Roads, Mills, Laps

Anyone with a military background recognizes the title of this posting. Everyone else thinks about the Beatles’ song, “Hello Goodbye.”

In 1996, I was the S-1 of the 2nd Battalion of the 504th Parachute Infantry Regiment, 82nd Airborne Divsion. The S-1 is the personnel officer–the unfortunate sod who manages the underpaid high school dropouts who process the pay, the awards, and all the other paperwork that shits through a military bureaucracy at the rate of a constipated octogenarian. I was also the Battalion Commander’s right hand man. Yay, lucky me!

God help us.

My Battalion Commander happened to be a man with a Kindergartener’s grasp of the English language, a toddler’s grasp of world history, and an embryo’s grasp of basic world geography–a man who literally swaggered into a room bowlegged as if he had been stradling a super-sized cow all day. He rode a Harley with his wife on the back and thought he was John Wayne; he neighed like a horse undergoing a circumcision–even more so when he saw me rebelling with my long hair and my John Lennon glasses, me enduring the last months of my prison sentence like Dumas’ protagonist in The Count of Monte Cristo, Edmond Dantès, shackled up in my Château d’If: my little hobbit-sized office next to the Colonel’s papal-like palatial estate.

He called me his “Radar O’Reilly.” I called him old horsey or that zany, panpipe-playing satyr. (He looked like the worst parts of a horse and a man put together, like some sort of terrifying Greek mythological amalgamation, spawned by a wanton Zeus experimenting with bestiality.)

or I called him ‘fucking asshole.’ All names carried the same weight.

We didn’t get along too well.

Anyway, besides babysitting wife-beating, crackpipe-smoking clerks and processing meaningless awards for wife-beating dropouts, I had the job of running the Hail and Farewells. These things were a production of sorts, a monthly, regimented routine where all the white collar managers (read: the upper crust, the officers), got together at some restaurant and said goodbye to the people leaving the unit and welcomed the new people coming into the unit.

These things were a repeating horror film with the following plot thread:

-Officers show up at restaurant. They all have short hair (high and tights). In the summer, the officers have collared shirts, khaki shorts and Teva-esque sandals. Shirts are tucked in and belts are visible. It’s so bad that some shirts have dress-offs.

-Officers order drinks at bar. Same shit: Coronas in the summer; Sam Adams in the winter.

-Groups form. 1-block, careerist asslickers with short hair go to one corner. Jaded rebels with a penchant for quoting Marx, sporting longer hair, go to another corner. Bourgeois here, Proletariat, there. Unsuspecting, generic ROTC graduates, the 2-blockers stand in the middle with their hands in their khaki short pockets. They hold their beers (Budweisers) and look around for hot chicks.

-Jimmy Buffet plays in the bar. If it’s not Jimmy Buffet, then it’s Hootie and the Blowfish, guaran-damn-teed.

-Motorcycle noises heard outside–in swaggers the colonel with his entourage like they are entering a saloon. If there were double doors, they’d be pushed open, wild west style.

-Colonel hollers, “S-1! Get over here!”

S-1 says in a Smithers-esque tone, “Yes sir! Enroute!”

-Everyone eats things like BBQ pork and steaks. Meat is required. Killed things must be consumed at all costs. MEAT DAMNIT!

-Conversations ensue. The subjects range from who’s having an affair, to who’s got a threesome lined up, to who’s gay. In other words,the more seminal fluid that can move across a membrane, the more cruelty towards the recipient woman, the better; everything is AOK as long as its not between two guys. If it involves gays or the anal area of a man, then the homophobic cards are played by unassuming men with latent, homoerotic tendencies.

-Colonel stands up and reads notecards. The S-1 diligently prepares these. The notecards describe everything about people in the Battalion coming and going as well as about who’s Stepford wife is pregnant. Stepford wife pregnancy mandates cheers to the lucky male stud; it requires manly, Russell Crowe-in-Gladiator comments like, “Hooah, Ride’em Cowboy!!!”

-Colonel, being the horsey cro-magnon boob that he is, can’t read the King’s English and so he squints and says, “Who wrote these?”

-S-1 reluctantly raises his hand. Damn, 1-cent words.

-Colonel says: “S-1. Did your mama teach you to write?”

-Depending on how many days are left in the S-1’s service he says one of the following:

a. “Yes sir.”
b. “No sir.”
c. “Maybe sir, it depends on which mama you are referring to: my mama or yours?”

-Regardless of which answer is given, Colonel says, “Goddamn S-1, you are killing me. You’re fired.”

-Room erupts in sycophantic laughter. S-1 puts hands up and gives his best Alfred E. Neuman-what-me-worry impression.

-Men newly arrived to the unit are announced and stand up, Colonel gives them a unit coin.

-Colonel says: “Don’t lose this coin. If I catch you without it, you owe me a beer. I drink Bud, bud.”

-Room laughs again. Sycophants in the front laugh hard enough to be distinguished.

-People leaving are announced and stand up. Colonel gives a framed plaque containing the unit colors to them.

-People leaving give goodbye speech.

-Colonel wraps up the night with the following: “Men, you are all warriors. Shit, even the S-1 is a warrior (laughter in the front again). As Henry the Whateverthefuck once said, ‘You are a band of brothers and I will serve with you happily and shed my blood with you, my brothers.’” Room grows silent contemplating this Shakespearean abortion.

-Colonel swaggers out. Harley noise enters the quiet room. Colonel drives off with his woman on his back, into the sunset.

I bring up all this because the one night that the script deviated was the night that the Jesusfreak officer, Captain J. said goodbye. He was always that guy who was too nice; if you were having a bad day and you wanted to vent on someone, stay the fuck away from Captain J.

We went through so much fucking stress in our unit, but Captain J. had a corner on the happy market. Not surprisingly, he played guitar and some Biblical verse was always on the tip of his tongue. The letters of Paul to the Thessalonians seemed to apply in all things. From missing night vision goggles to dealing with that misogynistic NCO, Saint Paul was there, back up on his Damascus-bound horse, spreading THE WORD. Yebe, thoube, shallbe. Aba daba koba. Shazam! Thessaly was us, the simian ingrates, the sinners and the wifebeaters in 2-504, the Marxist rebellious officers and Captain J?, well he was naturally Saint Paul with one hand raised, ready to give an okely-dokely, sign-o’-the-flaming-cross blessing, strumming his folk guitar with the other.

Captain J. gave a 15-minute speech that night and had us all pray at the end, our heads bowed, Captain J. laying on his hands and shaking them for effect, squeezing bits of Jesus into us. He told us that we all had to accept Jesus Christ as our personal savior and lordddddddduh. At the time, I was sitting next to a friend and peer, D. who happened to be Jewish, the only Jewish officer in a 500-mile radius. D. just put his head down and shook it. I felt horrible for him; I felt angry. This wasn’t my Army.

By then Captain J. was done with his blessings and said, “Amen,” walking off the stage.

Naturally, the Colonel was oblivious to it all. Jesus, Judasim, whatever–it was about Harleys and chicks; it was about hairy, gimpy machomen in leather chaps. Wait, did he just think that? Strike that, S-1.

When it came time for me to say goodbye, I just said this, “Goodbye.”

The Colonel slapped me on the back and asked me if that was it.

I nodded my head and gave myself the Battalion colors that I had framed for myself. It was fucking pathetic.

I’ve never looked back; I’ve never wished that I had stayed in; these people were awful examples of supreme ass kissing and righteous bigotry. The experience: mind-numbing, foul-tasting. The Battalion colors today aren’t on my wall. They hold no place of honor; I’ve got no war movie nostalgia about them. I think they’re in my basement somewhere in some box underneath piles of dirty Army socks.

They belong there: they deserve nothing but smelly foot odor.

The whole place, the whole experience resides in the septic parts of my brain: the parts where wasted experiences get flushed, where drippy, poopy, freshly-shit intolerant evangelicals come to rest–the place where the Colonel and his bootlickers lay–the place where the strata of these creatures form until they get stirred up and come together, forming a turbid mass of regretful memory.

I can’t forget them; I wish I could.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 13th, 2006 at 10:45 pm and is filed under Res Gestae. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.