Wow, the army was stupid. But at least I learned my way around the bush...
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This is not me. Maybe. Photo by Pavel Yakhant on Unsplash
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Ft. Bliss, Texas, sits at the foot of the Franklin mountain range in the little corner of Texas just north of old Mexico but just south of New Mexico. It was basically Mexico.
This was the desert. After growing up in Pennsylvania, this climate was a bit of a shock. The desert heat was sweltering. Summer days were regularly near 100°F (or neat 40°C for you smart-ass metric folks). People would say, “Oh, but it’s a dry heat.” Fuck right off; it was hot. (This semicolon brought to you by Carl’s Junior.)
I was in the army band. They don’t have a band at Ft. Bliss anymore, and I swear I had almost nothing to do with it. I hated and loved my job. It was one of the only places in the world where being a paid musician was an option for a career, and you didn’t have to be that good. The truth is that many of us were pretty good musicians, but it’s almost impossible to make a living playing music in the private sector. It’s kind of like the number of kids that go from high school sports to the pros. We were band nerds who couldn’t give it up.
When we weren’t playing music they made us play soldier, which was really one of the dumbest things you can imagine. They still made us go through boot camp, we still had to go through the gas chamber and learn to shoot and clean weapons and spit-shine our boots and road march with heavy rucksacks and stuff.
Band geeks in camo with guns. Who thought that was a good idea?
Nobody, that’s who. After basic training they took our guns and replaced them with instruments of sonic destruction, and even gave us foam helmets that looked just like the heavy Kevlar helmets everyone else wore. Though to be fair we did more marching and ceremonies than any other unit. Like, ever.
When we got to our permanent assignment things were a little better. The band was only about 40 people, and we did everything together. We worked, lived, ate, played, and, of course, slept together. Occasionally, anyway. Like Harold Ramis in Stripes — I was not homosexual, but I was willing to learn.
We would work out at 6am, go shower, then go rehearse in various ensembles, then go home and hang out and drink or party. It was a pretty easy gig in spite of the army stuff now and then.
The army got their pound of flesh out of us by using us for other things when we weren't playing for ceremonies or dinners for the general. We did recruiting work and community relations and worked with the local school kids in music. It was actually pretty fun. But once in a while they’d do a “base run,” where sometimes we’d have to run with the rest of the soldiers, and other times we’d have to play fight songs and stuff.
Do you know how embarrassing it was to watch everyone run by as we honked away at Eye Of The Tiger? Yeah.
Periodically we were forced to do manual labor around the base. As I said above, this was the desert. Cactus and tumbleweed and sand. Lots of sand. And there were large swaths of it on base that were largely ignored or abandoned, but the helpless little weeds that could barely survive would bother some asshole officer now and then. They’d send us out with weedwhackers or propane torches to kill the last shreds of life in those barren fields.
‘Twere also, coincidentally, the fields in which I grew my fucks. Lay thine eyes upon them and see that they remain barren…
Once in a while all the weedwhackers would somehow all break at the same time break and they’d all have to go out for repair. I know, it was a damn shame. But the generals caught onto us and decided to pick one person from every unit on base and teach them to be the Bush Hog.
Now, I had my share of girlfriends in my day, but nobody had ever called me that before.
Guess who had two thumbs and got tagged to learn to drive this vehicle of botanical destruction?
This guy.
A couple weeks later I went to a room on base that looked like every other drab room on an army fort. Several of us took a class on safety and other useless nonsense before they took us outside and strapped us into one of the big-ass tractors. We took turns driving in big circles in the dirt field before they showed us how to lower and run the oversized mower deck. This was the feature that would murder all life as we know it.
After my warmup lap I fired it up and off we went. This was it. I was not exactly jumping off the deck and shoving it into overdrive as Kenny Loggins had convinced me some years earlier, but I was doing, uh, something. I pulled some levers. Noise was made. Some things happened. I drove around and said “oops” and “shit” a lot. The whole thing lasted less than five minutes and my instructor told me to stop the tractor and get out. He said they’d call when it was my turn.
They never called me.
Once a month, though, I was on the schedule board and released from regular duties in case they needed me to go hog that bush. I was willing and almost able, but it never did happen. The people in my unit sure wrote a nice song creatively entitled “Bush Hog,” and they sang it every time the phone rang.
Ah, those sure weren’t the days.
