Anthrax Chapel on Improbable.com

Marc Abrahams, editor of "The Annals of Improbable Research" (Subscribe Today!) and the Web site www.improbable.com, posted The Anthrax Chapel on his site, complete with my camera phone picture, properly oriented. This may be the first connection between the Ig Nobel Prize and training barracks at Fort Sill, Oklahoma.


Marc at AIR staff meeting

"What Exactly is a Processing a Person?"

Today I was the escort for a soldier who is going home and not deploying with us. I told a friend who is a chemical engineer that I was getting this soldier processed.

"Processed," he said. "What Exactly is a Processing a Person?" He said his mind went straight from chemical processing to food processing to processing a chicken. I laughed at the image then told explained that processing in the Army means filling out all the papers necessary to get someone in, out or to a new duty assignment.


I could have posted some really disgusting chicken processing photos, but the cut-in-pieces image seemed appropriate.

I will try to be careful to explain the acronyms and Army-specific terms I use, but every day I am being "processed" further into the abyss of Army language. I am re-reading Strunk and White (The Elements of Style) now so I keep standard English in my mind while the acronyms pile up.




By the way (BTW), my friend knows by now that any three-letter military acronym with the letter 'F' in the middle is always the same participle used as an adjective. So a BFR (Big F#&king Rock) is a large stone and if a soldier uses it, BFF may or may not mean Best Friends Forever.

Specialist Dust Pan

One of the enlisted men in our unit lost his room key three times in a week causing him to be late for formation. His squad leader decided to make it harder for the young man to lose his room key, so his key ring is now connected to a black, metal dust pan. At every formation and when we are not training in the field, he has to carry his keys on a dust pan. 

If you haven't ever carried an M-16 rifle and a dust pan, I don't recommend it. By Saturday he should be able to turn in his dust pan and just carry a key ring. I, on the other hand, may become Mr. Clean. This morning I took a half-dozen soldiers form the motor pool back to the barracks to sweep and mop stairwells and hallways. Then two of us paste waxed a hallway floor in the afternoon. They tell us soon we will be training hard. Tomorrow I get driver training in a HMMTT fueler.

Anthrax Chapel

One of my co-workers back in PA asked for a photo of The Anthrax Chapel. It's not much more than a name painted on the wall above the door of a rectangular room in a military barracks. I guess about 20 by 50 feet. As noted before, this classroom also serves as the chapel for our unit. And according to one of our intelligence sergeants, the same room is where soldiers here got shots for anthrax immunization during the anthrax alert following September 11, 2001. So someone had the bright idea of calling the place The Anthrax Chapel.

This is a camera phone shot and I could not save it rotated 90 degrees. So turn your computer to the right if you want to see the photo correctly.

All Day Cleaning

Today most of the company was in convoy training or sleeping in after midnight fueling training. The few of us that were left had little to do so we cleaned and reorganized the stuff we are using while we are here in Oklahoma. So I volunteered to clean the latrine. With one platoon training all night and other people out in the field, the latrine looked bad, so I decided to clean it rather than wait for something to happen.

The other soldiers were surprised I would volunteer for that, but they weren't running after me saying, "Can I clean the latrine too?" So I spent the morning cleaning the walls and floors and restocking the supplies. One of the officers paid for real cleaning supplies (Clorox and Clorox spray cleaners) because we only have Simple Green and with all those guys, I wanted to clean with real chlorine.

In the afternoon I saw one of the sergeants in the headquarters company picking up trash behind the barracks building, so I told her I had a few soldiers killing time and we would get the front. When I got back to the motor pool, the idle soldiers were cleaning Humvees and the shop. So I got a bag and spent an hour picking up trash, mostly cigarette butts.

At the end of the day, the motor sergeant said the tool van for deployment would not be leaving for another three weeks so I could take the fixed-gear bike out of the van and ride it till then. He didn't hare to say it twice. I rode 10 miles after final formation yesterday. Riding a bike here MUCH harder than in PA. More on that later.


We have partitions--but I have been in barracks that looked like this and may be again.

Multi-Use Rooms

On Sunday the main classroom in the barracks is also the Chapel and the movie room. In fact the room has "Anthrax Chapel" painted above the doors on the inside. This morning there was a sign on the right door listing chapel services at 0830, 1000, 1800 and 1900--two Catholic and two Protestant services. On the left door was a photocopied sign for tonight's movie which starts at 2000 hours, right after the last chapel service. The Sunday night movie: Righteous Kill

Mob Cafe--Intellectual Corner

Seated near the drinks in the far corner of the Mob Cafe are the soldiers with some college who hang together and make jokes almost devoid of 4-letter words. If the Mob Cafe is a high school cafeteria, these are the smart ass kids that don't like the jocks.

Tonight I was doing my laundry when one of this group walked into the laundry room to take his stuff from the dryer. He is an ex-Marine with a shaved head in his late 20s. He was talking on a cell phone as he emptied the dryer. He was also carrying a cup he found that says, "Retired Navy." As he walked by, I noticed he was wearing a red CCCP t-shirt (the Cyrillic alphabet letters for Soviet Socialist Republic), blue sweat pants, shower shoes, and carrying an M16 rifle. An ensemble you just don't see everywhere.