They had a name for it in boot camp, but I can’t remember what. They filled a pillow case with government-issued bars of white soap and ganged up on a guy while he slept. A couple of them used a blanket to strap the screw-up down to his bunk by pulling down on either side while another covered his mouth, then they took turns beating his bare stomach with the bag of hard bricks of soap. Oh yeah, they called it a “blanket party.”
You can see a pretty good representation of this crazy ritual in the movie Full Metal Jacket.
I watched from a couple bunks away. The whole company wasn’t in on it, just a core group that completed the brainwashing process early. I suppose I did my part by not helping the guy. (Although that changed when they came after my buddy, Oliver, but that’s another story). I can’t remember what the guy even did to warrant the beating. Maybe I didn’t know at the time. I knew I had gotten out of step plenty of times marching myself … I kept my mouth shut.
You could hear the guy whimpering in the dark afterward, trying not to make a sound.
Our Company Commander, “Big Black Mama,” said he wasn’t like other Company Commanders. We lucked out. We would win the flags. We would win all the flags. We would be a Brigade Company because we would get up earlier, sleep less, run harder, march more, take less time to eat or take breaks, and do way more pushups than the other companies—or “by God” one by one—we’d get “setback.”
Big Black Mama told us the war was “cold,” and said that just meant more people were dying, rather than when the war is hot and you let newspaper people report about the killing. The war was cold, and if you wanted to survive you would have to get used to the chill. Cold showers, he said, would cool off our peckers until we could fuck us some flip chicks we’d pick up from the Navy Club or somewhere in “town.”
If you got setback that meant you had to redo two more weeks of boot camp, two more weeks no beer or our promised Filipina pussy. I fell into step. I did the pushups while they screamed in my face and the hot August asphalt of the “grinder” burned all the skin from my palms, rearranging my life line forever. I could feel the wash settle over my brain and reach on down for my spinal cord. I was G.I. Joe, the Sea Adventurer version. Seventeen and wouldn’t turn eighteen until I sailed out with the fleet, I didn’t want extra camp time. I ate the cornflakes at 4 a.m. and dreamed of a blonde I wouldn’t meet for thirteen years.
But my friend, Jojo, he said boot camp wasn’t so bad for him. He had a reasonable Company Commander and they even got to have the occasional smoke & coke break.
The Fleet, well, that was another story. The war was cold and when people died it happened, usually, on accident. Accidents happened all the time. No big deal.
After getting discharged for a while and having time to think it all over, Jojo put a .45 caliber handgun (the weapon of choice in the United States Navy) and blew his head clean off.
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