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by Jason
Christopher Hartley
January 2, 2004
Before the dining-in was to begin, an initiation ceremony
was to be performed for all the new NCOs (sergeants) that were recently
promoted. But before that was to take place, everyone hit the bar. Ah,
the evening was off to a spectacular start.
Me and Willy enjoying some Fort Drum microbrew.
And then the initiation ceremony began. As luck would have
it Willy and I were standing right next to an unsupervised keg of
Killian’s. We then shook the hands of all the new sergeants. And a few
were females. I had no idea there were any females in my beloved
infantry battalion!
Try to imagine what it must have been like for the servers
of this event. These are only about a third of all the attendees.
A big part of the dining-in was the “grog”, a horrific
concoction of all manner of poison including whiskey, gin, vodka, sake,
Copenhagen (yes, chewing tobacco), the socks the battalion commander
wore during his visit to Iraq and water from the East River in New York
City.
Each table had to create a centerpiece. This was my squad’s
for which I was art director. A few inside jokes here: during the last
field exercise a Humvee slipped into a trench and was stuck for quite a
while; also on the same exercise there was some serious difficulty
getting fuel. Not only was our centerpiece the most creative, but it was
probably also the most fitting. By the time midnight finally rolled
around I had become silly drunk, had stolen two additional dinners from
the servers using shameless trickery, had passed out on a couch during
one of the scheduled breaks (when they woke my ass up I announced that I
was Buddhist and was merely meditating) and now I had finally toasted
the new year. As we left, I took the toy Humvee out of our centerpiece
and put it in one of the display cabinets in the foyer. Standing outside
waiting for a ride back to the barracks and having resigned myself to
not getting a New Year’s kiss this year, a girl came up to me, shook my
hand and said “Happy New Year.” Before she knew what was happening, I
had pulled her in by the hand and stole a kiss. Okay, so it was only on
the cheek, but close enough. Hey, when heaven Fed-Ex’s you manna, you
just sign for it, man. Happy New Year everyone!
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