One thing that I always learned to expect during my first tour of duty at Fort Benning was surprise. Gotcha. You thought I was going to say ‘change.’ Change was a given. But ‘surprise’ was an unknown factor that would sneak up on you and catch you totally off-guard. Let me give you an example. Of course, I cannot simply just give you the example. That would be too easy. First, I have to ask a few questions. How many gifted artists have you run into in the military? I mean truly gifted, should be studying at an art academy, artists. One? Two? How about none? That’s how many I ran into in twenty years of service. How about painters? I am talking about gifted artistic painters not your garden variety house painters. Again, one? Two? Try none of those either. Nope. Nada damn one. Anyway, if there are or were any, they sure as hell ain’t in the infantry. I can pretty much guaran-goddamn-tee that. I did meet a guy once who learned how to be a tattoo artist. He was a Marine demolition expert that was wounded pretty badly in Vietnam. Got reclassified as a machinist in the Army and could draw sketches pretty well. He did an apprenticeship under a tattoo artist and became an arguably better tattoo artist than his teacher. But he is the exception, not the rule. Why do I bring all of this up? Good question. It goes back to the concept of surprise. One day, ‘Ricky Ranger’ came down to the motor park to talk to a couple of the NCOs. Pretty soon they made a beeline toward me. That was an ‘Oh Shit’ moment. What had I done this time? I couldn’t think of anything really ridiculous or stupid right off the top of my head. I mean, other than my normal ridiculous or stupid shit that the leadership had come to expect. The commander walked up to me and said, “PFC Masters, Sergeant Jones told me you’re the best mechanic we have.” I replied, “Shit, sir, I’m the only mechanic you have. The other guys are just trained grease monkeys. Pardon the French.” “Ok. I should have seen that coming. Anyway, I was told by battalion and brigade that we have an opportunity to upgrade our best vehicles. Can you tell me which vehicles those might be?” “Oh. Yes, sir. Do you want me to write out a list, or do you just want to walk down the line and take notes?” “We’ll walk and talk.” “Ok, sir. You’re da boss.” So, we walked up and down the line, and I gave him a rundown on each vehicle and prioritized the vehicles from best to worst. He questioned a few of my choices. He asked, “Why did you prioritize this vehicle so low on the list? It looks like it’s in great shape and it has low mileage?” I explained, “There’s a reason for that, sir. Nobody will drive that piece of shit. It breaks down every time somebody dispatches it. It’s not reliable or dependable. I wouldn’t bet your life on that vehicle.” “Fair enough.” I had similar stories for the other vehicles I had prioritized low on the list. When we were done, the commander fired a curveball at us. Leave it to him to come up with some totally hare-brained scheme to achieve fame and recognition. He announced, “Men, you are going to conduct a pilot program to paint the woodland camouflage pattern on all of our vehicles. This is the first-ever pilot program in the Army. You are going to set the example.” Disaster was more like it. I was thinking, ‘It would be just about your speed to volunteer for some stupid shit like this – slow to neutral with a lot of spinning in the mud.’ We couldn’t even make two vehicles look the same much less like the pictures in the books we were supposed to follow. Hell, the damn books weren’t even in color. We were supposed to guess what the hell the finished vehicle was supposed to look like. Well, that’s sort of what we ended up doing. Guessing, I mean. On the bright side, we made everything around those damn vehicles look camouflaged. Not like the pictures, but camouflaged. Just in case something needed to blend in with something else and hide. The ground was camouflaged. Our uniforms got camouflaged (more like tie-dyed is a better description). Vehicle tires got camouflaged. Most of what we painted, on purpose or otherwise, had four different colors. Just not in any discernable pattern that resembled what you might think of as a camouflage pattern. But when you hire bargain basement help to do a job, you can’t exactly expect top-notch high-quality workmanship. You get what you pay for. And when you ain’t paying anything, need I say more. After two months, we had only managed to paint eight vehicles and two trailers and none of them matched anything. There were also a lot of runs in the paint where it had been sprayed too close and too thick. As I said, really high-quality workmanship. We were told to cease and desist. We asked the obvious question. ‘Why?’ Cuz, when you’re having a blast and totally trashing something, you just want to keep right on going. So much for the pilot program. I guess it was a good thing those weren’t planes we were learning to fly. We would have crashed and burned every damn one of them. Not on purpose mind you, but remember what I said about that talent thing. Yeah. Guys in the infantry are in the infantry for a reason. Or the artillery. Or the tank corps. I think you get the idea. They ain’t there because they’re blossoming Rembrandt’s or Picasso’s. The Army loved our pilot program so much, they decided to have the camouflage pattern painting done at the depot level. Once again, our commander had led us on another exercise in futility.
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