Shit as a Pronoun

Shit has many uses in Army language, but is way more specific than Fuck--which is used for everything. In Iraq, I washed a load of clothes and dumped the unfolded load of laundry on my bunk. Someone asked if I was going to chow. I said, "I have get my shit off the bed first."

In the Army, shit is can be a substitute for every other noun--up to a certain size.
If something can fit on a bunk, like laundry or field gear, you can say, "That's my shit." But when referring to his Humvee, the driver says, "That bitch is mine."  When I first got to Iraq, the parking lot where we were pitching a maintenance tent had to be cleaned.  The sergeant in charge said, "We have to police this bitch up."

Shit also has other uses. Shit can actually refer to feces as when someone leaves a room to "take a shit." That is an interesting linguistic twist in itself. What the speaker will be doing in fact (one hopes) is leaving the shit behind, but since effort is involved, taking is the verb--the same usage as taking a picture. Another twist is in the use of the s-word as an exclamation. "Shit!" is generally negative, but "No Shit!" is positive. If I tell Private Snuffy he has guard duty he will exclaim, "Shit!" to express his dismay. If later on I tell him the Private Duffy has duty in his place, Snuffy will say, "No Shit!" and be happy.

But the main use is as a pronoun. Looking at someone else's food, I might say, "I don't like that shit." If my tools were in disarray I would say, "I need to get my shit together." If someone else were advising me to put my tools in order they might use the same phrase or the odder form, "Get your shit straight!" You can't think literally in most uses of shit.

By now you must have had "enough of this shit" so I will "stop this shit" right now. Except to add that the most common modifier of the word of the day is Bull, often said as if it had three syllables.

All-Night Duty

Today I was supposed to be one of the safeties for the next obstacle course. Next Wednesday, we are going on through a Confidence Course with a Rappel Tower. We will rope climbs and other obstacles including rappelling from a 40-foot tower. But I had all-night duty tonight and had to finish the Echo Company newsletter, so I skipped the Rappel Tower training and will just be one of the climbers next week.

Beginning at 8 pm tonight, I sat in the battalion offices with another soldier and waited for something to happen. Nothing did. The soldier I had duty with joined the Army in 1992 so he is an old soldier compared to most soldiers, if not compared to me. We ordered a pizza and talked for hours. Both of us can remember life in a barracks before cell phones and personal computers when people actually talked to each other.

After midnight, I called a friend who was my roommate in Wiesbaden, Germany, in 1978. We were in a joint Army - Air Force barracks. He got out of the Air Force in 1978 and instead of going home to Arizona, he became a novice in a Lutheran Monastery in Darmstadt, Germany, and he has been a brother there ever since. After his novitiate, my roommate Cliff Almes became Bruder Timotheus. We have kept in touch ever since. He is the only American in his small brotherhood, so he is the network administrator and has always been the "fix-it" guy. One of the reputations Americans have is the ability to fix and operate machines. We talked for about an hour. Bruder Timotheus only comes to America every few years and I have only been back to Germany a few times since 1978. But we keep in touch by phone and email. I hope to be able to visit Cliff sometime after this deployment.


Land of Kanaan, Darmstadt, Germany

Back to the Confidence Course

Today we returned to the Confidence Course. I was one of the safeties for the course--which is something like being a condom: Everybody around me is breathing hard and having a good time, but I am just there to prevent accidents.

The Confidence course is an imposing array of high, tough obstacles. Groups of soldiers move from obstacle to obstacle, some require teams, some are individual efforts. Throughout the day, soldiers surprised each other--good and bad--with what they could complete with easy and what they found tough or impossible. A soldier who was scrambling up and down all kinds of obstacles had to be pushed off the the platform on the Flight to Freedom (ride down a Zip line) and another soldier who climbed to the top of the vertical ladder while several other soldiers could not make it.

All morning I unhooked soldiers zooming down the Zip line. In the afternoon, I went over some of the obstacles. After stressing my shoulder at the PT Test, I did not do anything crazy, just these:

I am the one on the right, crawling over the top.

I don't think this one is me, but this is one obstacle I went down, until I dropped into the net.



And this one. Easier to get up than down.

My Physical Therapist Will Be Furious

I finally took the PT Test this morning. Joe and Gretchen told me to do the minimum push-ups. Just pass and don't hurt my shoulder. I told the grader I should just do 20 and pass. At 36 she reminded me I was supposed to do 20. At 48 she said, "One more." But that was it. I got 48. Max is 56 so I scored 91 out of a possible 100 points on the sit-ups. I maxed the situps (76) and was four seconds from max on the run. My total score was 290 out of 300. And since I scored at least 90 in each event, I get the Army PT Badge and a few more promotion points. Since coming back in I scored 252, 271 and 290 on the three PT tests I have taken. I know I never did that well when I was in my 20s. Of course, I smoked then.

Just a Short Ride to the Lake

When I don't have enough time to ride around the artillery range (28 miles) I ride to the lake recreation area and back, a 16-mile trip. I still; have not gotten used to the sights I see on these rides. At the end of the first mile I am riding past Medicine Bluff, legendary cliffs where Geronimo is supposed to have jumped with his horse 300 feet down into the river below and survived.

On the 2nd mile of today's ride I rode past a towed artillery battery with four guns under camouflage nets getting ready to fire. At mile 6 a rider blew past me without waving. I was riding with flat pedals in uniform with combat boots. The other rider had racing spandex on, but he had leg hair and looked a little too thick in the middle to be a racer. The steepest hill on was less than a mile ahead so I bent down and started riding after him. I also moved instinctively to the edge of the road to be fast as possible. A moment before the competitive brain turned on I was thinking this is the stretch of road where I saw the wild pigs and the rattlesnake. I rounded an uphill right turn and almost ran over an armadillo. It was dead at the edge of the road, but very big. So I moved back out to the middle of the road and kept pedaling. I caught the other rider just below the crest of the hill. He waved this time. I don't have to wonder if I still feel competitive.



On the way back, I heard the boom of a howitzer. The battery had just started to fire. As I rounded the corner to the clearing where the battery was set up, a towed 155mm howitzer fired a round. About 15 seconds later a gray cloud plumed on the hillside seven miles away--the same hillside where the rounds land in the "Fire Mission" (Click Click Boom) video. And about ten seconds after that the dull thud of impact echos back to where I am riding. I rode slowly and watched a couple more rounds go, then finished the ride and went to chow.

I am going to miss the sights of Oklahoma rides, but not the Oklahoma wind.

Zombie Film Review and the Formula 1 Racing Season

Just after 10 pm I went to the dayroom to see if it would be possible for me to watch the Grand Prix of Australia on the big-screen TV. There were a half-dozen watching a movie, but it did not look like any of them would be hanging around until 1 am when the race started.

NOTE: I am a devoted fan of the Formula 1 World Championship car racing and have been for many years. How much of a fan you ask? My favorite driver is 1992 champion Nigel Mansell. And my son's name is. . . Nigel.


NIGEL MANSELL 1992 FORMULA 1 CHAMPION


LEWIS HAMILTON--FORMULA 1 CHAMPION 2008
One of the people watching the movie was sergeant who let me know the movie the assembled group was watching was (I think) "28 Days." He said it is the best Zombie movie ever made. I left.

Later on, near midnight I was walking down the hallway toward the dayroom to watch the race. I ran into the sergeant who told repeated his high esteem of the Zombie movie. I told him I was glad to know there are ratings of every sort of human endeavor, but even the best Zombie movie was not something I could see myself watching. It was clear the fan of Zombie movies feels the same way about watching a car race.

The race broadcast live from Eastern Australia at 5pm local time, 1 am Oklahoma time. I watched the first hour, but could not hang in for the end. My son Nigel's favorite driver is Lewis Hamilton, a British driver of African descent who is the reigning world champion. Hamilton started 18th and finished fourth. Since the TV is gone at my house, I will be able to tell Nigel how his favorite driver did when we talk later today.

Suicide Prevention--Best Army Training Film I have Ever Seen

Every soldier here had to take a three-hour class on suicide prevention. Sad subject, but as the class progressed I could not help thinking this is the best Army video I have ever seen. For those who have not seen military instructional videos, imagine your least favorite safety video and then imagine the script and final production is reviewed by an 18-layer bureaucracy.

But this video was different. The subject clearly is so serious that whoever had responsibility for it, decided to go with Best Practices on making a video rather than taking a vague, edited message in four-syllable, Latin-derived words and trying to shoot a video around it.

This video was interactive. We saw a scenario, we talked about what the soldier should do next then watched where that course of action lead. One scenario could lead to a bad end, another to saving the soldier's life. We could see both the good and the bad play out.

But the real reason this video work is that everyone knew somewhere in the back of their mind the plot of this video. Whoever wrote the script was a soldier or knows our culture cold because the plot line of the script was following what happens to a soldier who is the victim of Jody.

Who is Jody? From the 1st day of basic training soldiers, airmen and marines sing about a mythical guy named Jody who was your best friend back home. As we march, we sing about how Jody is:
--sleeping with our girlfriend/spouse
--driving our car
--emptying our bank account
--living in our house
You get the idea.

In the video we see a good soldier who is going on combat patrols in Iraq turn progressively worse as he gets a dear John letter, finds out his girlfriend is pregnant with Jody's child, hears from home Jody is driving his car and living in his house, and Jody has emptied his bank account.

In the video we see the soldier deal with these things alone and how it could lead to suicide. Then we see what happens when he gets help. Then just when the Jody's victim is straightening his life out, his best buddy is killed on patrol. The soldier has to get control of his life without the guy who pulled him through the last crisis.

It has a happy ending, assuming you choose the right path.

If you want to know more about Jody, you can look him up on Wikipedia, or better yet, watch the movie Jarhead. As you read this, some formation of soldiers somewhere is marching down a road singing:
"Ain't no use in goin' home, Jody's got your girl and gone . . ."

I could not find a song about Jody on You Tube, but here's a marching song so you get the idea of the sound. Jarhead is still the best source for seeing how Jody fits in soldier's lives.

Here's excerpts from Full Metal Jacket--an awesome movie about Basic Training: