Drink Piss then Kiss

            “That’s the biggest, hairiest, most colorful caterpillar we could find,” Williams said.

            “Alright, get the pot up to 50 bucks and I’ll eat it,” JT promised.

            “All we got is 15.”

            “Close enough.”

            A few of us had finished our land navigation early and decided to gather at the top of a moss-covered hill near Fort Knox, Kentucky during basic training to hide from those scary drill sergeants, or drills.  JT grabbed the juicy critter and held it in suspense over his mouth as his head tilted back.  None of us had seen entertainment like this since Private Soress rubbed Icy-Hot on his balls for $12.  Basic training drove us to such extremes to pass time between getting smoked by the drills.

            “No, no, no!  Oh shit, ew, ew, ewwww!” we all gasped.

            JT smiled, chewed and swallowed what hoped to become a butterfly, but those dreams were cut short thanks to a bunch of bored privates.  This boredom killer of a ritual didn’t stop in basic.  It would follow me throughout my entire time in the army.  The only difference was that as privates became soldiers, money didn’t have to be the great motivator.

            Soldiers thought consuming grunt delicacies was another right of passage to becoming a man.  I would find great enjoyment knowing this was a ridiculous theory, but in no way would it stop me from instigating further dereliction from normal food in the intestinal track of other soldiers.

            One such soldier was McClurg.  He was in third platoon of Echo Troop during basic while I was in fourth platoon of the same troop.  Our platoons shared a hallway in the barracks and did a lot of training together.  Although we didn’t formally meet until our first duty station at Fort Lewis, Washington, I was able to observe his unique character from a distance throughout basic.  McClurg was the type of guy that you didn’t want messing with you, but holy shit it was a riot to see him mess with other people.

            McClurg was tall, hefty, skinny armed much like myself, white, dark haired and what he didn’t posses in physical attributes he made up for in being quick witted.  He also had a larger than average head with abnormal growths, because he was dealing with Gorlin syndrome.  Gorlin syndrome causes tumors to grow on the body that can be either cancerous or benign.  Either way, these tumors are painful.  McClurg dealt with it the best he could and often joked about his big head to make people laugh.  On the rare occasion McClurg got under my skin I would just tuck my hands up by my armpits and stagger clumsily like a Tyrannosaurus Rex as if to suggest my head was tough to balance.  Yes, if you want to maintain respect amongst your peers while serving in combat arms you have to be twice as brutal as the soldier that crosses your path.

            McClurg was a constant source of entertainment in basic.  If he wasn’t poking fun at somebody, he was questioning whether or not the drills were allowed to smoke us.  To smoke someone is the privilege of a higher-ranking person to exhaust a lower ranking person thru physical exercise or by making them hold a humiliating position. 

One such position is known as the “monkey fucker” in which a soldier bends over, reaches between his legs and wraps his hands around each Achilles tendon.  While holding on to his Achilles that soldier would repeatedly squat up and down to make his quads burn.  To add a little more humiliation the higher-ranking soldier would tell another soldier to stand behind the guy doing monkey fuckers.  The soldier in the rear would then be told to do the “hip rotation!”  That entails the rear soldier to put his hands on his own hips, feet shoulder length apart for good balance and then make a circular motion with his hips.  Yep, that’s two soldiers doing soft-core porn in front of a lot of people.  Sexy.

            With humiliation and pain like that well known to all of us if we misbehaved, I believed McClurg to be ballsy for breaking out regulation and telling the drills if something seemed out of line.  This infuriated the drills though, so they took shots at him whenever they could.  One such shot was during a class on how to properly apply camouflage face paint.

            “McClurg!  Eh private, you gonna just use the bright green paint,” said a drill.

            “Yes, drill sergeant,” McClurg said while staring down the drill.

            In the summer of 2004 while we were in basic, the Shrek movies were still very popular.  Can you already see where this is going?  With nothing but bright green paint on his face, an abnormally shaped noggin and a snaggle-tooth on his under bite, McClurg was dubbed “Shrek.”  Even he laughed.  McClurg was a good sport about it and turned it into a part of him.  A new character if you will.

            With his new persona, Shrek trekked to Fort Lewis and went off to war.  At F.O.B. Falcon in southern Baghdad a mortar attack came in while we had some down time in our old Iraqi barracks and the dirty little bastards hit the jackpot.  One of the rounds landed in our ammo point, exploded and set off a large portion of our ammunition.  Falcon went into self-destruction mode all over the news and we had to hunker down to hide from our own ammo.   Throughout the night, for several hours, munitions flew at us and exploded.  Some of the bigger rounds flew thru other barrack’s walls as soldiers ran for dear life.  What did my platoon do?  We gathered in the hallway to make bets.

            With our helmets on and the chinstraps not connected we cheered at every explosion like kids at a Fourth of July show, only we didn’t care that at any second a large artillery round could smash thru the wall, detonate and send us off to the after life.  I walked into the hall and some of the guys were already trying to collect money for Shrek to drink his own piss.  Since the latrines were a far walk we pissed in empty water bottles.  Shrek was holding one of his piss bottles filled about a third of the way.  We negotiated to give up a shameful amount of money for him to down it all.  Game on.  With explosions all around and life possibly ending soon, Shrek saved our minds from fear.

            “No, no, no!  Oh shit, ew, ew, ewwww!” we all gasped.

            Seem familiar?  Down it went.  Only Shrek would take it up a level.  He only took one break then killed the rest of it and grimaced for a moment.  Shrek even held it down after a disturbing belch next to a trashcan.  We all reacted like we were the stars of a Harlem Shake video.  Shrek then lifted his head up, stood high, smiled, looked to his right and laid a big ole fat, piss infested kiss on the left cheek of one of our Iraqi interpreters, A.K.  Then we commenced with Harlem Shake overdrive.

            “Ohhhhhh!” we all yelled as we jumped like crazy.

            A.K. was disgusted and I felt kinda bad at first, but A.K. would later betray us by sending phone messages to a town we had to invade.  The militia in that town set up several IED’s and fighting positions in reaction to A.K.’s messages and a lot of us almost got killed.  A.K. wasn’t even executed for his treasonous act.  He was simply fired and let go.  Man, now I wish Shrek had gone even further and face raped A.K. with his piss-drenched tongue.