While I attended Officer candidate school (OCS) at Fort Benning, Georgia, one thing that we could always count on was pogey bait to lift morale. However, pogey bait was strictly prohibited. But my OCS class and more specifically, my platoon, was made up of candidates willing to take risks. It seemed that the bigger the risk we took, the better the reward that we received. Sometimes, it didn’t always work out that way. But when it did, the reward justified the risk. In some respects, it actually became a competition among platoons to see which platoon could outdo another platoon in terms of the risk taken. For example, if one platoon smuggled candy bars and sodas for all the members of the platoon into the barracks, then another platoon would have to one up that platoon by attempting to smuggle in something such as an ice cream snack. In the boldest effort of all, my platoon decided to hold a barracks pizza party. This pizza party wasn’t just for my platoon. That would have been something. That would have been one up on every other pogey bait smuggling attempt to that point. But my platoon wasn’t stopping there. No. That just wouldn’t do. We wanted to smuggle in enough pizza for the entire second floor of the barracks. That would cover two platoons. What made this pizza party even possible was that another prior service guy and I had external guard duty in the parking lot. We took the order for the pizza and relayed it to the pizza company. When the pizza arrived, we paid the pizza guy and shuttled the boxes of pizza into the barracks to the interior guard who in turn got it up to the second floor. Everything went smoothly without a hitch. What could go wrong? You would be surprised. The guys upstairs in the barracks hid the pizza in the shower. I’m not sure when they were going to throw the pizza party. The details are kind of fuzzy. But I do know that they were loosely planning to throw the party sometime during the study hall. The Teaching, Advising, and Counseling (TAC) officer on duty that night was considered to be one of the easier going TAC officers. Well, that’s what everybody thought. So much for thinking. The TAC officer showed up unannounced and surprised the candidates while I was still out on guard duty. But when he arrived on the second floor, all hell broke loose. My buddy and I could hear the shit all the way outside in the parking lot. Shit was banging and pounding, and the TAC was yelling and screaming. Then, the interior guard came and got us from the parking lot and told us to get inside. That’s when we knew for sure that the shit had hit the fan. We went inside and immediately went upstairs only to be told by the TAC to hit the wall. The TAC was standing there with our platoon TAC. Oh shit. That wasn’t good. Our platoon TAC asked one question, “Who came up with the idea for the pizza party?” Nobody said anything. He looked around at us and said, “I know what you’re doing. You’re trying to protect somebody. It won’t work. If you protect somebody, I’ll just punish all of you. You will all pay for this. Somebody is going to tell me who came up with the idea for the pizza party.” Finally, one of the college guys who was very outspoken most of the time stepped forward and said, “I did it. The whole thing was my idea.” The TAC officer looked at him and said, “That’s bullshit. I know you didn’t do it. I know who did. I’m just waiting to see if the individual will own up to it.” When the college kid heard that, he hung his head and backed up against the wall. Next, the unspoken leader of our platoon stepped forward and said, “You’re right Sir. Paul didn’t do it. I did.” The TAC looked at him with a sneer on his face and said, “Candidate Rhodes. It’s really nice of you to step forward and admit your guilt. You will march tours for the next two weeks.” Then, the TAC grabbed two candidates and asked them to go into the shower room with him. They came back with boxes of pizza. The other TAC took those boxes of pizza and dumped them face down on the floor and told us to smear them all over the floor in the hallway. There was pizza sauce and pizza ingredients ground into the floor, all up and down the hall. Then, the TAC asked another candidate to get a bottle of shampoo. What in the hell did he want shampoo for? We soon found out. He dumped that shampoo all over the floor. Then he got floor wax and told another candidate to dump that all over the floor. Meanwhile, our platoon TAC had been doing the same damn thing inside the shower room. Needless to say, nobody ate any pizza that night. That is unless you count the floor of the barracks. The barracks floor ate one helluva lot of pizza. But us cand-idiots. By the way, a cand-idiot is a combination between candidate and idiot. It is a name that some of us prior service candidates in my class started calling ourselves as an inside joke. Yeah. We didn’t eat any. Nada. Zip. Zilch. We were told that the mess had to be cleaned by lights out or everybody would be marching tours for the rest of the week. So, as it turned out, we didn’t one up anybody with that pizza party. We found out later that the interior guard had snitched on us. Duty, honor, country, loyalty to your brothers at arms, and integrity. These are some of the buzzwords that leadership teaches us. That guy obviously didn’t learn anything in that class. We had to teach him a lesson. You don’t snitch on your brothers, never be a blue falcon (buddy f*cker). We learned a valuable lesson that night. You have to know who you trust. That’s why I always say. In God we trust, all others cash. Cleaning that damn pizza of that damn floor proved to be one helluva exercise in futility.
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