The De-flowering: Part 1
I had to literaly cry to get a chance to go for Infantry training that summer of 2000.
My father is, on the surface, a rather idealistic and strict man. All that goes down the drain when he sees his kids hurting. After arguing and making a case for myself to become a soldier for hours, I realized the only way I was going to get something done was to break out the waterworks. Now this may sound a little odd but I assure you, it was the most effective way of convincing him. Women are very familiar with this sort of thing: make the other party guilty by making up bullshit and then start crying, essentially convincing them of that guilt. Girly or not, I got what I wanted and that's all that mattered then.
The purpose of the Army is to reduce a person to a thinking grunt that is motivated and will listen to orders and follow them to death. Stripping away everything that keeps him from that goal is the reason they have basic training. To put it rather bluntly, there is one way this is accomplished: they make you their bitch for the summer from the first moment when the non-commisioned officers taunt/threaten/lure you into running back home to mama to the last day of training where you have become the most obedient little grunt.
At the swearing in, they allowed me to graciously bring in a Qur'an to use instead of the Bible. At the swearing in is where I met Gino and Chris. Gino was my height (about 6'3") and had brought his jamaican mother along with, just as I had brought my own pathan mama. Continuing my life trend of befriending black people, I helped him out with his form and we became buds (all my life, in all my classes, if there is one black guy in class. more often than not, i'm either his only friend or one of his best. I don't really know why. this pattern has continued all my life and i've enjoyed this trend much.) Chris was the skinny guy beside me who I joined forces with for making fun of the officer handing out the forms. It was a she and her name tag said 'honey' (you can pretty much take it from there.) We would be neighbours in our tent that summer and would finish the course together.
Meaford, Ontario is 3 hours north from Hamilton near Owen Sound. It's a barren former tank training ground the Canadian Department of National Defense uses as a training base. When we all got there, we were split into a platoon and then sections. Our platoon at the beginning of the summer started with 74 trainees and 4 sections. As a testiment to the filtering process, we finished with 43. I was in section 3. Every section had a reputation and every section except ours had atleast one female. We were known (as you can imagine) as the gay section. Saving grace? We had Rhean Oncango who was a 30 year old chiropractor built like Arnold Schwarzenegger and we had me. Dr. O offered his chiropractic services to the platoon and I accompanied providing comic relief along with making it a point to befriend every single person in the platoon. That and the house CDs I had grabbed along with me to play in our tent ghettoblaster. Our section commander was Seargent McClure and our 2nd in command was a dude named Corporal Billings. Seargent was arguably the best NCO in our entire platoon and by far the most fair, pleasant and friendly. I'll never forget just how much effort and pains he'd go through to get me halal food in our field exercises. One day I'm going to write him an email thanking him for that. Corporal Billings was (initially) a total tight ass. Tough as nails with blue eyes that he'd use to give you that poo in your pants look that you never ever want to get from your superiors. We grew to love him as later on we discovered he was a sucker for good jokes. That and the fact that he grew to love our assanine behaviour is what made our summer worth remembering.
Our routine was well organized and precise. If anyone in your section screwed it up, your section would hear it. and therein lies another moral of the army and the militiary in general. Once you're in the militiary, you live and die for your boys. Your country doesn't matter, your morals don't matter and your superiors don't matter. You work as an absolutely singular unit. The better you are at being an absolutely unbreakable team, the higher your chances of success. The habits you were expected to pick up would, in civilian life, be considered almost p/m-aternal. If there was even a hint of imperfection in your fellow soldier's uniform, you fixed it for him before even telling him. We'd be awoken at 5:25 am and be told to be ready in running attire in 5 minutes. Running and phsyical exercises would follow for the next hour. You'd get back and would be given exactly 10 minutes to what was popularly known as 'shit, shower and shave'. This sounds, in theory, doable. The reality of this is the following: there are about 60 males in your platoon. There are 8 sinks. 8 showers. 6 toilets. Not only do you have to finish with your sanitory needs, you have to be in perfect uniform from head to toe and in an entire platoon lined up perfectly. It took us half a summer to get this done right and even then, we got colourful comments from our superiors. The most hilarious (and most memorable) one was the most random. Seargent Reedy, who we knew for a fact was hung over and in a crabby mood, after seeing us miss our time by 45 seconds yelled out as loud as he could: "Straighten up you dumb fucks"
I had to literaly cry to get a chance to go for Infantry training that summer of 2000.
My father is, on the surface, a rather idealistic and strict man. All that goes down the drain when he sees his kids hurting. After arguing and making a case for myself to become a soldier for hours, I realized the only way I was going to get something done was to break out the waterworks. Now this may sound a little odd but I assure you, it was the most effective way of convincing him. Women are very familiar with this sort of thing: make the other party guilty by making up bullshit and then start crying, essentially convincing them of that guilt. Girly or not, I got what I wanted and that's all that mattered then.
The purpose of the Army is to reduce a person to a thinking grunt that is motivated and will listen to orders and follow them to death. Stripping away everything that keeps him from that goal is the reason they have basic training. To put it rather bluntly, there is one way this is accomplished: they make you their bitch for the summer from the first moment when the non-commisioned officers taunt/threaten/lure you into running back home to mama to the last day of training where you have become the most obedient little grunt.
At the swearing in, they allowed me to graciously bring in a Qur'an to use instead of the Bible. At the swearing in is where I met Gino and Chris. Gino was my height (about 6'3") and had brought his jamaican mother along with, just as I had brought my own pathan mama. Continuing my life trend of befriending black people, I helped him out with his form and we became buds (all my life, in all my classes, if there is one black guy in class. more often than not, i'm either his only friend or one of his best. I don't really know why. this pattern has continued all my life and i've enjoyed this trend much.) Chris was the skinny guy beside me who I joined forces with for making fun of the officer handing out the forms. It was a she and her name tag said 'honey' (you can pretty much take it from there.) We would be neighbours in our tent that summer and would finish the course together.
Meaford, Ontario is 3 hours north from Hamilton near Owen Sound. It's a barren former tank training ground the Canadian Department of National Defense uses as a training base. When we all got there, we were split into a platoon and then sections. Our platoon at the beginning of the summer started with 74 trainees and 4 sections. As a testiment to the filtering process, we finished with 43. I was in section 3. Every section had a reputation and every section except ours had atleast one female. We were known (as you can imagine) as the gay section. Saving grace? We had Rhean Oncango who was a 30 year old chiropractor built like Arnold Schwarzenegger and we had me. Dr. O offered his chiropractic services to the platoon and I accompanied providing comic relief along with making it a point to befriend every single person in the platoon. That and the house CDs I had grabbed along with me to play in our tent ghettoblaster. Our section commander was Seargent McClure and our 2nd in command was a dude named Corporal Billings. Seargent was arguably the best NCO in our entire platoon and by far the most fair, pleasant and friendly. I'll never forget just how much effort and pains he'd go through to get me halal food in our field exercises. One day I'm going to write him an email thanking him for that. Corporal Billings was (initially) a total tight ass. Tough as nails with blue eyes that he'd use to give you that poo in your pants look that you never ever want to get from your superiors. We grew to love him as later on we discovered he was a sucker for good jokes. That and the fact that he grew to love our assanine behaviour is what made our summer worth remembering.
Our routine was well organized and precise. If anyone in your section screwed it up, your section would hear it. and therein lies another moral of the army and the militiary in general. Once you're in the militiary, you live and die for your boys. Your country doesn't matter, your morals don't matter and your superiors don't matter. You work as an absolutely singular unit. The better you are at being an absolutely unbreakable team, the higher your chances of success. The habits you were expected to pick up would, in civilian life, be considered almost p/m-aternal. If there was even a hint of imperfection in your fellow soldier's uniform, you fixed it for him before even telling him. We'd be awoken at 5:25 am and be told to be ready in running attire in 5 minutes. Running and phsyical exercises would follow for the next hour. You'd get back and would be given exactly 10 minutes to what was popularly known as 'shit, shower and shave'. This sounds, in theory, doable. The reality of this is the following: there are about 60 males in your platoon. There are 8 sinks. 8 showers. 6 toilets. Not only do you have to finish with your sanitory needs, you have to be in perfect uniform from head to toe and in an entire platoon lined up perfectly. It took us half a summer to get this done right and even then, we got colourful comments from our superiors. The most hilarious (and most memorable) one was the most random. Seargent Reedy, who we knew for a fact was hung over and in a crabby mood, after seeing us miss our time by 45 seconds yelled out as loud as he could: "Straighten up you dumb fucks"
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