Military part 2

Ft Knox Kentucky, home of the gold deposits of the United States but back in August of 1965 it was my basic training home for six weeks. My dad had filled me in on a few things about basic training, don’t stand out , don’t volunteer and don’t get in trouble. Army basic training exist to turn the home town boy or girl into part of a system , the entry point of a world that is far removed from what the trainee had been experiencing for most of their lives. The first part is standard, remove the individual , remove thoughts of freedom and instill compliance to orders, there is no other way but the Army way. This is the first step in creating whatever the Army needs to feed the machine. A line of clones , new material to be formed by whatever method works best. Going from your own room and a bathroom with a door to an open bay sleeping with 24 of your new friends and taking your morning dump in an open latrine quickly eliminates any feeling of being an individual. The rest is what is too be expected, mostly close to what any old WWII war movie has about basic training. The rifle shooting, what use to be called gas chambers, morning exercise and standing around waiting, a lot of standing around waiting. The bright spot was always the mess hall, lined up with your new found friends to stuff as much food as you could get into your stomach before resuming the day’s activities. This was my first introduction to a lot of things, draftee’s, black people, crazy people and really mean son’s of bitches. Remember back in those days a way to get out of going to jail was to join the Army. It all becomes a blur, and one day you’re a brand new real Army soldier in a parade waiting to go home and wondering what will happen next.
The home coming was strange, I was by no means a steely eyed cold blooded killer. I had put on some pounds , had no hair and was now a stranger, all in six short weeks. The two weeks went by fast and off to Ft Gordon Georgia, I was to be Infantry. My dreams of being an engineer had been shattered the first week of basic when the truth was revealed to me and I was informed, basically tough shit, we have your skinny ass now and your infantry. We all had to take a battery of tests going through basic, and that was suppose to tell the Army where a person was best suited to perform. Well that is all well and good unless the Army has a need for something else then those cute test scores go in your folder and you’re shipped off to whatever the Army needs at that time. In this case it seems Infantry was high on the list, something about an ongoing war in a place called Viet-am. Ft Gordon is backwater USA, the only claim to fame in Augusta GA is something called the Masters Golf Tournament . At the start of the Viet-Nam war, Soldiers were still kind of viewed in a good light and I did manage to get a chance to walk part of the course. The fact that I was picking up trash didn’t seem to have an impact on my training. I ended up being trained on what was called direct fire infantry, those are the guys that are suppose to kill tank’s with rockets, recoilless rifles and such. It was fun but I was really hoping that I would never have to try it for real, it didn’t seem to be a job that made for a long life. I did manage to have my first taste of grits, and friendly southern girls. This was another six weeks, not as bad as basic but I was headed for hell and didn’t know it. Next up and just across the state of Georgia was a place called Fort Benning , Georgia and Airborne school. What I didn’t know was that the Army had changed its mind about my job, but they had also failed to tell me, the training wasn’t wasted and would come in handy a few years down the road.

Military Part 1

I have been thinking about this post for a few years. The three people that read this blog probably know that I am retired military. The details have not been posted so here are some of the details and my thoughts on the military. Now this is my view and my experiences and since the military like any other profession is always evolving and changing others with military experience may or may not share my views. I spent a total of 30 years in the US Army, starting at private and ending at W4, my jobs ranged from combat infantry to Helicopter Maintenance Test Pilot. I went from a single young guy with visions of an Army that didn’t exist to a divorced father of two that had seen things that were beyond belief both good and bad and a realization that the Army was something that I couldn’t define. This will of course take more than one post and how it will end is anybody’s guess.
So how did I end up in the Army to begin with? My father had something to do with it but the bottom line was that I had quit school over something fairly stupid and unless I wanted to spend my life in an Indiana factory with no future I had to do something. My choices in Northern Indiana were limited, my parents were divorcing, I had let stupidity and ego talk me into quitting high school with two months to graduation. Vietnam was cranking up and in 1965 it was almost a popular war. So I drove up to the big town up the road and was waiting outside the Air Force recruiter’s office. He was late and the Army recruiter asked me if I had considered the Army, he gave me his song and dance. I ended up signing up to be a combat engineer, thinking that I would do my time and come out with skills in driving road graders and such. I also jumped on the Airborne school, not realizing and not being told that I only had once choice and the Airborne choice, for the extra 55 dollars a month wiped out my first choice. My journey from there started in Indianapolis where the half truths, half promises and bullshit continued, but being young and dumb, I swallowed it all hook line and sinker. A bus trip from there to Ft Knox Kentucky started my basic training. The truth’s started to be revealed, I was just a very minor cog in a big machine, expendable , rubber stamp to be applied, to be conformed to a standard, invisible with no opinion, lonely, scared and impressionable.

WTF

This is the year I turn into the magic pumpkin, 65 seems to be another miracle number from the phone calls , emails, and snail mail I receive. Oh well it could be worse, I could be a 22 year old with a degree in some worthless study that I paid a $100,00 for with no job connected to my major.

Idiots I put up with every day.

WTF is wrong with people, driving in the left lane, on the cell phone ,eating and not a fucking care in the world. The fact this fat ass black woman was doing 10 miles and hour slower than the speed limit was not even on her limited mind. How do I know she was fat and black, she damn near ran me off the road when she took an instant left into the gas station to pick up another bottle of Pepsi and a bad of chips. Yeah I was still behind her fat stinking ass standing in line, oh she did manage to slip a twenty in for lottery tickets. I bought a 12 pack after that.

Muslims can kiss my ass

I am not a pacifist that turn the other cheek bullshit doesn’t fly for me. Yeah, I know a good Christian should be tolerant and turn the other cheek and suffer on to the children and all that really, really good stuff that the bible pretends to teach. So be it, I am not a good Christian in fact I am not even what is called a backslider by the Baptist crowd. I am more than likely an old Testament kind of guy, all that peace and love shit doesn’t seem to have caught on in the past two or three thousand years. Then again I fall mostly in the crowd that thinks the Bible is a pretty good read but if God wanted a book I am pretty sure he could have figured out a way to get one printed or maybe he or she is just waiting on Steve Jobs to clear customs and is going to bring down a really smoking IPAD 4.

Back in my long gone Army days I use to have a drinking buddy who was a man of the cloth, in fact there was three of us that use to set around and get shit faced and talk in circles and since we were in Korea at the time not much else to do. The other guy was an older pilot who used to root for the Nebraska football team , mostly because he was born somewhere in that state. The good father would do his confession part about a third of the way through a bottle of Jack, he understood that religious wars could not be won in the conventional sense. This was back in the day before we worried about Muslims and there fanatic dedication to a goat fucking child molester.

I am not particularly anti religion, I believe a little belief in something great than yourself is a pretty good thing. I am also not a supporter of the so called Atheists of the world, in my view they are just as bad as the religious wack jobs. In my view , you can believe or not believe in any damn thing you want, just do not to try to force me or anyone else to believe the same way. There is nothing quite as pathetic as someone who went to the seminary and lost all faith, that has to be a sad and empty life filled with anger and hate even though they love to call it truth.

So where is all this bullshit heading? Why to the sick ass Muslims and the totally ignorant back ward follower of that pedophile. It seems a few are all up in arms because their holy book was not disposed of in accordance with their wishes. Now they don’t have a problem with women being stoned to death, Christians getting their heads cut off or people being hung from bridges who have been burnt and gutted because they don’t believe in their pedophile goat fucking lying ass prophet. Hell you can get your hand wacked off for stealing a loaf of bread. These worthless should be dead anyway assholes are rioting over a fucking book!! This is the same mentality that calls for the death of anyone that dares to draw a picture or make fun of their personal deity and goat fucker. So I am not even close to being tolerant of Muslims, I am past that, I have not seen one so called leader of this mock religion ever stand up and condemn the killings or condemn other leaders of this so called religion of peace.

Since the brother Muslim in the white house wants to eliminate 80% of our Nuclear stockpile, I am going to make a suggestion where he can get rid of the excess, pointy end first. It’s time to rotate the stock .

7.6 Billion and I didn’t even get a reach around.

So General Motors comes up with a nice profit something like 7.6 billon dollars. Now a reasonable person might expect GM to pay back a bit of the loan from the government. Would a reasonable person expect a $7,000.00 bonus to the union workers? Of course GM is claim gloom and doom from the European sector and of course they will need to re-invest to fix that problem. So bottom line, tax payers get screwed, union workers get rewarded, bribed and a pat on the back. Of course blaming the union for GM’s failure to begin with would be not cool and probably deemed un-American. Since I really don’t give a fuck what any union zombie thinks, I will give at least 80% of the failure to the Union, the rest goes to the GM management for caving into Union blackmail.
So for today, Fuck Obama and Fuck Unions, your both ghouls and bloodsuckers.

The Truth

I do not have the words to explain how frustrated, pissed and just plain mad I am about the current administration. From the top to the bottom it is nothing but one lie after another, anything to stay in power.
I don’t think I am alone in this feeling.

Tired, pissed and not knocked up

At least I am not a woman. Of course from the screwing we are getting now days we all might as well have a vagina.

Whitney Houston,,, no surprise

Came home from a Wedding and the tube and the net is running over with the news that Whitney Houston is dead. I wasn’t even mildly surprised, everyone knew it was coming, just a matter of when. It is sad but in reality no sadder than any other death caused by stupidity.

What message?

You crazy republicans can’t make up your mind. Just choose a loser and get it over with. Looking more and more like four more years of that piece of shit.