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EXCERPT FROM THE BOOK:
Our Rifles Are Our Closest Girlfriends.
Our drill
instructors always emphasized that our weapons were more
reliable than our wives or girlfriends in a tight situation.
According to them, if we treated our “Lady’ right, she
would come through for us and save our lives. We were told to
make love to our “ladies” as we cleaned and oiled them up. One
of my D.I.’s told us to give our M-16’s the name of our current
love or any female name (I often wondered what the drill
instructors would have done if they had caught one of us
crooning a man’s name as we caressed the flanks of the weapon
with oil).
“Oh Anthony,
oh Anthony, I love you!”
Or we could
have taken it a step further and named our weapons after one of
our drill instructors and crooned sweet endearments to it.
At the time, I
didn’t have a current girlfriend, so I named my M-16 after a
high school senior that, up to that point, had been my most
enjoyable sexual encounter. (She was the girl who gave me the
hickey that had infuriated my mother). She reminded me of Honey
West (played by the actress Anne Francis.
So in this
book, I refer to her as Honey, which of course, is not her real
name.
When we were
cleaning our weapons and reassembling them, oiling them and
wiping them, we were told to “make love” to our weapons and to
murmur sweet and sexy things to our “ladies.”
There I was, a
freshly turned seventeen year old sex-crazed kid, getting into
the role of caressing and wiping the “flanks” of Honey,
murmuring, “There you go my sweet little Honey; how does the oil
feel on you? Feels good, doesn’t it? Yeah, you feel so good
against my finger tips.”
During the
times I engaged in professing my mindless sick love to my
weapon, there was a distant logical observer in me noting how
sick and bizarre this was.
This same
observer found the conversations of some of the other recruits
even more disturbing as they got even more into the
role-playing.
One of the
recruits was murmuring to his M-16, “Yeah my little baby, when
we get over to Nam, we are going to kill a bunch of mother
fucking, low-life gooks. We’re going to fuck them up. You and me
are going to rack up the body counts.”
Listening to
other recruits really gave me the creeps and, looking back at
myself in hindsight, it’s also disturbing to know that I so
easily fell into the role of making verbal love to my rifle.
I suppose I
shouldn’t be too shocked; considering all the talk the drill
instructors gave us so that we would turn into fucking lean mean
killing machines.
The first time
I heard a drill instructor say, “You’re going to become lean,
mean, fucking killing machines. You’re going to go over there
and kick ass, kill the enemy and fuck out their eyes sockets!”
It shocked my
middle-American teenage sensibilities. I figured it was the kind
of over the top talk that some drill instructors used to put the
fear of God and him into you. Still, it was very
disturbing and, of course, looking back years later it is even
more disturbing.
MOST PEOPLE TALK BULLSHIT:
One Primate's Search For Intelligent Life
(GENESIS)
MOST PEOPLE TALK BULLSHIT:
One Primate's Search For Intelligent Life
(EXODUS)
MOST PEOPLE TALK BULLSHIT:
One Primate's Search For Intelligent Life
(REVELATIONS)
MOST PEOPLE TALK BULLSHIT:
One Primate's Search For Intelligent Life
(JUDGMENT DAY)
THE MARINES: GOD'S CHOSEN
WARRIORS
VINCE'S GYM
CONVERSATIONS WITH NEO
NEO TEACHES ME THE ART OF WAR
& PEACE;
His Version of The Matrix
MEMORIES OF MY FATHERS
ZEN & THE ART OF RESISTANCE
TRAINING:
A Yogic & Scientific Approach To Weight
Lifting
ZEN & THE BIOLOGY OF
TRANSCENDENCE:
The First Matrix of Psychic
Phenomena
ZEN & THE ART OF KINESIOLOGY:
The Yogic & Scientific
Approach To Movement
ZEN & YOUR ENERGY SYSTEMS
ZEN & VARIOUS ASPECTS OF
TRAINING
HOMEPAGE TO ADVENTURES IN MARINE BIOLOGY
HOMEPAGE |
