Flashback, um, Thursday
Finally getting 'round to cleaning up the categories -- and remind me to email Michelle about adding pages for the archives -- and decided to create one for the Military-Industrial Simplex. Mind you, haven't written about that stuff lately. . .
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I should probably explain some of the terms and concepts mentioned elsewhere on the page.
MRE supposedly stands for Meal, Ready to Eat. A number of other possible explanations exist. The best ones had packages of dehydrated peaches, which in theory could be placed in a dish of water and would expand into something almost, but not totally unlike, peaches. Since we were in the middle of the fucking desert, I never had an opportunity to see if this was true.
Seabees occupy a unique position in the military. Part of the Navy, they're a land-based force who do construction work for the Marines. This is because. . . well, have you ever talked to any of Uncle Sam's Misguided Children? There's a reason their equipment is at the level of an instant camera, just aim and shoot.
This often caused problems procuring materials, which leads to our next vocabulary word, cumshaw. This is best illustrated with a brief dialog:
Seabees: We need concrete.
Marines: You're not in our budget. Talk to the Navy.
Seabees: We need concrete.
Navy: If it's for a Corps project, talk to them.
Seabees: Do you guys have any concrete?
Air Force base guard: Yeah. Why?
Seabees: Merely engaging in conversation, fellow soldier! Say, isn't that Saddam Hussein over there?
Air Force base guard: What? Where? (runs off)
Seabees: All too easy. Hey, they got generators!
Mind you, this did sometimes lead to awkward situations.
Marines: Wow, you guys do good work. But how do you always end up with more material at the end of a project than when you started?
Seabees: . . . the little baby Jesus.
Remember, if the material belongs to the military, and you're in the military, how is that theft? Besides, if they really wanted the stuff, they'd use a higher-gauge wire in the fences.
There are some other weird words and concepts that other services use, like "chain of command", "regulation haircut", "regulation sunglasses", and "flagrant disregard for a superior officer", but I never learned what any of those meant.
Typical Monday at base:
Chief: Okay, Hawkins. I need you to do preventative maintenance on all the bunkers. It's a 16-hour job for a two-man crew, but we're short-handed, so you'll have to do it alone. I don't want to see your ass back in here until Friday.
Me: Dude, that'll take like two hours, tops. I'll be back before lunch.
Chief: Perhaps I was unclear. Your ass, back here, until Friday, not see.
Me: . . . I might have to work through the weekend too, chief
Chief: In that case, make it next Wednesday.
Note to visitors from af.mil: Eheh. I'm kidding. I also state for the record that I have no idea where any shipments of copper pipe, rebar, concrete, electrical generators or Christmas turkeys which may have gone missing during Operations Desert Shield or Desert Storm might have ended up. We loved you guys. Really. Especially when you managed to read the maps right, and actually bombed the enemy.
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. . . on advice of my attorneys.
Comments
As an army brat, MREs are the stuff of childhood nostalgia for me. My dad would bring them home from some field exercise and my sister and I would have a picnic (outside or in an indoor tent/fort made of pillows and stuff) and eat the "cheese food" that comes in the shoe polish container or our favorite, the fruitcake. Though we never ate any meat out of an MRE, which may be why my memories are fond. No creamed chipped beef for us, no sir.
Posted by: susan | March 11, 2004 9:36 AM
Dad was USAF, so it cracks me up now to see what other branches of the Armed Forces thought of us. Them. You know what I mean.
We had some MREs lying around the house too -- Mom bought them as part of a panic over the supposedly impending New Madrid earthquake (that might take too long to explain here). No one ever worked up the nerve to actually pop one open, though.
Posted by: Karin | March 11, 2004 9:53 AM
Susan, I don't think anyone ever studied the effects of eating those things on children.
Hell, I'm not sure the effect of eating them on humans generally was ever really considered.
Karin, I was in Shampoo-Banana during the New Madrid scare, if I remember right. Where were you?
And those MREs are still good, you know.
Well, as good as they ever were.
Posted by: Aaron | March 11, 2004 10:07 AM
Scott AFB, near St. Louis (which I liked to think of as Cornfield Hell), attending what would turn out to be the second of three high schools. It was not a good year.
I still keep one of the first-aid kits that Mom bought in my glovebox; the fact that it contained a needle came in really handy when I got some splinters in my arm away from home. Not sure what happened to the MREs, though. Mom probably tossed them when we moved.
They'll probably be taking up some corner of some landfill when the cockroaches inherit the earth.
Posted by: Karin | March 11, 2004 10:41 AM
you have attorneys? plural??
you remind me of my next door neighbor some times. you don't own a fishing boat, do you?
the guy who built my house in 1941 was one of you guys, i think. except he was a member of the heritage foundation, who still keep sending mail to him even though he's long dead...
it's good to know we have people who can build stuff as well as blow stuff up.
Posted by: r@d@r | March 12, 2004 12:11 AM