Pinecone Pick Up – An Ode to Military Humor

When I was stationed at Fort Benning, Georgia, I performed a lot of what I like to call “make work” projects or extra duties.  For those of you that are greenhorns and don’t know what “make-work” is, allow me to elaborate.  Suppose that it’s a nice hot humid day and you are just lollygagging around the company area, killing time because there’s a huge gaping hole in the training schedule.  That never happens in the Army, right?  Right.  Of course not.  Perish the thought.  Cuz you gotta have a sharp company commander, training officer, training NCO, and cadre.  And those fine individuals would never allow that to happen.  I’ll allow some time for you to stop laughing and recompose yourselves so that you can continue reading.  Are you ready?  I know that was a stretch.  So, every once in a while, you’re caught in this vicious trap called “make-work.”  The cadre has to come up with something to keep you busy.  That’s why you find a lot of military bases with painted rocks.  I’ve talked about the painted rocks before.  I’ve even talked about raking the sand so that it looks all nice and pretty.  But dammit.  Dirt is dirt.  You expect to see tracks in dirt.  You know.  Shit like boot tracks, sneaker tracks, and even critter tracks.  Hell, you might even find critter shit if you look close enough.  I try not to look close enough.  I also don’t step in the critter shit.  That tends to make your boots stink like shit.  Anyway, back to this idea of “make-work.”  Let me put it to you like this.  There are only so many times you can rake the dirt and paint the rocks to make them look pretty.  If you attempt to paint the rocks too often, you could totally screw them up.  Likewise, if you rake the dirt too much, you could actually end up messing it up worse than it was before you started.  So, those sharp-as-tacks leaders in your company have to come up with something new for you to do.  They’re struggling because there aren’t any more rocks to paint and there ain’t any more dirt to rake.  What are they going to make you do?  They don’t have a clue.  Not one clue.  It seems they’ve all gone brain-dead.  That is until private Johnny-come-lately-Unitas gets bored and picks up one of the huge ass pinecones laying on the ground that fell off of one of the longleaf pine trees that grows all over the damn place around Fort Benning.  Those huge ass pinecones litter the ground everywhere because they seem to rain down out of the pine trees whenever the wind blows.  As soon as our fearless commander saw private Johnny-come-lately-Unitas pick up that pinecone and heave it like it was a football, the proverbial lightbulb turned on in his brain.  It glowed in all of its four watts of brilliance as he shouted his profound idea.  He called the company to attention and said, “Men, I have a great idea.  Well, it’s not a great idea, but it’s a good idea.  We will conduct a pinecone pick up.  We will police the pinecones in all of the company areas to include the parking lots, the grassy areas between the barracks, the sidewalks, and the maintained areas between the road to and from the Motor Park and the company headquarters.  Are there any questions?  No?  Okay.  Get to work.  Platoon leaders see me to get details about division of responsibility for the pinecone pick up.”  And just like that, we were doing “make-work.”  I had never seen anything so chickenshit in my entire life.  Pinecone pick up.  What the hell kinda shit was that?  Let me tell you something.  There were one helluva lot of God damn pinecones laying around.  Cuz those got damn pine trees have been standing there dropping those got damn pinecones for a long damn time.  And it was my guess that nobody had ever picked that shit up before.  Oh, hell no.  They might have kicked them out of the way.  They may even have cussed and swore a few times when they came out to the parking lot after a helluva windstorm and found that a few of those pinecones had dented their cars in a few places.  But pick the shit up?  Oh, hell no.  That had never happened.  Not until that fateful day.  We were some lucky sons of bitches.  Cuz we got to pick them up.  Yay!  Lucky us.  The commander came up with a couple more brilliant ideas as well.  He thought it would be a great idea if we piled the pinecones that we picked up into huge piles.  Everybody could see that four-watt bulb glowing again in his brain.  It was a beacon of light to illuminate the darkness that was cast upon the company.  It’s just too bad that it was only four watts strong.  Then, he suggested that we burn each of those huge piles of pinecones from the pickup.  A couple of us suggested getting gasoline to throw on top of piles of pinecones.  We also asked if we could bring marshmallows and wieners.  What the hell.  We might as well have a marshmallow and wiener roast if we were going to do the bonfire.  When the first Sergeant reminded him that he needed a permit to do the burning, the commander backed away from the whole bonfire thing.  He said we would haul all of the piles of pinecones away at a later date.  Since the later date hadn’t arrived by the weekend, a few of my friends and I decided to play a game of pickup football using the pinecones that we had conveniently piled up during the pinecone pick up as our footballs.  I found that the largest, heaviest pinecones that were shaped like a large cone could be thrown in a pretty decent spiral.  I also found that they could be thrown pretty accurately for 20 or 30 yards.  The one problem was that you couldn’t get much velocity on a pinecone.  As a result, your target had to be open.  Otherwise, your pinecone was getting intercepted.  No doubt about it.  Did we pick up our pinecones when we finished our game?  Hell no.  That would’ve been too much like the exercise in futility that we had already endured when picking them up in the first place.

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