Hungry as I was, I was glad to be eating last.
“Gimme five,” a voice beyond the screen door shouted, indicating that the next five diners should enter. Each meal brought a different method of determining who went next. As we stood in two rows, some drill sergeants would take five from one row and then five from the other. Others would send in the closest five to the door. Still others would be more inventive, choosing arbitrarily or through some unknown criteria who or what number were next to enter.
Eating in the Army rarely qualified as a pleasure, especially in basic training, except that trainees were always hungry at meal time. The simple act of filling our stomachs was a pleasure, regardless the taste of the food.
I was happy to be eating last because the drill sergeants monitoring chow couldn’t eat until all recruits were fed. We had about as long as they took. Troops at the start of the line had no time to eat. Back of the line also meant larger portions, and occasionally, seconds. Which, it turns out, isn’t always a good idea.
Drill Sergeant Moore stood before the door deciding who would go next. Inside, Drill Sergeant Bartlett made sure no one lingered too long over their lunch. Leeway came only to those who prayed first, and even that had a limit. We could hear him clearing the chairs.
“Shovel it down and move the fuck out,” Bartlett yelled. “What you waiting for boy?” His drawl was transplanted Kansas, not originally from there but bred into an existing accent more southern.
Moore’s method for moving the line today came straight from the Smartbook, “The Soldier’s Handbook,” the compendium of all that need be mastered during basic training. He stopped the line five feet from the door, asking questions of the next five Joes. Anyone who answered correctly moved up to the door. If a question were answered incorrectly, the troop waited while Moore asked the one behind him.
According to Army standard operating procedure, basic training was officially over. In a system called OSUT, basic trainees finished basic training in nine weeks, then moved on to five weeks of advanced infantry training. We were about 10 days into that, but with no change in venue and with the same drill sergeants breathing down our necks all day, it still felt a lot like basic.
The next five through the door, I stood at attention, marched one step forward, and returned to parade rest (a modified position of attention). Moore quizzed me on the maximum effective range of the weapon I was learning about that day, and the answer—which I can’t remember now—rolled crisply from my tongue. Behind me, I heard Deblois (they pronounced his name deb-lee-ous) deliver the wrong answer. The guy behind him advanced.
I don’t remember our lunch options that day. They usually had a second choice of entrees in case of allergy, and plates sat atop the counter already made up. We could get our own salads and deserts, both already prepared. The dessert counter caught my eye.
Nothing says “I love you” like a creamy, chocolaty cup of pudding. A perfectly formed dollop of whipped cream on top sold me. “I love you,” I told myself by taking a cup of pudding. They rarely offered pudding. Usually it was cookies or pie, occasionally cake—and then, usually something with re-hydrated fruit and unnaturally colored frosting. Drill sergeants always made note of who ate dessert, especially those who had weight problems when they arrived. I had not, and no drill sergeant ever looked twice at me for taking dessert.
I ate it first and then plowed into my meat substance. As I was finishing the pseudo-potato, I heard the most magical words I’d heard in 10 weeks, “Everyone’s welcome to seconds on dessert if they want,” the lady at the counter said. I nailed off my veggies like a ravenous rat working its way through a meat farm, ate my cornbread and ran for the dessert counter.
Apparently, I don’t hear so well.
As I turned, prepared to love myself again, Bartlett called my number. “313, just what the fuck are you doing?” I don’t remember exactly what he said, but that was the gist. I looked up in confusion. Was I about to have it taken away?
“So you think my orders don’t apply to you, Davidson?” He asked as though I had done something wrong. I could see his flippant albino eyebrow bouncing around above his freckled red face. His lip twitched like saliva was about to cascade past his chin and fill a coffee cup. I never wanted to slap anyone so bad in my life.
I stood at parade rest with the pudding directly out in my right hand.
“You hard of hearing or something?” He had walked away from his plate and was now so close he spat on me as he spoke. “Apparently,” was not the answer he wanted to hear. “Did you not just hear me tell third platoon to stay the fuck away from the dessert counter?”
“No, drill sergeant,” I said. “I didn’t hear you.” I started to turn toward the dessert counter as I said “I’ll put it back.” But he was having none of that.
“That’s unsanitary,” he said. “Do you think anyone will be able to eat that after you’ve had your dick-slappers all over it?” He motioned to my table and tray. “Sit down and enjoy it, 313, because you’ll be paying for it.”
I didn’t actually want it anymore, but I sat to eat it. As I started, Bartlett came over and told me to meet him upstairs in our billet when I was done. And, he said, “Pray to God you get there before I do.”
When he was gone, I finished it, knowing that I was going to suffer. While I was picking up my tray, Moore asked to look at my pudding cup. “I know you finished that like you were told,” he said. Sweat shined on his bald, black head as he smirked. “You better hurry. Drill Sergeant Bartlett doesn’t like to wait.”
Drill Sergeant Bartlett was an asshole. Not that it was part of his job, I believe it was part of his personality. In his introductory speech to our platoon, he informed us that his transfer to our company would include a few days in the vintage WWII billets because his wife had started a disagreement, and after too much “lip,” he said, “I knocked the bitch out.” Quite fitting, he thought, to coincide with reassignment to a unit whose motto was “death before surrender.”
I beat him by enough time to catch my breath. I heard him coming up the stairs. I did every exercise he could think of until every muscle couldn’t do it any more. Then, he started again. After about 20 minutes, he sent me to get ready for duty formation.
At formation, Bartlett had the entire platoon doing pushups for not looking out for me. “You might think this is Davidson’s fault,” he said, “but he wouldn’t have gotten up for pudding if you lazy cocksuckers had been looking out for him.” He emphasized “cocksuckers” because they weren’t supposed to say things like that. It was Bartlett’s way of saying he wasn’t afraid to break the rules. “This is not Davidson’s failure,” he said. I wished above all else that he would stop saying my name. “This is third platoon’s failure and it has resulted in Davidson failing individually.”
Apparently, only Bartlett saw it that way. I heard shit from everyone in the platoon at some point that week. Toward the end of it, I started blaming them outright for being whining pussies and told them I had every intention of doing it again.
They watched me like hawks at every meal.
And each time Bartlett had dining duty, he’d ask how I was enjoying dessert. When he monitored the line, he’d ask if I was planning to have seconds. On graduation day, they had a reception for family and friends after touring the barracks and grounds. Bartlett told my dad how I had stepped up in the face of an angry platoon and won, simply by applying a little psychological warfare.
It seems the only thing that stood out more than my eating a second helping of dessert was how I dealt with the backlash from it.
Saturday, April 18, 2009
Little bunny Feux Feux
Life within the white and brown, cinder-block corridors of Fort Bragg could feel meaningless at times. Like clichés, we were numbers with guns waiting to be called or to expire quietly. To help keep us sane, we would bring, buy or otherwise acquire things to remind us of home. We would place them in our shared 15’ x 15’ rooms to feel a little more like people. These trinkets could be anything, a Bud Man poster, Earl the (stuffed) dead cat, a college sweater hung on the wall. Everybody had something to bring them back while they counted down days in the barracks.
There just needed be something to remind us all that life wouldn’t always be jump boots and camouflage, even if it was something as simple as a stuffed bunny gifted by a baby sister—Dave Reid’s secretly prized possession, a little piece of Maine-made memories that he loved enough to fight for. I know this because I thought he was going to kill me over it.
But the furry little bastard had it coming (Reid, not the bunny).
Coming home from a training mission, April 1990, and looking for nothing more than a cold beer, I had reached into the fridge and found that, not only did Reid drink my last beer, he left in its place a bowl of water, frozen, with my ninja turtles in it. I had two of them. I’d read the comic books before enlisting; when the movie came out a month prior, I had started collecting the action figures.
I felt violated, but I let it go, mostly because he’d done it just before going home for his grandfather’s funeral. Reid was a family-values kind of guy. He’d take a death in the family pretty hard. So, I thawed and dried them. They returned to action poses in places of prominence around the room, and the deed was forgotten…until he got them again. Boredom leads to inventive means of entertainment, another thing life in the billets of Bragg begets: mischief.
This second time, not two weeks later, he wrapped them into a ball of hundred-mile-an-hour tape—dark green duct tape—and left them atop the TV. Getting them out of the ball was like surgery. As I operated, I plotted revenge. These abuses were pretty common among Joes. They didn’t happen because of like or dislike; they happened through a combination of opportunity, vulnerability, and lack of concern for repercussions. Sometimes they ended in conflict, other times, with a good laugh.
I was Reid’s easy target since I was out training on both occasions (we called that a “target of opportunity”), and he and Traveling Matt Farrell, my roommate, were good friends. And while I wasn’t vulnerable, a pair of four-inch plastic turtles weren’t any challenge for Ranger Reid, a martial-arts expert with almost four years of infantry experience. Repercussions didn’t concern him either, as he outranked me.
The second violation told me that I couldn’t let it slide again. If I did, I’d find something every time I came back to my room, so long as Farrell was there. I started planning blindly, immediately, knowing that opportunity would provide me with a victim, and I knew I’d best be ready when time came.
To defeat an enemy, one must know him. Reid didn’t have a girlfriend, didn’t drink much; he really only left the barracks for physical fitness types of things and for food—which he always took at the nearest dining facility. He didn’t qualify as a barracks rat because he socialized within the company, and he would inevitably be found at any room party.
The first keys to opportunity would be finding a weakness, and then finding the victim. Once these found me, I’d be able to set my slowly developing plan into motion.
Now as then, the Army has a stringent policy on physical security, something I always called the “my-shit principal.” To me, the idea was that everybody wanted my shit, my stuff. If I left it out or unsecured, they would take it. Looking through the open door of Reid’s room one afternoon, I discovered his first, most exploitable weakness: he didn’t lock up the way he was supposed to; he’d gone to the first-floor vending machine and left his room wide open.
I scanned the room quickly. Knowing which bed was his (he didn’t have a roommate at the time), I found my target. In the corner of the bed, where walls intersected, sat a bunny. A soft, brown and so very cute stuffed rabbit. Hearing no footsteps on the nearby stairwell, I looked also at shelves next to the door.
The plan formed. And it wasn’t enough to surprise him. I was going to announce my intentions.
“Hey, Farrell,” I called across the hall to my roommate. He grunted a response. “Hey,” I said, “Did you know Reid sleeps with a stuffed bunny?”
“What?” Reid kicking his way through the fire door drowned out the shuffling of Farrell coming to look. I looked to Reid and smiled.
“What the fuck are you doing, Davidson?”
“Sgt. Reid,” I said, still smiling as Farrell emerged from our room. “Do you really sleep with a stuffed bunny?”
He read my face, my smile for a second and said he did. It was a gift from his youngest sister and “Don’t you fuck with it, Davidson.” I’m not sure if I was smiling a full shit-eating grin, but I was definitely on the verge.
“Trust me, Sergeant,” I said. “I would never hurt dear, sweet Flopsy.” I smiled, both Reid and Farrell laughed, and I walked away secure in the knowledge that Karma was on my side. All I needed now was to remember a Jesus quotation or two….
“Good things come to those who wait.”
Or was it the Rolling Stones?
“Time, time, time is on my side. Yes it is.”
The following Sunday, I got my chance. I had prepared carefully, knowing still that the window of opportunity would be short. I heard the charge of quarters call to him. “Reid, your sister is on the phone.” I was certain this would be the sister in college out west, as he had been home the previous week and seen his younger sister. That meant a long phone call, and my plan being detail oriented, I would need time.
His door swung open and shut. I muted the televised football game—to complaints from Farrell. When I heard the stairway fire doors swing, I jumped up; throwing him the remote, I looked down the hall. No Reid in sight, his door, almost directly across the hall, was ajar. I burst quickly in, secured Flopsy and a spring loaded training knife.
Back across the hall, I pulled out my 100-mph tape and several plastic shopping bags. Farrell gawked as I stuffed the collection into my wall locker. His face asked a hundred questions that I answered by saying “Wait a minute.”
Calls on the barracks phone were limited to five minutes, most of which had passed while I ransacked his room. If this were a typical family call—and it turns out that it was—he would come back, get the calling card from his room and return her call from the payphone, end of the hall. As long as he didn’t notice Flopsy’s absence, he’d call back right away. He was in and out in seconds, and I set to work.
Flopsy was the soft, gentle kind of bunny given on one of three occasions: to a child (hypoallergenic and soft as brushed fleece directly from the dryer), from a child (same reasons, Reid’s 8-year-old sister loved it and figured he would), or to a woman one is trying to bed. That is, Flopsy was the softest, sweetest, cutest bunny on Fort Bragg.
Poor little bastard.
To start, I secured a shopping bag around each ear with the duct tape. It was big enough to cover Flopsy’s face as well (Flopsy was about 18 inches, foot to ear). Care to keep tape off its fur was paramount because Reid really would kill me if I damaged his baby sister’s bunny. So I kept about half an inch of plastic showing beneath the tape.
Next, I put the torso into a second bag with the arms through the carrying straps. Taping each leg at the crotch, I made sure they maintained their appearance. I also taped it at Flopsy’s beltline to keep it in place. A third bag with spaces for ear holes covered the face a second time and allowed ample room to isolate the arms, each taped at the armpit. I secured this one below the beltline, again to ensure that no tape would touch his fur.
I held it out for Farrell to inspect, a plastic bag shaped perfectly like a bunny. “Priceless,” he laughed. To finish Flopsy, I covered every inch—limbs, ears, head, and torso—with duct tape. He was still a perfect bunny shape, only now he was a dark green, duct taped bunny, not a plush, sweet, cute one.
I had other things in mind, but the detail and care taken thus far had consumed much time. I had to check that Reid was still occupied. Leaned into the corner, elbow atop the phone, his posture suggested plenty of conversation was left to be had.
The training knife from his room, a spring-loaded, plastic blade attached to a steel knife handle, allowed self-defense students like Reid to learn defense against, and disarming of, knife-wielding maniacs, without worry of getting stabbed or slashed.
I couldn’t think of a better knife-wielding maniac than Flopsy. I taped it to one of his hands.
Finally, from the corner of my room, I grabbed a decoration from home that had been a point of contention between my platoon sergeant and me since he had taken charge: a hangman’s noose (a point of contention because, visible through the neck loop, a hand-written sign read “emergency exit”). I tightened the noose around Flopsy’s neck, pocketed my Government Issue signal mirror, and walked to the door as though headed for the bathroom.
Actually, I checked Reid. He wasn’t looking. Across the hall in a flash, I took great care to not slam the door. Standing on his desk chair, I knotted the trailing end of the noose several times to keep it anchored over a ceiling tile. Placing Duct Tape Flopsy With Knife alternately on shelves by the door, I tested which gave the rope proper tautness before placing him.
Putting the chair back, I slid the door open just enough to get out. Nervous, coated in sweat, I used my signal mirror to look back down the hall. As soon as Reid looked away, I was back in my room.
“You’re gonna love this,” I told Farrell. But I wasn’t sticking around for it. Since Reid and I weren’t really friends, I couldn’t be too sure that he wasn’t going to flip out before realizing Flopsy was unharmed. I asked Farrell to let me know how it went.
The bar was a rewarding place that night as I relayed to friends the story of Reid and his stuffed bunny. When I returned, I found a note. “Reid is going to kill you,” it said.
At 6 am, I tried to get to formation without seeing Reid, but I didn’t get out of the room. He burst in and started ripping me going into his room. But he couldn’t hold it. He put me at parade rest, shouted a few words and then started laughing.
After his call, he’d unsuspectingly swung the door open to his room. It hit the rope, which pulled Duct Tape Flopsy With Knife from the shelf, sending him swinging toward Reid with knife in hand.
“All I could think was ‘I’ve been had,’” he said. “It’s a hell of a thing to come home to.”
There just needed be something to remind us all that life wouldn’t always be jump boots and camouflage, even if it was something as simple as a stuffed bunny gifted by a baby sister—Dave Reid’s secretly prized possession, a little piece of Maine-made memories that he loved enough to fight for. I know this because I thought he was going to kill me over it.
But the furry little bastard had it coming (Reid, not the bunny).
Coming home from a training mission, April 1990, and looking for nothing more than a cold beer, I had reached into the fridge and found that, not only did Reid drink my last beer, he left in its place a bowl of water, frozen, with my ninja turtles in it. I had two of them. I’d read the comic books before enlisting; when the movie came out a month prior, I had started collecting the action figures.
I felt violated, but I let it go, mostly because he’d done it just before going home for his grandfather’s funeral. Reid was a family-values kind of guy. He’d take a death in the family pretty hard. So, I thawed and dried them. They returned to action poses in places of prominence around the room, and the deed was forgotten…until he got them again. Boredom leads to inventive means of entertainment, another thing life in the billets of Bragg begets: mischief.
This second time, not two weeks later, he wrapped them into a ball of hundred-mile-an-hour tape—dark green duct tape—and left them atop the TV. Getting them out of the ball was like surgery. As I operated, I plotted revenge. These abuses were pretty common among Joes. They didn’t happen because of like or dislike; they happened through a combination of opportunity, vulnerability, and lack of concern for repercussions. Sometimes they ended in conflict, other times, with a good laugh.
I was Reid’s easy target since I was out training on both occasions (we called that a “target of opportunity”), and he and Traveling Matt Farrell, my roommate, were good friends. And while I wasn’t vulnerable, a pair of four-inch plastic turtles weren’t any challenge for Ranger Reid, a martial-arts expert with almost four years of infantry experience. Repercussions didn’t concern him either, as he outranked me.
The second violation told me that I couldn’t let it slide again. If I did, I’d find something every time I came back to my room, so long as Farrell was there. I started planning blindly, immediately, knowing that opportunity would provide me with a victim, and I knew I’d best be ready when time came.
To defeat an enemy, one must know him. Reid didn’t have a girlfriend, didn’t drink much; he really only left the barracks for physical fitness types of things and for food—which he always took at the nearest dining facility. He didn’t qualify as a barracks rat because he socialized within the company, and he would inevitably be found at any room party.
The first keys to opportunity would be finding a weakness, and then finding the victim. Once these found me, I’d be able to set my slowly developing plan into motion.
Now as then, the Army has a stringent policy on physical security, something I always called the “my-shit principal.” To me, the idea was that everybody wanted my shit, my stuff. If I left it out or unsecured, they would take it. Looking through the open door of Reid’s room one afternoon, I discovered his first, most exploitable weakness: he didn’t lock up the way he was supposed to; he’d gone to the first-floor vending machine and left his room wide open.
I scanned the room quickly. Knowing which bed was his (he didn’t have a roommate at the time), I found my target. In the corner of the bed, where walls intersected, sat a bunny. A soft, brown and so very cute stuffed rabbit. Hearing no footsteps on the nearby stairwell, I looked also at shelves next to the door.
The plan formed. And it wasn’t enough to surprise him. I was going to announce my intentions.
“Hey, Farrell,” I called across the hall to my roommate. He grunted a response. “Hey,” I said, “Did you know Reid sleeps with a stuffed bunny?”
“What?” Reid kicking his way through the fire door drowned out the shuffling of Farrell coming to look. I looked to Reid and smiled.
“What the fuck are you doing, Davidson?”
“Sgt. Reid,” I said, still smiling as Farrell emerged from our room. “Do you really sleep with a stuffed bunny?”
He read my face, my smile for a second and said he did. It was a gift from his youngest sister and “Don’t you fuck with it, Davidson.” I’m not sure if I was smiling a full shit-eating grin, but I was definitely on the verge.
“Trust me, Sergeant,” I said. “I would never hurt dear, sweet Flopsy.” I smiled, both Reid and Farrell laughed, and I walked away secure in the knowledge that Karma was on my side. All I needed now was to remember a Jesus quotation or two….
“Good things come to those who wait.”
Or was it the Rolling Stones?
“Time, time, time is on my side. Yes it is.”
The following Sunday, I got my chance. I had prepared carefully, knowing still that the window of opportunity would be short. I heard the charge of quarters call to him. “Reid, your sister is on the phone.” I was certain this would be the sister in college out west, as he had been home the previous week and seen his younger sister. That meant a long phone call, and my plan being detail oriented, I would need time.
His door swung open and shut. I muted the televised football game—to complaints from Farrell. When I heard the stairway fire doors swing, I jumped up; throwing him the remote, I looked down the hall. No Reid in sight, his door, almost directly across the hall, was ajar. I burst quickly in, secured Flopsy and a spring loaded training knife.
Back across the hall, I pulled out my 100-mph tape and several plastic shopping bags. Farrell gawked as I stuffed the collection into my wall locker. His face asked a hundred questions that I answered by saying “Wait a minute.”
Calls on the barracks phone were limited to five minutes, most of which had passed while I ransacked his room. If this were a typical family call—and it turns out that it was—he would come back, get the calling card from his room and return her call from the payphone, end of the hall. As long as he didn’t notice Flopsy’s absence, he’d call back right away. He was in and out in seconds, and I set to work.
Flopsy was the soft, gentle kind of bunny given on one of three occasions: to a child (hypoallergenic and soft as brushed fleece directly from the dryer), from a child (same reasons, Reid’s 8-year-old sister loved it and figured he would), or to a woman one is trying to bed. That is, Flopsy was the softest, sweetest, cutest bunny on Fort Bragg.
Poor little bastard.
To start, I secured a shopping bag around each ear with the duct tape. It was big enough to cover Flopsy’s face as well (Flopsy was about 18 inches, foot to ear). Care to keep tape off its fur was paramount because Reid really would kill me if I damaged his baby sister’s bunny. So I kept about half an inch of plastic showing beneath the tape.
Next, I put the torso into a second bag with the arms through the carrying straps. Taping each leg at the crotch, I made sure they maintained their appearance. I also taped it at Flopsy’s beltline to keep it in place. A third bag with spaces for ear holes covered the face a second time and allowed ample room to isolate the arms, each taped at the armpit. I secured this one below the beltline, again to ensure that no tape would touch his fur.
I held it out for Farrell to inspect, a plastic bag shaped perfectly like a bunny. “Priceless,” he laughed. To finish Flopsy, I covered every inch—limbs, ears, head, and torso—with duct tape. He was still a perfect bunny shape, only now he was a dark green, duct taped bunny, not a plush, sweet, cute one.
I had other things in mind, but the detail and care taken thus far had consumed much time. I had to check that Reid was still occupied. Leaned into the corner, elbow atop the phone, his posture suggested plenty of conversation was left to be had.
The training knife from his room, a spring-loaded, plastic blade attached to a steel knife handle, allowed self-defense students like Reid to learn defense against, and disarming of, knife-wielding maniacs, without worry of getting stabbed or slashed.
I couldn’t think of a better knife-wielding maniac than Flopsy. I taped it to one of his hands.
Finally, from the corner of my room, I grabbed a decoration from home that had been a point of contention between my platoon sergeant and me since he had taken charge: a hangman’s noose (a point of contention because, visible through the neck loop, a hand-written sign read “emergency exit”). I tightened the noose around Flopsy’s neck, pocketed my Government Issue signal mirror, and walked to the door as though headed for the bathroom.
Actually, I checked Reid. He wasn’t looking. Across the hall in a flash, I took great care to not slam the door. Standing on his desk chair, I knotted the trailing end of the noose several times to keep it anchored over a ceiling tile. Placing Duct Tape Flopsy With Knife alternately on shelves by the door, I tested which gave the rope proper tautness before placing him.
Putting the chair back, I slid the door open just enough to get out. Nervous, coated in sweat, I used my signal mirror to look back down the hall. As soon as Reid looked away, I was back in my room.
“You’re gonna love this,” I told Farrell. But I wasn’t sticking around for it. Since Reid and I weren’t really friends, I couldn’t be too sure that he wasn’t going to flip out before realizing Flopsy was unharmed. I asked Farrell to let me know how it went.
The bar was a rewarding place that night as I relayed to friends the story of Reid and his stuffed bunny. When I returned, I found a note. “Reid is going to kill you,” it said.
At 6 am, I tried to get to formation without seeing Reid, but I didn’t get out of the room. He burst in and started ripping me going into his room. But he couldn’t hold it. He put me at parade rest, shouted a few words and then started laughing.
After his call, he’d unsuspectingly swung the door open to his room. It hit the rope, which pulled Duct Tape Flopsy With Knife from the shelf, sending him swinging toward Reid with knife in hand.
“All I could think was ‘I’ve been had,’” he said. “It’s a hell of a thing to come home to.”
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