The Admiral's Brief

The Death Racket has flailed its last.  The largely ceremonial hunt no longer appeals.  How the Fruit Fly menace has grown!   Like Hitchcock’s Birds; the swarm is now a palatable cloud in the whole front of my living space.

They are taking over the town.

But wait!  Hark, my fevered brain…what’s that?  Not enough apple cider vinegar, you say?  A diluted little pool covering the bottom of a Friskies can insufficient? Zounds!  Flawed methodology!  Therein lies the rub!

Time out here. 

You know what?  SpellCheck has neither the levity nor the humor to stomach the artistic flow.  I am all over the page, right-clicking green undersquiglies and red…SEE THAT??  Stupid software.  I know grammar errs.  I intend for it to. (Damn it! Made me hang another preposition! Damn it all!) I think Bill Gate’s insidious word tyrant pouts a little every time I click ‘ignore once’. 

I ‘ignore’ a great deal, you fastidious binary little prick.  Fume all you want; my revenge is coming at you by the crafting of audacious new words with my tool.  I’m calling it WordCraft, an acronym for addled brain over software.  Words never before seen in the English Force Majeure; I’m going to stuff them down your punctilious throat by clicking ‘add to dictionary’ every time you slide a red squiggly under my text.. How d’ya like them apples, Apple Foe?  By the time I’m through with you, your miserable excuse for a matrix will swarm with language that you can’t explain away to your Microsoft masters.  Run to Windows 8, you little chickenshit!  Leave me alone with my muse!

Now, where was I?  Oh yes.  The executive summary for the fruit fly conundrum: I drove (I didn’t run) to the Commissary for one large apple cider vinegar, an economy refill of Swifter WETjet Limiador Multiuso, and two cartons of Marlboro Reds in the Soft Pack.  Nowadays you have to specify red ‘shorts’ or else they’ll drag forth all sorts of nonsense.

The vinegar, as we speak, is stinking up my house and drowning drousilae by the millions.  The overbreeding little shits might have prevailed for another day, save my OCD need to stock sufficient nicotine to last for another week.  Then it will be payday; time to go get more cartons.  Get them at the Class VI if I deplete the Commissary.  I can hardly be expected to write without a constant flume of smoke wreathing my head, now can I?

(When last we saw our Hero, he was in front of his assigned barrack, duffle bag dumped at his feet and standing there in his sweat-drenched Donald Duck whites).

I went inside and squared away my upper bunk; changed into Navy blue fatigues.  To think; two months ago, I wore these bellbottoms as a fashion statement.  Now they marked me as a newly arrived fish; more fodder for the cannon.  The truth was that all incoming non-billeted E-3’s were assigned to the First Lieutenants’ Division.  We became the barrack janitors and night watchmen for our first sixty days in-country.  Then, we would be assigned elsewhere.

There were no pleasant prospects, so I lay idle on my bunk waiting for my own barrack to appear and pending my summons to the required orientation brief.

I tried to suppress all the crap they fed us at Coronado Island, home of the Seal Teams and Counter-Insurgency School.  We watched the Seal inductees running everywhere, hoisting a rubber raft large enough to accommodate the whole platoon, with a D.I.running alongside, screaming away at them with no let-up. Yo’ MAMA, G.I. Jane!

This ubiquitous comedy was only a momentary distraction while we attended to the lessons that would supposedly deliver us from Harm’s Way.  In the course of three weeks, we were told of the diabolical booby traps awaiting us: razor blades embedded in deodorant sticks, bars of soap; grenades attached to the flush handle; bamboo vipers hanging by wire in unlikely places.  Yada yada yada.

They even tried to teach us some rudimentary Vietnamese.  After six semesters in college, I couldn’t form a single sentence in Spanish.  With that degree of ineptitude, I certainly wasn’t going to chow down on a tonal language that changed inference with a hiccup.

I thought the crowning bullshit was the story of a turncoat Marine out in the bush who acted as a decoy for Charlie.  He had blond hair and a gold-plated .45 automatic.  If you saw him  through the thick of jungle and attempted to arrange a capture, Charlie would cut you down, one more victim of the traitor Marine.

(A short commercial break here: this not literary license; these are all my own memories distorted only by the passage of time, but nevertheless containing all the veracity I can muster.)

I lay on that bunk in a puddle of sweat, thinking about those razor blades and that grenade in the shitter.  I had blown off the hanging viper and the Marine with the Golden Gun stories; but razor blades were do-able.  I hadn’t been there long enough yet to figure out that the Mamasans, the only gooks in sight, were more interested in trading things for cartons of Salems than slashing the artery of my armpit.

They had a cushy job here at Tien Sha; probably vetted by G-2 to the extent possible.  Why, in God’s name would they jeopardize all of that by some pyretic victory in slaying one dumbshit gob?

I heard my name called with twenty others.  We formed a double file and shuffled off to orientation.  There, we learned of our impending assignments which had been common knowledge among us for the previous two days.  We were waiting for the arrival of the Admiral who would personally welcome us to his command.  The Admiral was himself short in-country.  I never saw him after that day; but in his brief, he gave me a ray of hope.

A redhead of Scotch-Irish stock, he clutched his notes and got into a talk he must have made a hundred times before.  “Now, (pause, look at his notes) there are a few Don’ts here in Da Nang”.  I watched his face begin to turn a bucolic heart threatening red.  “The first Don’t is, WE DON’T SMOKE MARIJUANA!!!”  His voice roared at us as he swiveled his glare around the room.

I looked up at him with my best poker face, no smiling allowed.  I thought to myself, ‘these clowns have actually no, nada, none control over dope in this place.  I am free to do whatever I want’.  After this wistful attempt to somehow frighten the fish into obedience, the gate was left swinging open, and the herd wandered insolently out of the corral.

And so, my intuitive guess was born out.  In less than three weeks, I was smoking and getting stoned every night.  Every night.  I made the necessary concession that stoning on duty was verboten.  That single common sense rule I maintained for the duration of my tour.  Off time, however, was mine mine mine.  Me and my friends. Ours, to have and be lit up in the night.

I was to do many stupid and dangerous things in the nocturnal stupor.  None of them ever once deterred me into clear headed sobriety; from those first faltering days to my last night in-country.

Kids today talk up their non-stop partying.  I wonder: have any of them partied non-stop every day for a year?