semperfried76 is the last hope for humanity.
Too bad he hates you all.
Attending the ball isn’t mandatory. Yeah right, and forty-eight straight hours of barracks duty is an acceptable alternative to two days off during the work-week.
“I don’t have a ride.”
“You better find one.”
“Hey, Prislac, you can ride with us to the ball.”
“Thanks loads, Hopper.”
Hopper was a grunt, but had been FAPP’ed out to us from TOW platoon. He’d be riding with Raye and Keaton, who were both grunts from Scout platoon. I had hung out with these guys before, and decided it was better than being assigned a ride with someone from Maintenance Platoon. The morning of the ball, I met him and his compadres downstairs at the barracks, and after loading our bags full with our dress uniforms and plenty of booze, we piled into the Blue Beast, an old beater Chevy Celebrity station wagon. I doubted the poor old thing would even make the trip out of town, much less Laughlin, which was where the ball was being held. They assured me that we were getting a rental car, greatly setting my mind at ease.
After picking up the rental, I found myself falling asleep in the back of the Blue beast, sulking about being forced to attend what seemed to me as being an overblown high-school prom. Hell, I didn’t even go to the prom when I was in high-school, opting instead to go with some friends to see “The Crow” at the movie theater across the street from my school.
I was woken by the sound of the car door opening, and the vision that greeted my half-dreaming eyes made me think I was in heaven.
“Hi, you must be Ed.” said the vision.
Is this for me? My mind raced to find a possibility for this to be true, maybe this gorgeous redhead is another Marine? No, 1st Tank Battalion doesn’t have any women, and never will, if the command has any say in the matter. One of the guy’s sister? Get real, none of them are from anywhere near here. My hopes were dashed as my brain fully woke up and I realized who this beauty was.
“You’re Keaton’s girlfriend?”
“Name’s Katt,” she said, “Pleased to meetcha.”
It puzzled me to no end how this girl could be Keaton’s squeeze. Sure, he was a Marine, and a grunt, but the guy was tall and lanky, wore thick glasses and had a face marked with the conspicuous absence of a chin. Leaving aside his appearance, he, hopper and Raye also watched way more anime than even I can stand, and played D&D and Magic the Gathering in their spare time, which was all the time they weren’t in the field. I decided not to dwell on it, these guys were my buddies, no matter how dorky they were, and I didn’t need to complicate things by coveting a buddy’s girl. With that in mind, I crawled into the passenger seat of the rental and tried to go back to sleep. It’s a long drive from Twentynine Palms to Laughlin, though.
“Hey.”
I felt something poking my head.
“Hey.”
There it was again, the poking. I started to wake, and opened one eye.
“Hey.”
Once again with the poking, this time, in my eye.
I’m completely awake at that point.
“You don’t talk much, do you?” Katt was the one who’d been poking me. She’d grown tired of chatting with Hopper and Raye in the back seat, and Keaton was intent on watching the road, so she turned her attentions to me.
“I really don’t have that much to say. I didn’t even want to come, to tell you the truth.”
“Why Not?” she asked.
“Because I don’t care for dances and I hate people.” Okay, maybe I was a little bit bitter.
“Oh,” she said, “I heard that the ball was supposed to be more of a big, drunken party.”
“Five-hundred drunken Marines in a casino? Sounds more like a riot to me.” I was kind of a self-hating Marine at that point. I didn’t mention it to Katt, but I was a hairs-breadth away from giving up on the Corps at that point, and planning on consuming as many of the substances the Marine Corps said I couldn’t on my next leave, hoping that I would pop on a piss-test and get myself discharged. What I did tell her was the story of how I got myself into what I believed to be the biggest mess of my life.
A year and a half earlier, I was earning a pitiful wage as a soda jerk at a fifties-retro diner, who smoked more than his whole block’s share of pot in his spare time. Four years before that, I had been a promising, award-winning artist coming out of high-school, until a failure to secure funds for college forced me to re-evaluate my career plans. Flash forward to the soda jerk years, and I was still re-evaluating my career, and not really getting anywhere. I was smoking weed with my uncle and one of his friends one day, when they decided to join the army.
“You bastard, if you join the army, where the fuck am I gonna go? I can’t afford to pay the whole rent on this place by myself! Well, hoss, fuck it, never mind, and pass that joint over here, would you?”
We spoke no more of it. I had run out of options, so decided to check out the army myself. My uncle and his friend, had already been in contact with the recruiter, and told me where to find him. When I got to the recruiting station, he was out to lunch, and I was greeted instead by a Marine sergeant in his Dress Bravos.
“Where do I go to join the Army?” I asked him.
“Down that hall”, he motioned, “and to the right.”
I looked in the direction he had motioned, at the shingle hanging on the door with the words “Marine Corps” proudly painted on it in crimson and gold. The guy either had serious balls, or thought I wasn’t bright enough to tell the difference. I decided to find out which.
“Uh, that says Marine Corps on it. I’m here to join the Army.”
This made him smile.
“No you’re not.”
Balls it is.
Maybe it was his salesmanship techniques (although I waived the whole “intangibles” keychain speech, as well as the whole speech about pay and benefits), or maybe it was some sort of weird Jedi mind-trick, but I signed up that day.
My uncle and his friend wussed out, and never did join the Army.
I told Katt all this during the course of our conversation, and I think she found it a hell of a lot funnier than I had intended it to be. For some reason, that actually made me feel better about being forced to make this trip. She had a killer smile, the kind that infects everyone close enough to see it, and sure enough, the longer I talked to her, the more I was smiling too.