Greywar – Agent of the Vast Doughnut Conspiracy
*Thanks to chiprj for helping to fix this article!
Note : Sorry for the prolonged absence. My perverse nature actually made it more difficult to start writing again the more people clamored for it. I know, its weird. Nonetheless I am back and with a multi-parter no less!
(Settle in folks this is a long one...) - G
I was a loony left liberal. Thats right folks, I was a dyed-in-the-wool anti-religion-anywhere, pro-choice, socialist leftist in 1992 as I left high school. I didn't really know it at the time since our school system didn't cover the differences between political ideologies but I remember being very angry with my mother (over nothing really) and most of my left-wing ideas really sprang from that suppressed anger. I desperately wanted her and all generations of her era to be wrong about everything.
Aiding my growth as a moron were a bevy of leftist high school teachers who I now believe were motivated largely by similar emotions. I wanted my mother to be wrong about how her generation had set-up the governance of this nation and about any and all other issues that I could find fault with. Set against this misplaced angst was my lifelong desire to join the military. These days this would be a larger seeming mismatch but I wrote it off back then by simply thinking to myself “Well the Army is really a Socialist organization anyway so it will be good for me....”. I was correct about the Army's underlying Socialist nature but wrong about pretty much everything else I was rebelling against at the time.
"A Socialist system would be able to run efficiently if only it was not being actively stifled by an outside power." This was what I was fed by a couple of teachers who firmly believed that the widespread failure of every Communist government in the world (barring Vietnam and to a lesser extent China) was due to the U.S. And it's “puppet's” interference with the grand beauty that was Marxism. Thusly the Army was going to be my Utopia since it had virtually no outside forces arrayed against it. Right?
Putting the theory to the test I took the ASVAB (Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery) tests and scored very very highly. This of course simply furthered my belief in my own intellectual superiority and the implied rightness of my bizarre ideology. I decided that the Air Force would be a great idea for someone of my refined intelligence (Oy, was I an insufferable prick then (no commentary from the peanut gallery here)) but the Air Force recruiter couldn't have cared less whether he enlisted anyone or not. His lack of interest coupled with the whisperings of the Army recruiter next door about the Air Force's lack of machismo, crap uniforms, and their unwillingness to guarantee me the job I wanted swayed from the Blue to the Green.
Mother Green's recruiters were all infantry soldiers who were extremely interested in their prospective enlistees especially those of us who scored in the 95th or higher percentile on the ASVAB tests. There were two of us as it happened (this was a major rarity in rural Minnesota since for the most part the children of blue-staters who score highly were actively discouraged by their parents from any military adventuring) and the recruiting station was abuzz with the good news. Both of us seemed like sure things since my desire to leave MN was writ large across my mullet-laden brow and the other candidate was from a retired military family.
The recruiter arranged to take both of us down to the MEPS (Military Entrance Processing Station) in Minneapolis for further testing and processing during the start of Christmas break in November 1991 (I was still 17 and in high school at this point but I would turn 18 the very day before we went to the MEPS). The recruiter took us to a hotel near the MEPS, booked us rooms, and then simply left us with instruction to be in the lobby very early the next morning. This one instance was what sold most recruits on the Army. After all we were still kids but here we were being treated like adults with hotel rooms of our own and no supervision whatsoever! Pretty shrewd tactic really.
Part 2 to follow
