Thursday, July 10, 2008

Just another day in Basic

Basic Training is hard. That's a cliche, I know, but it's a cliche for a reason, because it's nothing but the unvarnished truth. The Drills do all kinds of things to you, and order you to do other things you're not sure that you are capable of. It's part of the process of teaching a recruit to be tough enough to make a decent soldier, teaching a recruit the things that very well might keep him alive in dangerous places, during evil times. I'd do all of it again, if I had to. I wouldn't be happy about it, but I'd stick it out, and do my best, without experiencing much dread.

Except for the niggling thought that I'd once again have to go through the Gas Chamber.

It's called the Gas Chamber for the very simple reason that it's the room in which you and your fellow recruits are exposed to CS Gas, a generally non-lethal riot control agent. This is done for two reasons, near as I can figure: One, to show the recruits that the Protective Mask they are issued will indeed protect them from gas attacks, and Two, to show the recruit what happens when you're not protected.

The first part is easy. The Drills call out the warning that a gas attack has commenced, and the recruits struggle to don the disturbingly S+M style mask in the nine seconds we've been told we might have before feeling the effects of the gas. Then your platoon is marched into a small, one room, airtight building, where two of the Drill's have fired up some of the actual gas, and let it build to a nice, painful level. You spend a few moments just breathing through the mask, noticing a strange tang to the air, but nothing particularly bad. Then you're told to pull the mask away from your face, breaking the seal to your skin and letting just a bit of the gas in.

You know you're in trouble from the first whiff. By the time you're told to completely remove your mask, you already know that you really, really don't want to. But you do, because you know that if you refuse, the mask will still come off, probably at the hands of the Drills, and nobody wants to be that guy.

That first whiff was bad, but getting it full on is like experiencing Satan's Halitosis. The gas crawls into your eyes, up your nose, and down your throat. It's like inhaling razors into your lungs and Tabasco into your nose while pouring sand into your eyes. Your eyes pour out tears and clamp shut, which doesn't help at all, your nose begins to run, and you cough hard enough that you think some lung might come out.

It's all you can do to stand there, trying to breathe and not breathe at the same time, waiting out the time until the Drill's open the doors and let you stumble, red eyed and hacking, into the clean air outside. I honestly don't know how long we were required to wait, because all I could think was 'Oh god, this shit is gonna kill me." Later, one of the other guys in the platoon told me that from what he could see, I handled the exposure pretty well, but at the time, it was all I could do not to break for the door, and to hell with what the Drills would say. I managed to hold out, though. Just barely, but I did it.

Johnson broke, though. He was headed for the door pretty quick after the mask's were removed, and when one of the Drills grabbed Johnson by the back of the Load-Bearing Vest he was wearing, Johnson hit the snaps on that thing and motored right out the door, leaving the Drill with an empty vest clutched in his hand.

Somewhere between a minute and a century later, the doors were opened, although the only way you could tell was by the fact that a brighter light was now swimming through your tears. Stumbling, tears pouring and snot running, you get into the light and are pushed away from the door, to walk up and down a dirt road. You walk until the hacking cough subsides, and your eyes dry, and there's no more snot to wipe away. You spend the rest of the day slowly getting your sense of smell back, and trading quips about how bad it was with the other recruits.

And, if your like me and my platoon-mates, and happen to be the duty platoon that week, you have to go back into that god damn room at the end of the day and hose it off, to eliminate as much of the residual gas as possible.

Sunday, July 06, 2008

Return to Dreamtime

I took my last hit of weed about seven months ago, now. It's had a couple of benefits, including less money wasted and a slightly improved ability to get things done, but the most enjoyable has been a return of regular dreaming to my sleep cycle.

I don't think weed keeps you from dreaming, but it does keep you, or at least keep me, from remembering them in the morning, and being, well, I suppose 'fully engaged' with the dreams would be the best way to describe it. I might have only fragmentary memories of the dreams, but I do know I was involved in what can only be called 'weird shit' while I was asleep.

I never really missed having fully experienced dreams, while I was using. But now that Morpheus' Technicolor Wonderland is again open to me almost every night, it's turned into a pretty good reason to not smoke again.

Dreams are just fun. Fun while they're happening, fun the next morning, when you go into the whole 'what the hell was that about' part of the experience, fun to recount to others, just like any other god-you-won't-believe-what-happened-to-me experience. Fun all around.

Why, last night, was I on the roof of a skyscraper that was being attacked by, well, something large? Why, after dropping a cartoonish dynamite bomb down it's throat, and having the subsequent explosion cause the building we were on to lean against it's neighbor, did I stop my headlong flight down the second building's stairs to look in on a small comic shop, where I met a short-haired blond girl? A girl who was so enchanted by my calling her cute, that she left a rambling, and very cute, message on my cellphone. Why, on the subsequent date that instantly began, did we see Michael J. Fox, and a guy who was in Blade 3?

Who knows? Hell, who cares? Not me. I just enjoyed myself.

Now I'm gonna go take a nap.