(Consider This Making Up For The Four-Sentence-Post Yesterday)

All Over You

People usually seem surprised when they find out that I was in the Army. I always say that it was a long, long, time ago. This prompts them to ask me how old I am and I have to admit that I'm 21, nowhere near old enough to be able to refer to any event in my lifetime as a long, long, time ago.

I was seventeen years old. My birthday was on May 12, I signed up on May 15, and I shipped out for Boot Camp on June 15. (I was rather impulsive in my youth. But that was a long, long, time ago.)

At seventeen years and one month old, I was the youngest person in my battalion, which was about 1,200 recruits. I was even pointed out at the very beginning. Myself and the oldest recruit were marched onto a stage in front of everybody and given little coin/medal things in recognition of our grand accomplishment of being born at a certain time.

It would be difficult to describe how immensely I appreciated that.

Basic Combat Training in the muggy sand-forests of Fort Jackson, South Carolina was an interesting experience. It was the first time I'd ever been truly alone. It was a good thing that I picked one of the most inhospitable emotional and physical environments to try it out in.

I came out of it with a few interesting experiences, though.

For instance, being huddled in a humid, dimly-lit, concrete blast bunker with 39 other wide-eyed, jittery, recruits while we all clutched live hand grenades to our chest is even more fun than it sounds.

Or the thick protective suits we had to wear with as part of our training against nuclear, chemical, or biological attack.
The suits consisted of a jacket and pants. When they were issuing them out, I was one of the people in charge of pulling them all out of storage and carrying them down several flights of stairs. When my task was completed, I was allowed to go stand in line to get my protective suit. Yeah, that meant the very back of the line.

When it was my turn, all that were left were the extra-small suits.

Even when I was seventeen, it had still been a number of years since I had been able to fit into an extra-small.

There was nothing I could do about it. I took my tiny, tiny, suit and left. We didn't have to use them right away, and I had a few other things on my mind. I forgot about my little suit.

Some time later, we ventured out into the sand-forest on our three-day field exercise. While we were digging trenches and fox-holes to lie in, the drill sergeants fired off a tear-gas grenade. These fun little canisters were filled with the same stuff that is used by riot-control police. The stuff hurts a lot.

(To get an idea of what the gas is like, chop up several large onions by hand until you can't see. Then, separate the chopped onions into two piles. Snort one pile up your nose, and inhale the other. If it's a hot day (and it will be; they all are) rub the remaining onion all over your body so that the acids seep into your unsuspecting pores. Yeah, it's kinda like that.)

As soon as we heard the choked warnings of our downwind friends, we all donned our protective suits and gas masks and ran into our half-dug trenches.

I was a bit slower to accomplish this than everyone else.

If you had been in South Carolina that day, you might have seen what looked like a big, green, demented, penguin waddling furiously through the trees away from an ominous cloud of white smoke. Perhaps even more strangely, despite having immense glass eyes above a beak that looked suspiciously like an air filter, the creature did not appear to have the ability to see where it was going.

After several collisions with trees and entanglements with bushes, it finds a shallow trench that you assume to be its nest. The creature clearly wants to lie down in the shelter of the trench, but is confused. Apparently, it has no working elbow and knee joints. With a resigned sigh, the creature stands at the edge of the trench and just topples pathetically over into it. It thrashes for a moment, perhaps trying to turn over, and then gives up. After some time in that position, a noise begins to issue from its air-filter nose. It is muffled and metallic, but it is a familiar sound. You leave the poor creature snoring peacefully and hope that the noise doesn't attract any of the drill sergeants you saw roaming nearby.

Another Day In Basic That Mostly Sucked

The following is what I actually sat down to write about:

Each recruit had to qualify with the M-16 assault rifle to advance to the next block of training. We had spent all day, every day, for two and a half weeks firing the damn things. It had been fun at first...for about 20 minutes.

I was a terrible shot. (I'm assuming I still am a terrible shot.)

The final day was for Rifle Qualification. If you didn't pass, you didn't move on. If you didn't move on, that meant going to a completely different unit and re-doing the last 2 1/2 weeks of training. So there was a little bit of pressure.

Starting in the morning, we would march down to our assigned lanes on the firing range. We would fire at pop-up targets shaped like human torsos. We marched off the firing range into formation and waited. If your lane number wasn't called over the loudspeaker, that meant that you qualified. After you qualified, as a kind of reward you would go back to the barracks, be allowed to purchase soda, actual soda, and watch movies. You had to clean your rifle while you watched, but everyone was good at that.

Some people qualified the first time. Some people qualified the second time.

I was there all day.

Daylight was fading and I was panicking. Well, panicking even more. There were only a handful of us left, and the drill sergeants were displaying very little patience.

I knew that I needed to calm down. The first two steps in firing a rifle, before even aiming, were to have controlled Breathing and to be Relaxed. (Then came Aim, and finally, Squeeze.) Much easier to say than to do. My mind was racing to find something calming.

And my mind, eventually, found something.

I had seen the movie Saving Private Ryan earlier that year. One of the characters is a sniper who would quote Bible scripture as he picked off his enemies. It had something to do with controlling his breathing, and I think something to do with irony.

I didn't know much scripture ver batim, but I knew something else. My friend Ryan Smith had, at my request, mailed me the lyrics to the songs from the Live album, Throwing Copper. (I had just been singing the four or five verses I did know over and over and over, much to the irritation of my roommate.) Since we couldn't listen to music, I would often read the lyrics and listen to the songs in my head.

So if you had been standing on a shooting range in South Carolina and not wearing ear plugs (which is a major safety violation) you might have heard, between gunshots, someone softly singing:

"Our love is (POP!) like water
Beaten down and abused (POP!) for being strange (POP!)
Our love is no other (POP!) (POP!)
Than me (POP!) alone for me all day
Our (POP!) love is like water
Beaten (POP!) down (POP!) and abused (POP!)

All over (POP!) you, all over me the sun, the fields, the sky
(POP!) I've often (POP!) tried to hold the sea, the sun, the fields, the(POP!) tide..."

I didn't qualify in time to drink soda and watch movies, but I qualified.

In the end, being such a terrible shooter may have worked out to my advantage. The Army wasn't very enthused about chasing after a soldier who was good at shooting off his mouth but completely incapable of shooting anything else.

I hadn't stuck around to point out that I was an expert at throwing hand grenades.

Nobody likes a braggart.