Dry Off at Your Own Risk

What happened to make the Fort Happiness fitness center put this sign up?  This was at the gym.  Usually when you go to the gym, you pick up a nice, clean white towel from the stack and don’t think twice.  I’ve never seen a sign warning me that they could be screaming with chemical toxins.  They’re probably using something like Tide or Cheer and maybe one or two people had an allergy to it.  But, in the spirit of our litigous times, they probably thought they needed a sign.  Quite possibly they might be trying to avoid an Army Times story about soldiers suffering disabling reactions because of strong detergents.

This picture however, makes it look like they just found out they were using some sort of Chinese detergent that was recalled because it was laced with rat poison.

Looking for Love in All the Wrong Places: My Date With Psycho

Some things in life are ridiculously obvious and yet we still miss them.  Take for example my last date.  Capt Jason is one of the Army guys going through combat skills training with us.  His teammates nicknamed him “Psycho”.  This fact alone should have suggested that maybe going on a date with him wasn’t such a good idea.  However, he asked and internal warning bells be damned.  I threw caution to the wind and accepted.

I told my roommates back at the dorm.  They were horrified.  As it turns out Psycho had been making his rounds with the Air Force chicks.  He even hit on an enlisted Staff Sergeant.  Additionally, he’s seen fit to notify other women about the “understanding” he had with his girlfriend, that she knew he had needs, blah blah blah.  That sort of thing.  I started to get concerned.

I let Psycho know that wherever we went, I would be driving myself.  That in turn, meant I would not be drinking—I wanted to be in full control of my mental and physical capacities.  It turned out to be a good plan.

He had rented a room at the Best Western “to get away from the dorms for the weekend” (yeah, right).  Could I pick him up from there on the way to Old Chicago.  On the way over, the first question he asked was, “So, what’s your story?”  Hmmm, let’s see.  I’m from Nebraska, I graduated from UNL…no, no, no…turns out that wasn’t the story he was interested in.  He wanted to know if I was dating and how many guys I’d screwed.  When the first question a guy asks about on your first date is your sexual history, saying it’s a turnoff is an understatement.  I was completely disgusted.  It kills the mood to have to tell a guy he’s not going to get laid from the outset.

Psycho was already three sheets to the wind when I picked him up.  He got drunker as the night wore on while I nursed my two glasses of Sprite.  He spent the night trying to explain his enlightened sexual philosophy to me, while punctuating it with embarrassingly effusive flattery.  My glasses gave me the naughty schoolteacher look, it was sexy the way I ran my fingers through my hair, my truck was sexy, I had no idea how sexy I really was and that he would make me fall in love with him.

When I dropped his drunk ass back off at the Best Western, he tried to tounge me.  I booted him out of the truck.  He later send me a charming text message and then went back to the dorms and told all the guys that I was a frigid bitch who wouldn’t put out.  This backfired on him.  He looked like an even bigger douche and I still came out on top (so to speak).  If I had slept with Psycho, I would have been a social leper.

I found out later, that Psycho is such a freak that his teammates are keeping a record of all the ‘effed up shit he says (most of it unprintable) in case they need proof later on.  I told his team leader that if they’re ever court-martialed down the road for whatever crime against humanity or cruelty against animals he’s going to end up committing, the Air Force women would testify on behalf of the rest of them and throw Psycho under the bus.

Most of the guys in the Army are good, decent men.  Unfortunately, it’s assholes like Psycho that show up on CNN torturing prisoners or post videos of themselves throwing puppies off cliffs on YouTube.  Psycho is a veritable wet dream for Michael Moore and other Hollywood types that show military personnel as being brutal, stupid, and brainwashed killers.  He doesn’t represent most of us, but it’s guys like him that get the attention.

I’ll finish on a good note.  The water main in our dorm broke the night before we were going home on a four-day weekend, so I decided to stay at the Clairion Hotel.  The Army had a big dinner at the hotel that night and to avoid drinking and driving, quite a few soldiers decided to rent a room for the night.  The next morning, I woke up to a light blanketing of snow.  As I walked out into the parking lot, I overheard an older man, maybe in his seventies, thanking someone.  I noticed that a younger man—a soldier and a stranger to the older guy—was out in the parking clearing the snow from the older man’s car.  That soldier’s actions represent the best of the military.

Tards and Guns: The Special Olympics Short-Range Marksmanship Relay

All the services have different views of themselves and each other, that while sometimes are exaggerated stereotypes usually have some foundation in truth.  The Air Force and Navy tend to be seen as smarter, while the Army not so much.  There’s a grain of truth in this.  Throughout the course of training, I’ve seen mispelled test questions (“pneumonic” device when they meant “mnemonic” and “plural” instead of “pleural”) and a clear plastic squirt bottle filled with gun cleaner labeled “DO NOT DRINK!!!” in permanant marker, as though someone might run out of water and it would occur to them to refresh themselves with gun cleaner.

While the Air Force is seen as the “smart” service, there are things that the Army does better.  We can ace a written test, but when it comes to putting something into practice, the Army wins out.  Particularly in the arena of ground-pounding, warfighting type of stuff.  Marksmanship is one of them.  The Air Force is seen as inadequate lightweights compared to the Army.  The marksmanship instructors are like bees—they smell the Air Force people coming and hover around them.  It’s like they have sensors that say, “Air Force chicks at two o’clock.  Commence hover ops.”  This is actually a good thing—they make sure you pass.

One of the skills we’ve acquired during combat skills training is how to shoot.  It makes sense really.  After all, guns are somewhat vital to warfare.  More specifically, how to shoot an M4 and an M9.  We also learned how to shoot a M240 and a 50-caliber maching gun, but that was mainly for our personal edification.

We learned how to shoot long-range and short-range.  And this dear reader, is where the story gets entertaining.  One of the things we had to do during short-range marksmanship was start out in the prone after which we would leap up, run inside a “house”, and shoot out the windows at our targets.  We did this activity in pairs and I was with one of the other Air Force gals.  The second the whistle blew, we were on our feet running and within another few seconds, I was no longer running.  The ground was uneven and the weight of the armoured vest, kevlar helmet, and M4 caused me to pitch forward, landing directly on my head and doing a face plant only three feet from our starting point.  As I was lying on the ground, I could hear someone yelling, “Your magazine!  You dropped your magazine!”  My partner’s M4 magazine had fallen out of her vest and she had to run back to get it.  We finally stumbled our way to the makeshift house, but the damage was done and we were the source of a great deal of mirth on the part of the Army.  We looked like retards.  We lived up to the stereotype.

I told my partner later that we looked like something out of the Special Olympics Short-Range Marksmanship Relay.  It was embarrassing, but of course if I’d seen somebody else do that, I would laughed my ass off too.

AETC: Risk-Averse is Our Middle Name

I love the military.  I really do–most of the time anyway.  The one aspect I don’t love about it is Air Education and Training Command.  AETC runs the Air Force’s training schools and programs.  They have a detachment at Fort Happiness.  In spite of the fact that the Army runs Combat Skills Training, AETC maintains a small, yet highly ineffective presence here to ensure that the Air Force students are “taken care of”.  I guess that’s one way of putting it.

One of the hallmarks of AETC is that they are the most risk-averse Major Command (MAJCOM) in the Air Force.  The Air Force is paranoid about safety.  AETC has refined this worry to an art.  It’s not worry about the student as a human being per se.  It’s worry about being highlighted in the Daily Operations Brief and having to explain the dead trainee to the Chief of Staff of the Air Force.  One particular event highlighted this attitude for me.  A few years back, I was going through a training school in Mississippi.  One unfortunate student drowned in a swimming pool.  He blacked out, probably from holding his breath underwater and when he surfaced, it was in the Big Swimming Pool in the Sky.  It was a freak accident and Just One of Those Things.  Base leadership freaked.  AETC freaked.  Then a week or so later, the base paper came out with an article that mentioned–I’m not making this up–because the student was stationed with Air Combat Command (ACC) and was only TDY to the base, it wouldn’t count against AETC.  Way to care.

I had this driven home in a very deep and personal way over the Christmas holiday.  I was supposed to go on a sea kayaking trip to Baja.  I was in Baja last March.  I walked all over the town of Loreto and never encountered a problem.  I’d been planning this trip for months, had shelled out money for it, etc.  A week before my trip, the detachment commander decided to tell me I couldn’t go.  It would be a gross understatement to say I was pissed off.  She tried to use some precedent about five security forces guys who wanted to go to Juarez not being allowed to go.  She said there was a terrorist threat, which is absurd.  It’s not a terrorist threat–it’s a criminal threat.  Besides, I wasn’t going to be mingling with the drug cartel crowd.  I explained to her that I wasn’t going down Mexico way to star in a donkey show or score some blow in Juarez.  I was going on a kayaking trip to Baja where I would be very safe.  She didn’t care.  What’s worse, is that I asked her well over a month beforehand what paperwork I needed to go to Mexico and she didn’t object then.  There was no written guidance about where we couldn’t go.  She waited until a week before my trip to tell me this.

Her reasoning—I’m a valuble asset that they’re sending to Iraq and they’d hate for anything to happen to me.  Translation:  It’s okay if you’re killed by insurgents, but not by street thugs in Mexico. 

If your headless corpse is found in the desert in Baja, they’ll have lot of explaining to do during the daily operations brief to the Chief of Staff of the Air Force and there will be a lot of troublesome and unpleasant paperwork involved on their end.  They’ll be accused of not giving enough safety briefs and it might even make you look like you have questionable character.  After all, why would you be there in the first place?  Who were you consorting with?  

On the other hand, if your headless corpse is found in the desert in Iraq, you’ll have been at war and they can name a chow hall after you.  More importantly, you’ll already be in another command and you won’t be AETC’s problem anymore.  People killed in drug wars don’t have dorms named them.  

I ended up going to Omaha for Christmas vacation.  Not that I don’t love my family, but given a choice–Omaha in December or Baja in December–laying on the beach wins out.  Additonally, in the adding insult to injury department, the driver’s side window to my truck broke from the cold and ice and I had to leave it in Wichita for almost a week and drive home in a rental car. 

When I stopped by my squadron over my two weeks off, I found out forbidding me from going to Mexico might not have even been a lawful order.  That just hurt.  Screw the AF detachment at Fort Happiness.  In fact, screw AETC.

Boyland, Joyland: It’s Raining Men

I’m one of five women going to Iraq.  To give the reader a sense of proportionality, I should mention that I’m in a class with a couple hundred men.   A less scrupulous woman could make a killing here.   The fact that we’re Air Force also adds to our mystique.  There’s a common conception that the Air Force has the best looking women.  I think this might be a myth reinforced by the fact that we’re the only women here.  I always thought I was pretty decent looking, but not exactly “hot”.  However, this hasn’t stopped the guys who have been happy to help us out.  While the rest of my roommates have viewed their overtures with suspicion (and they may have a point), I’m not complaining.  Even though I’m not “that kind of girl”, I won’t lie.  It’s been quite an ego boost.

Maybe the Air Force does have the hottest women, but the Army is in the running for the hottest guys.  Fighter pilots may think they’re shit on a stick, but until they start jumping out of the airplanes they don’t hold a candle to Army special forces.

Killing the Earth One Humvee at a Time

I always thought Humvees as a civilian purchase were kind of dumb.  What suburbanite needs a car that size?  I’m not so bitter and stupid that I would help the Earth Liberation Front vandalize the parking lot of the local dealership, but I just don’t see the point in them.

I’ve been at Fort Happiness for exactly one month now and we’ve been doing all kinds of cool Army crap.  We’ve also been doing things that sound cool, but suck in reality.  Take for instance Humvee training. At first blush, this sounds exciting.  I could picture myself on the road, amongst the Hummer driving soccer moms screaming, “Back off, bitch!  I’ve driven the REAL thing.”

As it turns out, Humvee training was one of those things that sucks in real life.

When I first climbed in, it was like getting onto a spaceship.  Except a spaceship would be more comfortable.  Also I wouldn’t be wearing a Kevlar helmet and 50 pound vest on a spaceship.  In fact the only way it was really like a spaceship was in its complexity.  Weird boxes and doo-dads stuck out everywhere.  There was a hole in the top that I learned later was the gunner’s turret.   We did daytime driving and night driving with night vision goggles.  We also learned how to tow a Humvee, check the oil, change a tire and most exciting of all, what to do in a Humvee when it rolls over.  To this end, we experienced the rollover simulator.  (You can get an idea of what this looks like on YouTube.  Just type in “Humvee rollover simulator”).

Everything went fine until the part where we were hanging upside down and had to get out of the simulator.  I couldn’t reach the door handle and I didn’t have the upper body strength to support myself with one hand.  I unbuckled my seatbelt and ended up falling headfirst into the gunner’s turret.   I finally pulled myself out and found a ring of people surrounding the simulator.  Evidently, falling upside down into the turret is a big deal.  Our team leader mentioned to one of the guys in charge, “Oh, she just fell into the gunner’s turret” and he freaked.  It generated quite a bit of excitement among the Humvee rollover simulator operators.  In retrospect, I was probably lucky I didn’t break my neck.  In spite of the fact I emerged completely unscathed, someone came running over to tell me there was blood on the platform.  I had to reassure him that it wasn’t my blood and for the next two days, people kept asking me if I was okay.  Something good came out of it though.  Our team leader insisted that I take the next morning off from physical fitness.  We were supposed to go for a two mile march in our vests and and Kevlar helmets and even though I felt fine, who am I to argue with the team leader, right?

Thank a Vet Today

A couple years back, a guy in my shop was talking about Meals-on-Wheels.  He said he didn’t want to volunteer because he’d get stuck listening to a some old guy tell stories about being in ‘Nam.

A few years before that while I was in OTS, our flight had the misfortune to contain a noxious individual who was certain he was God’s gift to the Air Force and the next Curtis LeMay.  We suffered daily from his narcissistic personality disorder.  Some older Air Force guys (my dad being one of them) have a habit of “duck-tailing” their flight caps.  It’s hard to explain unless you see it, but the cap is pushed down in the middle so that the end sticks up like a duck’s tail.  The now Capt Josh uttered his own pronouncement about it, “It’s stupid.  It looks ridiculous.”

I’ve also heard numerous complaints over the years about retirees for various and sundry reasons.  There’s a common thread that runs through everything—there’s active duty military that have no respect for the people that have served before them and paved the way for them to be a part of great traditions and a great way of life.  We’re part of an ALL-VOLUNTEER military force (anti-military types take note—we haven’t been kidnapped) and we have the good fortune to deploy to places where the Army Air Force Exchange Service (AAFES) ensures that there’s a Burger King and Baskin Robbins waiting for us in Baghdad and the PX/BX is stocked with iPods and Wiis.  Some of the guys before us didn’t volunteer.

Someday we’ll be those old people sitting in a veteran’s home, shopping in the commissary, or dining at the base club and we’ll want people to remember our service and listen to our stories.  You don’t have to agree with the outgoing administration’s policies to appreciate the service of America’s veterans.

Remember—for over 200 years we’ve maintained the right to spout off on our blogs or stand on a street corner with a sign and scream because of them.  They thought our freedom was valuable enough to sacrifice everything for no matter what our opinions of them are.