I recently left the Army, after serving for a couple of years as an Infantryman. I was looking into staying enlisted, doing something other than being in the Infantry, but was told that the Army didn’t really need rodeo clowns. Whatever, their loss.
I have a lot of good memories of the Army. Most of them involve the fine people I was honored to serve with, and the sense of joy that accompanied special moments ranging from my graduation from Basic Training, to enjoying steaks cooked by Sgt. Gibbs during long summer evenings in Iraq, to the indescribable feeling of returning home with all of my limbs and most of my sanity intact. I wouldn’t trade any of these memories, not for anything man can offer.
And mixed in are a couple of stories about some profoundly stupid people. These are the three dopiest cats I recall from my time in service. They all occurred after we’d returned to the States, and all names have been changed.
Our first subject is a young man named Maki. Maki was pulled over at one of the entrance gates to our post, for the simple reason that he was drunk, and driving a car. After the MP’s gave him the sobriety tests, to confirm that Maki was actually drunk, and hadn’t simply been bathing in gin earlier that evening, they took a look into his car, and found that he was in possession of a loaded .45 automatic. When Maki was asked why he was trying to bring a large, unlicensed hogleg on post, he replied, “I’m gonna go and clean out the barracks.” He was promptly arrested, which, I hear, surprised him a bit. Not being the swiftest monkey in the jungle, it hadn’t occurred to Maki that being quite drunk, carrying an illegal firearm, and confessing an intent to commit multiple homicide were things that the MP’s might take an interest in. He was wrong.
Second out of the gate, we have Private Dyke. Dyke, having already screwed up in a manner unknown to me, had been moved from his barracks room into the ‘fuck-up room’, where various and sundry idiots were placed so as to be under the bored eye of the sergeant who had the daily Charge of Quarters. One day, Sgt. Burr, who was on CQ, stepped into the hallway between the CQ lounge and the ‘fuck-up room’ to find Dyke coming the other way.
“Hey, Sergeant,” Dyke said, stopping Sgt. Burr, then glancing around in a manner most shifty, “We cool?”
“Sure, Dyke, we cool”, replied the sergeant.
“Good, man, good.” At this, Dyke pulled out a plastic pen, broke it open, and proceeded to stuff in, and light, a rock of crack.
Sgt. Burr, while discussing this incident later, had confessed to being so shocked by the sight of Dyke’s action that he’d actually experienced the same feeling of unreality that had overcome him just after being shot in the leg in Iraq.
Last, I bring to your attention to Pfc. Milo. Milo, who had had his weapon taken away while in Iraq, after accidentally firing three rounds from said weapon into a fire that his squad was sitting around one evening, wasn’t actually stupid. His head just... wasn’t hooked up quite right. He’d come close to clear thinking, and then just get lost. Sometimes very, very lost.
Just before going to jail, he described to me and our mutual friend Houser what had gotten him into trouble. Apparently, he and a young lady of his acquaintance had spent a nice evening together. They had seen a movie, had dinner, and then gone back to her apartment, where they had ended up in bed together. It had gone wrong when Milo, and I swear I am quoting this verbatim, “started fingering her down there, and then she woke up and got all pissed off.” Yeah, Milo, bitches'll do that.
My word.
No comments:
Post a Comment