story by Donny, written with help by skippy

One bright spring day our platoon was tasked with some combat training. specifically we were assigned to attack a fake village that would be populated with other soldiers pretending to be third world residents. Our goal was to neutralize HVTs. For the benefit of the non-military readers an HVT is a High Value Target. In other words the guys that we want to do bad things to.

The training village was a cluster of six buildings, ranging is size from a small single room dwelling to a large 2 story house. This building was practically a mansion by the standards of the other buildings, with several interconnected rooms. There was even an escape tunnel leading out of the village.

These buildings, like all urban combat simulators were constructed with thick slabs of concrete, to create a maximum of durabilty with a minimum of cost. Which are two desirable features for a building if you plan on letting soldiers run amok without any serious adult supervision.

My squad was the main effort, and so the large two story building was our target. We dismounted our Bradleys, sprinted to the building, and entered through a window. As we climbed the stairs we encountered light enemy resistance, which we quickly and professionally put down.

Once on the second floor, we began clearing all of the rooms. Within a short period of time we had swept through the area, and had already captured or killed every HVT except for one. And we only had one room left to check.

So my squad stacked up and I got the be the breacher. Again for the non-military types here, a breacher is the guy who gets the break the door down. As soon as he does that everyone else runs in, the goal being to put as many soldiers through the door as quickly as possible.

So I forced the door and watched my squad storm in to the sound of gunfire. As I tried to join them in the assault I collided with a team-mate who was standing in the doorway laughing. Despite the clear presence of an armed hostile my squad instead of opening fire, was doubling over with laughter. Feeling disgruntled I shoved my way into the room while shouting “What the hell is so funny?”

And then I saw.

Remember how I mentioned the nice thick walls in this place? Well aside from being durable thick cement also blocks sounds. And so the nice Sergeant who was playing the role of enemy combatant had not heard the raid starting. And having been left with some privacy for a while, he decided to conduct a private “weapons inspection”.

He was in fact rather enthusiastically in the middle of said inspection when my squad, rather rudely, broke the door down and barged in.

Now to his credit, he was able to change gears, and weapons, rather quickly. He dropped his gun, grabbed his rifle, and began what could under the circumstance only be referred to as a valiant last stand.

Unfortunately for him he had been caught with his pants down, red handed as it were.

I saw a news story a while back about a couple that had kidnapped people, kept them as sex slaves and then murdered them when they were done with them.

As disgusting as that is, it got me wondering, how do these people find each other? I have had a hard enough time finding a normal chick that will tolerate me playing video games.

So how do people like this hook up with someone else that shares their interests? You can’t exactly place an ad in the paper.

SWM seeks woman with open mind. Must enjoy trying new things, meeting people and able to carry up to 175 lbs. Van owner a plus.

Or maybe this.

SWM seeks woman into BDSM, mostly the B, D, and especially the S, not so much the M. Must enjoy the light hearted romantic comedies of Voorhees, Kruger, Myers and John Holmes. Must be into threesomes and/or voyeurism. Not squeamish around blood. Previous criminal history not a problem. Van owner a plus.

Or maybe this.

Do you get off on finding that special someone, and forcing them to perform unspeakable acts, against their will, and then “disposing” of them when they no longer amuse you? Would it be more fulfilling if you had someone to share the experience with? Then I am the man for you. Van owner a plus.

Obviously you can’t do that, so at what point in the relationship do you make the suggestion to your significant other that you want to spice up the sex life by committing three of the most heinous crimes you can commit?

I see the conversation going something like this…

A husband and wife are having another quiet, uneventful Friday night together. While surfing the channels on the TV, he asks, “So honey… what do you want to do tonight?”

“I don’t know. Want to go to a movie,” she replies.

“No… I was thinking of something a bit more active.”

She pauses to think for a moment and offers up, “Bowling?”

“No.”

He pauses for a minute then says, “Hey, I have an idea. It’s a little weird, but hear me out.”

With an intrigued look on her face, she says, “OK, this sounds interesting.”

The husband continues, “What if we went out and found some random stranger, kidnapped them, kept them in the basement as a sex slave for a while, and when we get tired of them, we can kill them and bury them in the back yard, and start all over again?”

She stares at him with a shocked look on her face, as if she saw her mates soul for the very first time and says, “Do you know how long I have been waiting for you to ask me that? I’ll get my coat.”

While I was in Bosnia I got to witness some truly awe inspiring disregard for appropriate conduct.

Now to preface, many of the rules and regulations the military inflicts on its soldiers are ridiculous. And a silly regulation should probably be mocked. But you should still follow it, especially if you are a leader. And if you are going to ignore it and just do what you want, you should at least have the courtesy to attempt to hide it from your soldiers.

So while I was deployed in Bosnia I got to work with Reservists for the first time. In fact, about half of the PSYOP forces in Sarajevo were deployed from the Reserves. My section lucked out, in that the most senior of the illustrators in country, a man who I will call Specialist Dart, had extensive training and experience with graphic design from his civilian job. So he taught me all about Photoshop, vector graphics, and Quark.

Unfortunately not all of the Reservists had similar amounts of applicable job experience. But most of them where willing to sit down and learn their way around the software and other job requirements.

But the video productions section had an NCO who I will call SGT Screecher. Now SGT Screecher was a very nice lady who had a few issues. The first is that she had absolutely no idea how any of the equipment in here section worked. She had transfered from some other area and received on the job training for her current assignment. Her on the job training more or less consisted of someone waving a pencil and shouting: “Abracadabra….you’re now qualified to lead video production!” And unfortunately for everyone, she didn’t want to learn. Basically, she had too much of an ego to allow a bunch of lower enlisted types to teach her how the equipment worked. So she just sat around her section being annoying until a higher ranking NCO kicked her out.

So she was now banished from being in the same office as the soldiers she was technically “leading”.

Which was no big deal to me, because I was in another section entirely.

Which leads nicely into my problem. My section leader was a man I will call SGT Horndog.

As you may guess from the name, SGT Horndog took one look at SGT Screecher and decided:

“I’m going to hit that so hard, whoever can pull me out again will be the next King of England!”

As nearly any soldier who has deployed can tell you, these “deployed romances” happen from time to time. And by “time to time”, I mean “near constantly”. In this particular case it was notable because weren’t particularly good at hiding it. But that special kind of “not hiding it” where they act like they are concealing their real actions with an almost ninja-like ability.

I named her SGT Screecher for a reason.

So besides keeping other soldiers up at odd hours, she would hang around my office making goo-goo eyes at Horndog and basically acting like an infatuated teenager. Seriously, she usually referred to him as “Honey” or by his first name while in uniform and on duty. (For purposes of this story I will say that his first name is Pookie.)

You know those people who are going through the nauseating “Yay I just started dating someone” phase? That was her. Except that she had rank and wasn’t above throwing it around if someone was mean to her “Honey”. I actually got chewed out once for trying to demonstrate a better way to make a layout to SGT Horndog. (Please note: I was an illustrator. This was my job.)

Aside from clogging up our space, and giving us a serious case of cooties induced diabetes, she also made an email account on every computer in our office.

Now this was in the mid-nineties before computers had multi-gig hard drives. We did graphic production and had itty-bitty drives to store it on. We had to use external storage media, such as Jazz and Zip disks, simply because we couldn’t fit all of the material we were working with onto our system at the same time.

So we had a special (read: crappy) computer just for email accounts, in the back.

Unfortunately for us, SGT Screecher didn’t like that computer. So she would just help herself to the workstations. She would even try to kick soldiers who were working off of the workstations so she could spend her afternoons sending emails to every person she ever knew.

And our NCOIC wouldn’t do a damn thing about it because he wanted to keep getting some.

One day SPC Dart (remember him?) had enough.

“SGT you can’t keep using these workstations for personal email. There’s no room for files we need already, plus we need the system to get the next magazine print set-up.”

She gave him a petulant pout, “Well Pookie would give me access to this system whenever I want!”

“SGT, would you like a quick rundown of all the things that SGT Horndog will give you whenever you want that I won’t? Because orgasms are pretty close to the top of that list.”

And with that she turned red, and ran away, never to bother us about email again. And my section lived happily ever after, except for SGT Horndog.

This is a fun meme that I found floating around the tubes.

Instructions:

1. Open your MP3 player

2. Put it on shuffle

3. Press play

4. For every section list whichever song comes up

5. Repeat to get the full soundtrack

Here’s my soundtrack:

Opening Credits: Gulf War Song - Moxy Fruvous

Waking up: Know Your Enemy - Rage Against The Machine

Falling in love: Blister In The Sun - Indigo Girls (Cover of the Violent Femmes song)

Fight song: Escape From The Flesh Eaters - Zombie Motion Picture Soundtrack

Break up song: Designed By Satan - The Vandals

Making Up: Americana - The Offspring

Life’s Okay: Parsons’s Farewell - Burn Witch Burn

Mental Breakdown: Fields of Athenry - Dropkick Murphys

Driving: Go Your Own Way - NOFX (Cover of the Fleetwood Mac song)

Flashbacks: O Do Not Forsake Me - They Might Be Giants

Happy Dance: Bad, Bad Leroy Brown - Jim Croche

Regret: Science Fiction/Double Feature - Me First and the Gimmie Gimmies (Cover of the Motion Picture Soundtrack)

Final Battle: Furry Old Lobster - Jonathan Coultan

Death Scene: Why Doesn’t Anybody Like Me - No Use For A Name

Final Credits: Jumping Cat Boogie - Red Elvises

What did everyone else get?

A quick note on names.

Just in case people haven’t noticed up until this point, I never use real names when telling my Army stories. This is because of two reasons.

The first is to protect the innocent. And guilty for that matter. I figure that some of the people I am telling stories about might still be in the service. Some might be in military-related jobs on the civilian side now. And not everybody has a sense of humor. I’d hate to see someone start getting crap or miss out on a promotion opportunity because I told a story that put them in an unflattering light. Or even just because they have a grouchy commander who doesn’t think Skippy’s List was very funny.

Even if they were in the habit of saying really stupid things, or acting like an idiot, I like to imagine that they grew up and got over it since then.

Also I try to remember all the idiotic things I have done, and how much I would hate it if someone put those all over the internet for everyone to laugh at me.

The second reason is that many of these stories happened a very long time ago. And I used to drink a lot. And I honestly don’t remember everyone’s name. Now get off my lawn.

On another note, I am beginning to reach empty on my “Magical bin of hilarious guest stories”. Which means that you guys aren’t sending any in. So get on that.

This weeks list of bad military ideas comes from an Army Cadet in the Australian military. Which should probably be terrifying if you are a soldier in the Australian military.

(Submitted by Cadet Who?)

• Must not refer to a lanyard as a “ropey thingy”
• Must not use a lanyard to hang an NCO, no matter how much I hate them
• Must not use wit to come up with “funny” rhymes about NCO’s
• The chain of command doesn’t care how long I have played PS2 for, I still have to do drill
• Ghostmas is not a real religious holiday and I shouldn’t take time off cadets for it
• I am not the crazy cat lady
• I must not make my personal army of cats
• I am not in charge of the zero gravity universe
• There is no such thing as the zero gravity universe
• I am no longer to do the “Eden” dance
• I am no longer allowed to dance the “Krystal”
• Walter the bank guy (deal or no deal) is not my home dog
• Using large amounts of hair gel causes cancer and hair loss, think about it
• I am not the president of Uzbekistan
• I am not to cover the parade ground with sand and create a Zen garden
• I am not allowed to re-enact anything from Jackass
• I am not to see how many marshmallows I can shove up my nose
• When in cold conditions, I am not allowed to lick poles
• I am not allowed to steal the company’s flag, this achieves nothing
• I am not to push that button on the radio while someone is talking
• I am not to inquire how to make “cadet cocaine”
• I am not to flatten my face against windows
• I am not to convert people to “The Dark side”
• “The Dark side” does not have cookies
• I am not to go into the Q store and become “The Magical Scrim Monster”
• I am not Fergalicious
• I am not to encourage other cadets to irritate the NCO’s
• “Point and laugh” is not a drill move
• I am not to go on a mission based solely on pushing over sleeping cows
• I must not put the bandages used for First-Aid lessons in my mouth, I don’t know where they’ve been
• I cannot fly and I should not test this
• There’s no such thing as “scrim attack”
• Manikin look-a-likes of me don’t replace me at lessons, camps or parades
• I don’t know kung-fu, and I should not say this
• I do not have an evil twin
• I am not to get other sections lost on purpose, even if it is funny
• The SSGT is not a member of Al-Qaeda
• Saying that I was dropped on my head at birth does not justify anything bad I have done
• I am to speak English at all times, Not German, not Chinese, English
• I am not bringing Sexy back
• If I start seeing Leprechauns, I’ve drunk too much coke
• I am not to do anything I saw in the movie “Jarhead”, especially “field f**k”
• I am not to taunt the air-force cadets anymore
• The SSGT is not a ferret, even though with his new hair style he does look like one.
• New recruits are not “cannon fodder”
• I must not itch myself with a loaded steyer

In my day when military personnel got bored, they made lists of things that they weren’t supposed to do.

Nowadays these kids have their newfangled interwebs, tubes, and digital video recorders. And they make videos and put them online.

And then their chain of command gets all upset and everybody involved gets into trouble.

It turns out that fighter pilot’s balls are more controversial than you would have thought.

Here is the video
(NSFW)

And here is the story of what happened over it.