Garry Owens in the Mist

Note: This is a work of (mostly) fiction, intended to amuse more than offend. Nevertheless, if you find yourself angered by the tale, the author’s name and address are: Pogue Mahones, 1060 West Addison Street, Chicago, IL 60613

Garry Owens in the Mist

By Pogue Mahones, Esq.

Within the U.S. military there exists a special creature.  This creature, in its natural habitat, can often be found in isolated areas with nominal support.  This isolation from the larger force, combined with a few centuries of evolution, has resulted in the multi-wheeled conundrum that is the Cavalry Scout.

If one referred to the cavalry scout as the duck-billed platypus of the armed forces, one would not be incorrect.  Simultaneously, if one referred to the cavalry scout as the Jersey Shore of the armed forces, one would again not be incorrect.  If one now has the mental image of a duck-billed ball of steroids wearing a gold chain and a sleeveless TAPOUT shirt, one would be on the right track.

As a non-cavalry member of a cavalry squadron, I had the unique experience of being able to observe the scouts from within their ranks, like a camouflage version of Gorillas in the Mist.  What follows is my report from within the belly of the beast.

Observations from Within

In the early years of the war in Iraq, I found myself being dispatched to the strange and mystical world of the Cavalry unit, something that most of my kind had only read about in books.  According to legend, the CAV scout was a shadowy entity that would only leave its well-armored dwellings for three things: alcohol, females, and fights.  Once they had ravaged an area, they would gather back into their metal beasts and speed off into the night, seeking the next spot to plunder.  My orders were simple: study the Cavalry as much as possible and try to identify the source of their power.

The combination of my mission into this mysterious world and my own lack of combat experience made it necessary to blend into their population in order to study them as thoroughly as possible.  To mask my scent, I covered myself in hair gel and axe body spray.  I replaced my spectacles with contact lenses and redacted any polysyllabic words from my verbal repertoire.  My disguise was so successful that I was gifted a ceremonial headdress by a tribal elder who I assume was either their chief or medicine man. 

Before too long, I had become familiar enough to understand the rudimentary language and could even duplicate the brutish ululations that passed as greetings for them.  After becoming accepted among their ranks, the shaman of the tribe even gifted me with a name: Dances with Pogues. 

As any scientist worth their weight would be duty-bound to do, I felt it necessary to document my studies.  Carrying my trusty journal wherever our path led us, I assembled copious notes to document the life of the CAV scout.  During my studies, I learned a great deal about the scout’s lifecycle, their environmental adaptations, and what appeared to be the beginnings of a rudimentary culture. These characteristics were vitally needed in order to understand the scouts, and to effectively communicate with them; but I found myself transfixed upon one specific trait that stood out among the others.

When you take a scout out of his natural habitat and remove the urgency of hostile fire or requirements for reconnaissance from his immediate purview, an interesting change takes place.  The scout leverages his highly-evolved skills of innovation in ways that few rational beings could ever understand.  For example:

If you were to provide a bored scout with a simple plastic frisbee, 
how would you guess he might entertain himself? 
 
Would you guess that he would urinate into the frisbee, 
stick it in a freezer, 
wait for the contents to freeze, 
pop out the frozen disk of piss,
and sling the yellow hockey puck under the 
door of his best friend’s barracks room,
shattering it into a million fragments of 
Red Bull-scented piss puddles?

With the exception of certain populations of Marines (you know who you are), no creature on Earth can compete with the bored CAV scout in the arena of The Shenanigan.  One-part MacGuyver and fourteen parts www.worldstarhiphop.com, the unemployed scout uses his preternatural abilities to spread hilarity and/or disgust wherever he may roam.   You really don’t want to know what they can come up with when they have to poop.

While it may seem strange to correlate mental health with the sort of mind that would think to fill a truck bed with a pallet of birdseed in order to smite the vehicle of an infantry soldier that parked in the wrong place, the shenanigans I observed during my study abroad illustrated an interesting facet of mental resilience that can often be overlooked. 

 A current theory regarding combat-related PTSD treatment is to combine therapy and/or medication with challenging physical activity.  While these can and are often beneficial, I have come to realize there is another tool in our arsenal: the incredible stress purge that comes from shenaningans.

To demonstrate this point, I have included a journal entry from my expedition into the heart of darkness:

An Excerpt from: The Collected Works of Pogue Mahones, Esquire

--Winter, 2004:

I find myself torn between two worlds.  The world I left only a few months seems so distant and meaningless after witnessing the pain, the loss, and the complete, abject fuckery that exists in the combat theater.  I cannot say what the future may hold, but I know that here, in this moment, I am breathing the rarefied air of what will hopefully be the last air breathed within this barren hellscape.  This week we began redeployment operations, the necessary preparations for beginning our long journey home.

Watching my new brothers recover from their long and arduous journey has been nothing short of incredible.  The discipline and hardiness they show while recovering their sun-bleached and bloodied equipment belies the unbearable sadness in their eyes.  We lose ourselves in our work, so much so that all of our required tasks for the next fortnight have been completed, leaving the scouts around me with little to do but ponder the meaning of the previous year.

The scouts seemed content to embrace existentialism for approximately two and one-half seconds, when the one called McSweeney determined an alternative means of entertainment.

“Who wants to make MRE bombs?” McSweeney said to all of us and none of us at the same time.

The Meal, Ready-to-Eat is the main source of nourishment for the CAV scout.  Inside of every MRE, there lies a mysterious pouch that heats up when filled with water.  The MRE heater is an amazing invention that has the ability to make cold cat food taste like warm cat food, dramatically raising the spirits of those surviving on the cat food.  Few of the scouts in our group have had the time during our missions to use the MRE heaters over the past year, but they have maintained an impressive stockpile of the unused heaters apparently for this very moment.

An interesting additional use of the MRE heater is that when combined with a larger about of water and placed in an airtight container, the heater creates a moderately loud and (mostly) harmless explosion.  To my chagrin, the cavalry had adopted a few variations to this concept: following the logic that the MRE heater works with water, and it explodes if you put it in a bottle, the scouts further hypothesized that human urine is basically water and should therefore have an equivocal result.   

I fear that my words will do no justice in describing the ensuing scene.  The mastery displayed by the scouts on that day will stay with me to the end of my days.  You must give the scouts credit: even though they were shenaniganing, their every movement was consistent with the military tactics and strategy they had mastered over the years.  They set up tactically perfect ambushes throughout the area, used cover and concealment to disguise their ingress and egress routes, and even had a reserve force they used to distract their unwitting victims.

— Imagine you have just spent a year at war, in the burning desert wasteland of Iraq.  You are less than a week from being back in the world, beer in hand and surrounded by loved ones.  This is your only thought as you walk to your hooch.  You can almost smell a steak sizzling on the grill. 

Suddenly you hear the blood-curdling scream of a cavalryman that thinks he has coined the cleverest term in human history:

“PISS-COMING!!!”

A liter-sized water bottle filled with what appears to be lemonade rolls slowly in front of you, almost in slow-motion.  Your human brain tries to comprehend what the hell is happening; but your lizard brain senses danger and kicks you into action.  You hit the deck as the bomb erupts in a cloud of yellow smoke.  You don’t smell steak anymore.

I was certain that this unprovoked assault would instantly devolve into close-quarters hand-to-hand combat among the troops, but the scout that had just walked into a PBIED (Piss-Bottle Improvised Explosive Device) simply licked his lips, stared at his attackers with cold, dead eyes and said, “Game on, motherfuckers.”

Approximately every one-hundred feet around our domiciles was a pallet stacked with similar water bottles, for hydration is key in the desert.  This had not been a problem for almost an entire year.  Almost.

 I can only describe the next few hours as this: the lyrics of The Star-Spangled Banner, but with bodily fluids.  At one point, the massive mountain of a scout that I have taken to call ‘Fridge’ threw open the doors of his dwelling, his arms filled with two crates full of apparently-stockpiled urine bottles.  At the sight of such firepower, the combatant teams declared a truce in order to create a daisy-chained mammoth of a micturition dénouement.

Shenanigan Week

This day would mark the beginning of what became known as shenanigan week: a five-day release of stress, anxiety, fear, loss, and yes, a bit of piss. 

A few other highlights:

• Headbutting a hole into a plastic table, then sticking your head through it and chasing people while screaming “Here’s Johnny!”
• Freezing cans of shaving cream, then cutting them open and hiding the frozen foam cylinders in showers (give it a try, once the shower gets steamy, it’s an amazing event)
• A Tabasco sauce chugging competition, followed by a screaming on the toilet competition
• Duct-taping plastic furniture into “cars” and holding a demolition derby

Now, any officer or senior enlisted official in their right mind would say that this sounds horrific, like a breakdown of good order and discipline, a complete degradation of decorum.  Every one of them would be completely correct.

It was chaos.  It was anarchy.  And it was the most liberating and memorable mental rejuvenation I have ever witnessed.  Those few days of pandemonium allowed people to almost instantly vent out a year’s worth of horrible shit that had been building up. 

No combat unit coming home from a deployment manages to complete the redeployment phase (the first few months back in “the world”) unscathed.  There are DUIs, domestic issues, suicides, and a whole host of possible issues that arise when soldiers try to re-acclimate to civilization.  While I don’t have any data to back it up, I am certain that the participants of Shenanigans Week had gotten enough out of their system prior to coming home that they enjoyed a higher resiliency and lower incident rate than those who bottled all that pain up inside themselves.  Whether this is true or not, it would make for one hell of a medical study.

Looking back on my excursion into the wilds of Fiddler’s Green, I can remember some very hard times.  I can remember brothers that we lost both in and out of combat, dealing with horrible situations, and helping others rebuild their torn apart lives.  I came to understand the role of shenanigans there and am now beginning to realize how much those few short days gave us the mental leeway to begin the decompression necessary for leaving combat.