My brother Mike, a Navy veteran, and myself, an Army veteran, were thinking the other day about souvenirs we saved to remember our military service; the ones we kept, and the ones we lost and wished we still had.
Mike was moaning about the loss of a pair of Arctic shooting gloves he once had because, obviously, they were something he needed in his everyday life as a hunter/outdoorsman.
They were like big mittens, but with a trigger finger.
We both still had plenty of stuff from our tours in the military. Boxes of old uniforms, a pair of jungle boots, a few ammo cans; the sort of stuff that’s useful in filling up empty spots in a garage or storage unit.
Nothing really useful, I thought when I was searching for something truly useful in the kitchen drawer — my old P-38, the little can-opener that came inside each box of C-rations.
The list of things you want to keep from your military service is quite different than the things that actually come home with you.
I had an Army folding cot in the garage for years — it might still be in there — and I can’t recall now what I was thinking when I threw it in with all the other worldly possessions a 22-year-old had when my hitch ended and the civilian movers came to my barracks room to box up my stuff and send it home. Maybe I’ll use it camping, I must have thought back then, though the thing must have weighed close to 50 pounds and it wasn’t much more comfortable than just sleeping on the ground.
One of the things I wish I still had from my Army stint was the group photo that was taken during basic training. At about the halfway point, after a day at the range shooting at pop-up targets with our M16s, we were marched over to a set of bleachers, put on our soft caps, and had our group photo taken.
Full-color copies, the photographer said, would be available the week before graduation at the special military discount rate of $20 each. Cash only, please pay now. Twenty dollars? That’s probably why they took our rifles away from us before the photo was taken.
Of course, I coughed up the $20. Though I was only 18 at the time, I could imagine the day many years from then, when I would be a general or a top executive with the Ford Motor Company, and the basic training group photo would be hanging on my office wall, next to a framed box of medals I would surely earn in later exploits.
The names of my fellow basic training soldiers I would forget, but I would remember them in some way, anyway, with a photo.
There’s the guy who got us all in trouble after he mooned a drill sergeant from another company from the top-floor window of our barracks and we spent the whole night doing pushups on the parade ground.
There’s the guy whose grandfather drew “Dennis the Menace.” There’s the guy who had to apologize to a rock for 15 minutes after the drill sergeant saw him trip over one.
Of all the memories I have of military service, some of the funniest and the oddest ones were from the first weeks of basic training.
It started from the very beginning, before our buzz cuts or the first obscenity-filled shouts of the drill sergeants. When the bus pulled inside the gates of the main post, we were pulled off as a sergeant pointed out the “Amnesty Box.”
You got a knife, a gun? Put it in the Amnesty Box, he said, no questions asked.
“People brought their own weapons to basic?” I wondered. “I thought they were going to give us those.”
Also that first week, the recruits were lined up for “police call.” “Wow.” I thought. “Someone’s going to get arrested!”
We then spent the next 20 minutes picking up small bits of paper, cigarette butts and other litter. I didn’t see a policeman anywhere. And so it went, until that last week at the end of basic that was a breeze. The drill sergeants had pretty much stopped screaming at us. We cleaned the barracks or practiced marching for the graduation ceremony.
A box arrived with the large envelopes holding the group photos, and they were passed out to the sentimentalists among us. A few minutes later, we heard the doom-filled shout from our drill sergeant, who was sitting in his little office at one end of the barracks.
“Bravo Company!” he screamed. “You have two minutes to give me one of those photos!”
Two soldiers, myself and another guy, grudgingly ran to the end of the building, photos in hand. We went through the door at the same time and almost did a Three Stooges pileup in the doorway. Arms extended, we both held out our big white envelopes.
The drill sergeant snatched the one out of my hand.
He sat back in his chair, opened one end of the envelope, and pulled out the photo. He stared at it silently for a minute that lasted forever.Then he leaned forward and set it on his desk. He grabbed a magic marker and blackened out the face of a soldier in the front row who had washed out of boot camp.
He tacked the photo on his office wall, then spun around to see two soldiers still standing there, slack-jawed.
“You don’t cut the mustard, you don’t go on the sandwich,” he said.
Brian Kelly is an Army veteran who served with the 1st Infantry Division overseas and with units in the Army’s Special Operations Command at Fort Bragg, N.C.
Kelly is editor of the Bainbridge Island Review.