format to use one to develop a format for the other.

So in case you do not know how to do this or wish to bring your performance up to Army standards, here is the officially approved 104th Division (Training) format for what we designated as "the Four-Count Hump", circa 1993.

Platoon, atten-SHUN!

At ease.

I am Drill Sergeant Lawes, and for the next twenty minute block of instruction I will be your primary instructor on the exercise known as the Four-Count Hump. This exercise is used to entertain troops not in formation as well as, when required, populate the United States inclusive of Alaska and Hawaii. It is a four-count exercise performed at a slow to fast cadence. The equipment required for this exercise include a partner and a roughly level portion of terrain.

I will now use my demonstrators to demonstrate one repetition of the exercise.

Demonstrators, POST!.

Not that in this case my demonstrators are one each male and female. Performing this exercise using two each male or two each female personnel is currently not authorized by Army Regulations or FM 21-20, however, I am informed that the Department of the Army is in the process of preparing a revision to these regulations so be advised that this information is subject to change.

My demonstrators have assumed the positions for the "conventional" or "missionary" variation of this exercise. This is the most common variation and is often exclusively used by personnel unfamiliar with the exercise or their partners. This variation is not the only variation authorized by Army Regulations, however, certain variations should not be attempted without the presence of safety personnel and a trained aidman on site.You will note that my female demonstrator has assumed a supine position. Her head and neck are erect, her shoulders square, her chest and back upright. She may place her arms at her sides or up to forty-five degrees from her torso. Her knees are bent and her feet approximately shoulder width apart.

My male demonstrator has assumed the front leaning rest position. His head is erect and faces his partner, his arms straight with his elbows locked and his entire body is in a line from his shoulders to his ankles. He may arch his back or sag in the middle but will return to the starting position before performing this exercise.

Now you will note that for demonstration purposes my demonstrators are wearing PT uniform. However, the actual performance of this exercise is done while wearing no clothing, or minimal attire consistent with the intent of the exercise. You will also note that to correctly perform this exercise the male personnel are required to maintain their penile assembly in the fully extended and locked position. Failure to do this will result in unsatisfactory performance of this exercise.At this time my demonstrators will perform one repetition of this exercise.

On the count of "one" my male demonstrator will begin the exercise by bending his elbows and lowering his entire body as a single unit until his upper arms are at least parallel to the ground. During this movement the penile assembly is inserted into the female personnel's vaginal housing unit. At the completion of the first count of the exercise the baseplate of the penile assembly should be firmly seated against the vaginal locking ring.Note that the female demonstrator is allowed to raise her hips up to eight inches from the ground surface and may make lateral motions up to four inches to either side during this count.

Ready. ONE.

On the count of "two". my male demonstrator will return to the starting position by raising his entire body until his arms are fully extended with the elbows locked. His body must remain rigid in a generally straight line and move as a unit while performing this count. My female may return her body to a fully supine position at this time.

Ready. TWO.

On the count of three my demonstrators will repeat the actions of count one.Ready. THREE.

On the count of four my demonstrators will repeat the actions of count two.Ready. FOUR.

At this time you will sound off with "Oh GOD!" and the number of the repetition. If you fail to keep your body generally straight, to ensure full contact between the baseplate of the penile assembly and the vaginal locking ring, lower your whole body until your upper arms are at least parallel to the ground, or to extend your arms completely, that repetition will not count.At this time what are your questions concerning the Four-Count Hump?

Tales from the Trail 1: The Mad Shitter

Fort Leonard Wood was fucking cold.

We were there in November, and I was told by the Leonard Wood cognoscenti that FLWM had two seasons; summer, and fucking cold. And at the moment it was fucking cold, and so was I.

But a drill sergeant is expected to be as impervious to cold as he or she is supposed to be immune to fatigue, fear, and uncertainty. Whatever else a trainee soldier may see during his or her Basic, they are not supposed to see a drill sergeant acting tired, afraid, or confused.

Or cold.

So I stood outside the nice, warm instructor's hut out in the middle of the scraggly woods on Range 37 and tried to look warm.

I was detailed as the company dogsbody that day; driver, runner, assistant Senior Drill; whatever was needed, that was what I was. But that morning the company commander had his own priorities, and they had nothing to do with my assigned duties.

"Sergeant Lawes," CPT Crowne asked sotto voce, "where, right now, at this very moment, is the Shitter?"

Now a normal, sane human being, hearing that, would have pointed the officer in the general direction of the latrines over by the woodline to the southwest. But a normal, sane human being would not understood that that term, at that particular time and place, had nothing to do with a place. It was a person.

PVT Flux wanted to be a soldier more than he wanted anything in the world.

Other eighteen-year-olds wanted a muscle car. Or a ridiculously awesome gaming system. Or to get inside the scented panties wrapped around the taut haunches of Suzy Creemcheese, Prairie Homecoming Queen and pride of West Lynn.

Not Joey Flux. He wanted a Combat Infantryman's Badge with two stars.

So he threw his gawky, badly-formed body at Basic Training like a spastic berserker, punishing himself and the equipment he fought to overcome. He was awkward at drill, slow and uncoordinated at PT, painfully incapable of the simplest military tasks.

But, oh, how he wanted to be a soldier. If desire, will and love alone could have been the masters Joey Flux would have been fucking Audie Murphy.

But mere military incapacity was not the impediment; this was the volunteer Army, and the numbers had to pass muster if even the slowest recruit had to be pencil-whipped on to their units. Let the gaining units chapter the poor bastard out, was the general opinion; they had nothing better to do. Here at BCT, Ft. Leonard Wood Missouri, we were in the business of making shit into soldiers and, by God, soldiers or one sort or another they would be.

But not in this case.

In this case, it WAS the shit that was the problem.

Because, you see, PVT Flux had problems beyond his ineptitude at D&C, general subjects, and PT.

He had an incurable inability to control his bowels around authority.

I'm not talking about a fear of truly Olympian power; a lurking dread of having his heels locked by the Chief of the Army Staff or the Post Commander. Merely being addressed sharply by SP4 Joremy, the orderly room clerk, would put Flux in a state of immediate knee-knocking terror. And if he was addressed by someone as exalted and terrifying as a drill sergeant he would nearly faint with panic.

For PVT Flux officers were pure, blind, sphincter-loosening nightmare.

The first time he demonstrated his peculiar affliction was when he was stopped by one of the cadre lieutenants while scurrying into a classroom early in cycle. He apparently hoped to avoid the august notice of this lesser god by lowering his head and speeding up to double-time, but he had made the mistake of passing alone and the officer must have been bored, or feeling shirty, because he halted Flux to harass him for not saluting.

I was told that the second john mistook Flux's look of panic for military intensity, and so stood awaiting the required gesture of respect which was, indeed, rendered with trembling hand. But it was accompanied by a sound not unlike the sudden tearing of rotten burlap, and both young soldiers were enveloped in a choking miasma of used chili mac and assorted secondhand GI chow.

The 2LT recoiled in loathing, and Flux's drill sergeant descended on him with fire and brimstone. This, needless to say, didn't help. The poor youth, having voided everything he could, merely subsided in a heap and had to be helped into the squad bay and hosed down in the shower.

Well, things went to hell after that. The wretched kid was beyond embarrassed, his superiors were roughly equally divided into horrified, disgusted, or amused. They tried, I'm told, everything they could think of. But the poor guy just pooped everytime he caught a glint of rank. He was hopeless.

By the time my USAR unit arrived to shepherd the young men of A/3/10 through two weeks of Basic Rifle Marksmanship poor Flux had experienced several more of these incidents, had been referred to Community Mental Health, and had been assessed unfit for service. It wasn't for lack of trying; I spoke gently to the poor kid, and he really, REALLY wanted to go on. It wasn't in his mind but in his bowels that the fear of military authority was so terrifying.

It was pure hindbrain - the caveman instinct when the sabertooth was on the slope above the trail, the direwolf glaring from the cleft of the rock. At the moment he was confronted by the menace of rank his monkey brain simply took over, and his monkey ass provided him with something to throw, perhaps. Or made him too noisome to be worth predating. Or something.

I really have no idea.

But the other victim of this sad little psychological drama was my commander. I'm not sure to this day if it started with CPT Crowne's predecessor but I've always suspected that this hearty sportsman, bursting with corn-fed Midwestern brio, took one look at the weedy little man who showed up to replace him and proceeded to take the mickey out of my boss with stories of the Mad Shitter and his insane desire to defecate on every officer of the United States Army.

From what I could tell from that moment, in the mind of CPT Crowne, PVT Flux occupied the same place that the hashishin of Alamut came to represent in the minds of 12th Century Crusaders, or the kamikazi in the estimation of the sailors of the U.S. Pacific Fleet; a frightful nightmare, the walking embodiment of sudden and unexpected horror.

My commander apparently pictured this poor wretch as some sort of walking bomb packed with deadly feces and fuzed to explode at the merest sight of an insignia of commissioned rank. That he was trapped in a BCT company with a home-grown Sunni suicide shit-bomb. CPT Crowne seemed to believe that the Mad Shitter lurked in ambush in every billet room or behind every blind corner of every training area, awaiting the opportunity to turn his back and hew down a selflessly-serving Reserve officer (married! with children! a churchgoer! Republican!) with his fearsome anal Claymore.

This dreadful fate so consumed his imagination that by the fourth day of our rotation the man was utterly useless and remained so the entire cycle. When he wasn't funking about looking for the Mad Shitter he was worrying about where poor Flux was and coming up with schemes to remove one or the other of them from each other's proximity, and that's what he was worrying about at the moment instead of the cold.

"Sergeant Lawes, here's what you need to do." he hissed, his eyes darting about like a ferret's in a cage, "You need to find the Shitter, and you need to take him back to the company area. Now."

I looked at the poor sod with as much pity as I could muster beyond my own chill. This is what the hell the Army has come to. Bill Calley and now this. Christ on a fucking pogo stick.

"Well, actually, sir, I need to remain with the trainees. The CUCV is the designated evacuation vehicle in case of an injury, you may recall."

CPT Crowne glared at me, his slitted lids almost hiding the panic in his mustelid eyes.

"All right, sergeant, if you're going to be that way. Inform Senior Drill that my CP will be in the cadre office until the trainees return to their bivouac site."

Yeah, the only place on the entire range where young PVT Flux can't go, you poor weasel, I thought, but gave him my best SFC Nelson salute, holding it until he turned and scampered away.

Poor Flux. He was still there, on medical hold awaiting his release from Active Duty on a Chapter 11 (Unsuitable to the Needs of the Army), when my two-week rotation ended and I got on the bus headed back to Portland.

I never found out what became of the Terror of the Tenth Infantry, the scourge of the shoulder insignia, the briefly notorious trainee soldier known to legend simply as the Mad Shitter.

The Army I Knew: BCT

We left off here almost exactly one year ago, with the cadre of A Company, 4th Battalion, 3rd (Basic Training) Brigade descending on the poor fools - among which I was one of the relatively-average-foolish - arriving from Ft. Dix Reception Station.

Basic Training - at least, the Basic Training they were running at Ft. Dix in the Eighties, was almost exactly what you would expect if you've seen a handful of movies or television shows or talked to someone who had been through it. It relies on the gullibility and fearfulness of late-teenagers and early adults who can be frightened into doing exactly what they are told. A handful are too stubborn, or too broken, to do even this, and they are, usually, quickly disposed of - although one day I'll tell you the story of Ft. Benning and the Mad Shitter.

But the rest is a tale as old as the Army and not really worth repeating. Yes, they made us do pushups. Yes, we had to go a lot of places in formations, and sit through classes, and go bivouac on the rifle range (and Ft. Dix in January is fucking cold and don't let anyone kid you) and were dosed with CS "tear" gas, and all the comic book and movie stuff. Suffice to say we got through it and moved on, and I'd be very surprised if any of us who went through "Coldsteel Alpha" that chilly winter of 1981 have spent much time or mental coin thinking back on it.So let me just tell you some stories from that time and place.

First, a little note about what we wore.

Trust me, this is not becoming a fashion blog. It's just that of all the aspects of my BCT the one thing that sets us apart in my mind is that we were the last of a long history of GIs to wear the O.D. green that had symbolized the Arsenal of Democracy since 1941.Specifically, we wore the OG-107 fatigue uniform, better known as the just "fatigues" or as the "pickle suit". We wore the rubber-sole black "boot, combat" that had been standard since the Fifties, and the whole ensemble was topped off with one of the most ridiculous items of headwear ever invented by the U.S. Army, the OG-106 "baseball cap".The cardboard stiffener in front was designed to get bent into all sorts of moronic looking shapes, and the fake-leather band was sweat-droolingly hot in summer and icy cold in winter.

The thing is, the pickle suit had been a very stylin' outfit. The drill sergeants nearly all had the old all-cotton versions from the Sixties. These typically faded to a pale green and took starch like a Congressmen to a lobbyist's cashbag; they could be creased to razor sharpness and looked terrific. Our later, cotton-polyester, like nearly all polyester products from the Seventies, looked, well, like shit, especially if you threw in the moronic cap.

But that was just for the guys. Really, let's not even talk about what may have been the most horrible atrocity committed by the U.S. Army outside of My Lai; the female summer Class A uniform, otherwise known as the "Slimey Limey", a jaw-droppingly ugly "mint green polyester knit skirt and jacket uniform" that would have worked spectacularly as birth control device for Messalina or any of the other great horizontals of history. On a normal American woman it looked like leprous death, was universally despised, and was perhaps the only reason the gals looked forward to going into the AG-44 Army Greens.

But back to the issue of O.D.; in our fatigues we looked like GIs had since North Africa, we were living a great tradition and an honorable lineage so, being GIs, we all hated the pickle suit and longed after the cool camouflage uniforms that the Marines had.

Had we known that the BDU was going to be that uniform, well...I'll leave that for another day.

The one other big difference in my BCT was a less permanent one. We had a "mixed" company, men and women together.

This was all part of the post-Vietnam VOLAR experiment and one that wrapped up soon thereafter. I have no idea which genius thought that the ladies from 1st "Fox" Platoon would live as chaste and stainless as the Sisters of Charity right upstairs from 2nd "Flame" and 3rd "Herd" where the lusty lads were bunked, but the fireguards on the landings were meeting cute every night, and I was told later that the unoccupied cadre rooms down at the end of the 1st Platoon floor were like a Fellini movie from midnight to first call.

But I never got in on all this hearty wooing; I was first a squad leader, then the platoon guide (trainee platoon sergeant) and was excused duty keeping the watches of the night and all that healthy young American soldier girl lovin'. All I remember it got me in return was the headaches of nannying forty other ignorant young people and Private Skrodinsky, the platoon's living Polack joke.

There was this time when Skrogie, cleaning his rifle, was showing the Kim brothers how the buffer spring could be compressed all the way down the buffer and (through an excess of CLP, or so he claimed later) shot the thing out the second-floor window into the truckbed of Drill Sergeant Reynold's truck...

...But that was later.Anyway, we managed to fumble through what I now recognize was a pathetically inadequate entry training, learning just enough to have gotten us killed within a day or so of genuine combat. But keep in mind we were the ash and trash of the Army; cooks, clerks, medics, truck drivers. The Army saw no reason - having forgotten the lessons of Vietnam and unseeing the ruinous guerilla wars to come - in teaching us REMFs how to really fight. After all, that was what Eleven-Bullets were for.Funny, when I think back on the time now I have a vague memory of cold, and being constantly a little tired, and of poor instruction inadequately delivered. And of a handful of memorable events, some because of the place, some for the people, some for the pure weirdness of them.

The Night of Sergeant Layne was one of the latter.

SSG Ricardo Layne was the junior drill sergeant for 2nd Platoon - this being a time when the Army was working under short commons each platoon had two instead of the authorized three - and was a native of some sort of Caribbean country. He was very tall, very black, and spoke, when at all, with a distinctive island accent.

SSG Layne was the "good cop" to SFC Nelson's "bad cop" - he was the cool, calm one next to the platoon sergeant's gruffness.

So it came as something of a surprise to hear him roaring at us in the middle of a dark February night.

We formed up in the hallways outside our barrack rooms in our skivvies, shivering and clueless, as he ramped and roared up and down the shiny linoleum, inching our toes away from the jump boots that glittered like black diamonds, even on pre-dawn CQ. It took some time for us to understand what he was furious about, and even longer to really "get" the impact of his fury, but finally we got it - we had used all the week's ration of toilet paper.

Remember, this was before the fat times; we were still "Carter's Army", still poor, still skimping to get by. We only got so much bog roll, and here it was almost Thursday and it had all disappeared up our capacious backsides.

"Joo pipple..."

Layne ranted,

"...joo 'ave been ussing en-tirely too mooch toilet pepper. Now Aye am not shoore if t'is is doo to joo pipple 'ave been inadequately instroocted in de joose of de Joo Ess Army toilet pepper, or because joo is joost full of chit. Dat doan matter, because dis is de last toilet pepper joo will get until NEXT week, and joo will 'ave to learn to use eet correctly or joo will just 'ave to use joor entrenching tool, which of course joo will clean properly afterwords..."

I'm not sure what happened after that; I think we went back to try and get another hour or two's rack. And we didn't run out of buttwipe again.

But he sure was mad.

Of course, it wasn't just us fucking up.

One afternoon late in the three-month training cycle (so it must have been some time late in March) the three of us platoon guides were told to have our units "in the classroom" after noon chow for some reason. So at 1300, good as gold, all three little soldiers called their units to atention, put them "at ease" and turned around to await their masters.

Only no one came.1310 came and went, and then fifteen minutes, and the three of us called out our first squad leaders and ran to meet in front of my platoon. What had happened? What was wrong? We concluded that we had been supposed to form up at "the classroom" - in our experience the battalion theatre down at the end of the street - and had missed some vital instruction. Confident now in our understanding of the situation, we returned to our platoons.

"Platoon, atten-shun. Right face. Forward...march!" and off the street we went, three little blocks of wanna-be GIs. Column right onto the battalion street (get out there, road guards!), column right and column left into the theatre parking lot. Countercolumn. Halt. File from the right, column left...march and into the dim seats.

And then...nothing.

I think it must have been another fifteen minutes when the side door slammed open and one of the holdovers who was acting as a sort of dogsbody and general nuisance around the company stuck his head in and yelped.

"Don't move!"

We looked at each other. Hunh? Don't move...where?

Well, we found out about a nanosecond later; the cadre poured in like OD Goths swarming through the Porta Appia. We were driven outside, marched back to the company area and herded into the company classroom (in the basement of our barrack) which was the intended location of whatever silly thing we had been intended to do. The three of us platoon guides were questioned mercilessly until our drill sergeants were satisfied that we had just made an honest mistake and had not been attempting to escape.

And I think they were a little frightened by our initiative as well as chagrined at losing 120 GIs for half an hour.

I don't remember much else, other than little oddiments. Somehow we managed to get through the POI and move on without killing ourselves or each other, and I suspect that most of us made fairly decent soldiers in one way or another.The old BT post is all but closed now, and my old barracks has been made into some sort of low-security prison. The soldiers are pretty much all gone, and the units, as well. The quiet streets of the old post are mostly empty, and the cold winter winds no longer carry the sound of marching cadences sung far away.

Straightedge

I'm 54 today.

It's just another day - I was up in the West Hills drilling a soil boring this morning, stopped by the shop around noon (I did treat myself to a sushi stop for lunch...) and then legged it across the street to drop in on of our construction projects for a check. At the moment I'm taking a break from writing up a soils report to post this.

I'll be back later tonight with some more reflections on twoscore-years-and-fourteen, but right at the moment, thinking back over the people I've been and the place I've gone, y'know what I was reminiscing about?

Straight razors.

It started with a brief visit to my friends Maia and Q here, where our heroine and her husband Mike visit an old-school barber shop in their home in Colorado. As part of the treatment the barber gets out the straight razor to shave Mike, and I was instantly transported back to the Division barbershop on Ardennes Street back in the Eighties.Because back in the day I still had hair, and I got a big kick out of getting a flat-top #1 cut that made me look the spit of my old man in his Navy crackerjacks back in 1944. And the best part of the whole gig was the big finish, where the grouchy old Army barber got out the shaving gear.

He would heat up the lather and strop the straight razor, and then it was all hot shave cream from ear to ear and down the back of my neck.

But before I could relax into the smooth heat he was there with the blade.

There was always something electrifying about the kiss of cold steel along the back of my neck. Maybe it was just the zing of cold after heat...or maybe it was knowing that one slip and things would get messy real quick. But I loved the clean feeling it produced, laying my nape and sidewalls down to the skin.

He never did slip, and I always tipped him high and walked out feeling like a real hard boy with my beret pulled down to show off the high whitewalls.

Well, time and genes have combined to give me whitewalls all the way up, these days. And I do my own trimming at home with an electric razor. I never found a barber outside the service who used the old straight blade after I left the active service. One of the barbers trimming my kiddo's hair told me that it's now against most state regulations, what with fears of AIDS and other blood-borne diseases.

Too bad.

Funny, all the things you do and those you enjoy; the cold steel shave up the back of the neck would seem to be an odd thing to miss. And yet, of all things, I do.

Funny Papers 2: It Came From South Florida

This little comic adventure stemmed from the week back in 1986 I was detailed to provide medical support for an ARNG infantry brigade from Florida. For some reason they deployed to Panama for their Annual Training and requested - and got - a GAMA Goat ambulance, driver and medic (which was me) from the 2nd Battalion (ABN)(LT) 187th Infantry, my then-unit of assignment.They were an interesting crew - lots of Cuban-Americans - and provided a certain amount of amusement but also a hell of a lot of irritation. Their officers were...shambolic, to put it kindly. They had very little in the way of military skills - I think that their weekend drills were a sort of Cuban-American social club. And they were in terrible physical shape and the Panamanian jungle just flat wore them out.I actually started this in the field, and included a full page (Page 6) detailing a long and pointless bit of foolery that, on reflection, adds nothing to the story and is omitted here. The second and third pages were an extended and juvenile bitch about how fucked up the Guards were, which I now regret (having been in the Guard myself now and seen the other side of the hill) and have also used my aeditorial powers to delete.



The one thing I should mention is that at the end of page 3 I draw a little scene wherein we had something like a stray round go overhead (the 105s were firing on the nearby FA impact area). The Guard had a bit of a panic, assuming they were taking friendly fire. It turned out to be one of the base-ejecting illumination round canisters (that hold the flare inside the shell). We lost a lot of sleep over that, though, and that's where you come in on Page 4.I think the story largely stands on its own but I should perhaps add some notes to explain some otherwise in-joke images.Notes: (The page numbers are from the original pagination - look in the lower right corner; pages 2, 3, and 6 are omitted)



Page 1, top: The teeny little picture right below the caption is supposed to be the Panamanian DMV - "D.N.T.T.", a notorious hive of scum and villainy (and bribery) where you got your Panamanian tags and licenses. I had a motorcycle, which the "inspectors" seemed to find all sorts of wrong and fine-able with until I slipped them all a sawbuck after which they were my best pals and passed me out most quick smart.



Page 2, bottom: My medical platoon sergeant was a "fixer" of the Bilko breed and had managed to scrounge a M151 quarter-ton jeep which was supposed to have been turned in as excess when the battalion converted from the 3/5th Infantry (straight-leg) to the airborne/light MTO&E. It was strictly off-the-books and for his own driving pleasure. Well, the Florida Guard borrowed it on a hand-receipt and wrecked the fuck out of it. I have no idea how. I really did roll up to our Motor Pool and find it sitting sadly, looking just like that, right outside the main gate. I heard later that my platoon daddy actually cried when he saw it. He really did love that quarter-ton.Page 5, top: The Guard chain never bothered to give me their challenge/password - probably assuming that as a "notional" part of the exercise I didn't need it - but never told their gate guards to let me pass without challenge, either. We spent some fun playing word games at their trains gate while someone went up to the the TOC and then the battle captain waddled down and sprung me. Good times.



Page 7, middle: Our mortar platoon was live-firing on Empire Range during the Guard field problem, and they really did shoot out of the impact area and blew some nice holes in K-15 road, which was the main road through that section of the range. I found the shell holes, so I got to be the one to inform the mortar platoon leader, who wasn't half as amused by it as I was.



Page 7, bottom: I really did have a guardsman that practically assaulted me trying to climb into the ambulance to be evacuated for being a heat casualty. Liveliest case of heat exhaustion I've ever seen. And the other guy wouldn't say what his problem was (I couldn't find anything, either, which didn't help) other than he was "woozy". I think he was woozy at the idea of trying the fire-and-movement course with his buddies shooting around him, since their idea of fire discipline would have made a pack of savage Shiite militiamen on the roof of the Ramadi Holiday Inn gulp with disbelief.



Last page, center: I really need to write a post about the old M792 ambulance. It really was a horrible idea of a truck, but it was unique and a bit of Army history. Maybe in a bit. Maybe as a cartoon.



But GAMA Goats or no, that's the tale of what happened in Panama in December, 1986. Hope you enjoyed it.