Burn Toppy Burn: Part 1

There was this guy… we’ll call him Birdbrain.

“Alright White platoon, lets see if you’re smarter than a 10 year old,” I said on the net while we were pulling security for engineers late one night.

            Friends and family had mailed a card game during my second deployment that asked questions at an elementary school level.

            “First question; do astronauts travel faster or slower than 18,000 mph while in space?” I asked while imitating a baseball commentator’s voice.

            “That’s easy, way faster,” First Lieutenant (LT) Birdbrain proclaimed.

            “You sure?” asked Courtney.

            “Yeah, astronauts come back from space younger than when they left Earth.”

            “And how is that, sir?”

            “Because they are traveling at the speed of light; way faster than 18,000 mph.”

            Of course the entire truck pretended to laugh at his stupid joke, but then we realized something.  Birdbrain was dead serious!  Then the entire truck legitimately burst into laughter.

            “So, you’re telling me that we have achieved warp speed?” Courtney asked.

            “Well, yeah.  What?”

            "Sir, nothing with mass can travel the speed of light."
            "Yes it can."            
            “Did they teach you that at West Point, sir?”

            “So here’s the next question,” I changed the subject to prevent our heads from exploding in shock.

I came across some real characters during my military time, but rarely did I see this level of turd in a leadership position.  Birdbrain was the highest-ranking person in our platoon and the first word we got about him was that he was a complete failure in all faucets of military training.  Unless "Turd Burglary" was a new subject, because I'm sure he aced that portion.

            “Oh your platoon is getting Birdbrain?” said another LT that graduated from West Point with him.

            “Why do you say it like that?” I asked.

            “Well everyone except for him passed the last set of exercises.”

            “Is he going to be difficult to work with?”

            The LT just smiled and walked away.  Oh boy.  We’re getting ready to deploy in a few months and we’ve got a piece of work in coming.

            “Bet you wish you took that promotion last year, Sergeant Vance, ah-hehehe,” Sergeant First Class (SFC) Ryan stated with a flem-filled throat.

            “Not really, I love being a team leader.”

            “But as the team leader in alpha section, you’re on the LT’s truck.  You get to fix ‘em.”

            “Well… shit, fuck, damn.”

It was a shame we had to switch LT’s so close to deploying.  Our previous one, Jamal Kahn, was outstanding.  He was born in the United Arab Emirates, graduated from Michigan State, average height and build, black hair, brown eyes, great sense of humor and was of the Muslim faith.  Jamal’s humor, thick skin and faith produced non-PC jokes throughout the platoon, which eased tension during a time when some people weren’t very excepting of Muslims.  It also allowed a lot of our guys to ease into a culture many of us were naïve too.  Myself included.  Socially, he was the perfect LT.  If he saw something wrong with a platoon member, he would ask that soldier’s first line supervisor if that was normal behavior.  If it wasn’t, the first line would correct that soldier.  In the field, he was always listening to everyone's ideas before making a final decision himself with certain confidence.  We were proud to follow him.  To say that my second deployment would have been better with Jamal is still a serious understatement.

            “Sergeant Vance, the new LT is here,” SFC Ryan gurgled.

            “Clear your fucking throat,” I whispered to myself.

            “Huh?”

            “On the way, sergeant.”

            I walked into our platoon cage where I saw a kid of average height, thin, pale, brown haired and nervous.

            “Hi guys, I’m Lieutenant Birdbrain.  I just want to start off by saying everyone has said I have an easy job to fill, because I’m walking into a platoon that knows their shit.  That being said, I want you to know that I know I have a lot to learn from you all.  I’m not going to get in your way.  Just do your thing.”

            The next year and a half would make this statement erroneous. 

“What do you think, Vance?” someone asked.

“Seemed like a rehearsed speech and he gives off this… douche bag aura,” I said, “but time will tell.”

During our first field exercise with Birdbrain we were told not to use cell phones by the squadron commander.  Of course, we would use our cells anyway, but Birdnuts took it one step further.  He aimlessly walked out in the open in broad daylight looking like the Verizon guy who always annoyingly asked “Can you hear me now?”  We could see our troop commander staring him down from a few hundred meters away.  They would have a one-sided conversation later on.

Birdbrain would always break little rules like that out in the open, leaving him and our platoon vulnerable to attention from high-ranking people we didn’t want attention from.  In Kuwait he was in charge of organizing conexes full of our equipment.  Equipment needed for war!  Remember that.  A conex is just a big metal container the military uses to transport gear via ships.

“Sergeant Vance, where’s LT?” SFC Ryan frantically asked in the middle of our troop's tent.

“No idea. What’s up?” I asked.

“The squadron XO (executive officer) wants to know why he isn’t present for the arrival of our conexes.”

“SHIT!”

“He won’t answer the radio either.”

Little Birdbrain was off visiting one of his buddies in a completely different unit.  Way to go, jackass.  Do you know who gets blamed for a butter bar being fucked up?  That LT’s platoon.  The XO had some choice words for him though.  While Birdbrain was getting his ass chewed, one of my soldiers approached me with a written letter he found near the LT’s cot.  It was a love letter.  I really wanted exploit it, but told the soldier to put it on the LT’s nasty cot.  Upon his return, Birdbrain was upset with me.

“Sergeant Vance, I don’t appreciate people moving my private letters,” he said.

“Lieutenant, that letter was found on the ground.  A soldier read it to find out whom it belonged to and out of the kindness of his heart placed it on your cot.  If you don’t like people touching your stuff, I recommend you tidy up a bit to avoid this situation,” I said, verbally cold-cocking him in the face.

“Well I don’t think people should be talking about how messy my cot is.  You need to tell me if its messed up, sergeant.”

“So you want me to tell our highest ranking, highest paid, grown-ass man that graduated from West Point how to keep his area clean so people don’t pick on him?”

“If this is a problem I’ll go talk to the platoon sergeant.”

“Let me know how that works out for ya, lieutenant.”

SFC Ryan slapped me on the wrist and asked that I be patient with Birdbrain.  I thought I handled it well.  Birdbrain just didn’t like getting embarrassed by a lowlife enlisted man such as myself.  I just looked at SFC Ryan as if to say, “really?”  Birdbrain saw enlisted fellas as an inferior race.  I don't know what West Point teaches, but I hope its not that officers are any different from enlisted members.

Oh boy, what’s next with this guy?  How about a story surrounding a stuffed animal and softcore porn?  After we headed north into Iraq, we discovered something odd about Birdbrain.  He had a Beanie Baby sized giraffe he named Toppy.  Toppy would go everywhere with Birdbrain.  The reason for this is because his alleged fiancé gave it to him and he wanted to take pictures with high-ranking Iraqi officials and send them to her.  Well, as you can imagine, Birdbrain got sloppy.

The first problem was that he wasn’t very sneaky in the placement of Toppy.  He would walk into meetings with the damn thing sticking out of his cargo pocket for everyone to gawk at in strange curiosity.  Birdbrain would then walk out to the trucks after a meeting grinning.  His grin was so awkward.  Our medic, Meany (that’s his real name, cause he’s awesome) dubbed him “Double Chops” because he would clinch his teeth and open his lips as far as possible, completely exposing all of his teeth.  It was cartoonish in nature.  Both his smile and an exposed Toppy were killing our platoon's well respected reputation.

            The second problem he had was disclosing too much information to a platoon that despised him.  He would always bitch to us about issues with his fiancé.

            “Well we’re from Vegas and she’s going to live there while I’m deployed, but I don’t know why she still has to share a storage unit with her ex-fiancé,” he questioned.

            Maybe because she’s sleeping with him!  I couldn’t say that though.

            “Yeah that’s so weird,” I’d say with a blank stare and innocent smile.

            The dumbass even got sloppy with the placement of his fiance doing an awful striptease, much like Jamie Lee Curtis’ performance for Arnold in “True Lies.”  How do I know this?  One night at a checkpoint it was my turn to sleep, so off I went in the hellhole of the Stryker.  Mitch, who was on watch at the time, awakened me.  He didn’t say anything, because he didn’t want to wake up the LT, who was sleeping only a few feet away.  Mitch just gave me the universal symbol for “keep quiet” with his index finger over his lips and showed me a video on his cell phone.  It was some woman doing a terrible dance.

            “I don’t get it, man,” I whispered.

            “That’s the LT’s chick!” he whispered back as he tried not to laugh.

            “How?”

            “I asked if I could get some music from his phone to listen to and he gave it up.  I downloaded EVERYTHING!”

            That video made its way around the entire platoon and he never knew.  Score one for the good guys.  Of course we all made references to chicks making videos for us, but he never picked up on it.  Shocking, I know.

            The last screw up with Toppy and its connection to his fiancé was not securing Toppy after he pissed us off to the point where we had to take action.  In Vietnam, LT’s like Birdbrain would “disappear,” but we couldn’t do that and get away with it so we had to get creative.  One day he left Toppy unsecured on the truck.  With my crew, that was a mistake.  Especially after he recently made the platoon give back peanut butter cliff bars we “acquired” fair and square from the chow tent.  Those were like gold when meals were sparse.

We decided to kidnap Toppy and hold him hostage.  We offered his freedom for our cliff bars in a ransom note written in Arabic by one of our terps along with a picture of me and another soldier fully masked like terrorists holding a grenade next to Toppy’s head.  Birdbrain was such a dumb prick that he only offered straight up cups of peanut butter after translating the letter and claiming he could figure out who was in the picture.  He never found out who was in the picture or that the terp that translated the letter for him was in on the joke with us.  When we refused to release Toppy he threatened to talk to higher.  Wow, he wants to tell the commander that somebody has his precious stuffed animal?  The commander would have reamed Birdbrain, but then we would hear about it and we didn’t want that kind of attention. What a douche.  We released the giraffe… temporarily.

Woody, Mickey and myself were bitching about how poorly the mission went one day and decided to take it up a notch with the innocent giraffe. 

            “I’d burn that motherfucker now if I had ‘em,” Mickey stated.

            “You would?” Woody asked in a tone I hadn’t heard him use before.

            “Birdbrain is in a meeting right now and I know exactly where Toppy is.”

            “Lets do this,” I added.

            Woody grabbed Toppy and handed it to Mickey.  Mickey stuffed it in a box we had gotten in the mail and I lit the fire.  Little Toppy went up in smoke as platoon members came out to be by the fire.  The three of us had to keep it a secret until everything blew over.   

Bye Bye Toppy

            For the rest of the tour we played dumb when Birdbrain asked about Toppy.  He threatened to do an inspection of everything we had to find it.  We said no.  It was a glorious victory watching him squirm at the loss of the only thing left that connected him to his unfaithful fiancé.  Oh but the fun isn’t over yet, folks…

…..To be continued…. dun dun duuuuuun…