No Stains – An Ode to Military Humor

If you have read some of my most recent posts, you know that I have been writing about my experiences while attending the Logistics Executive Development Course at Fort Lee, Virginia.  While at Fort Lee, I spent some time talking about finding a place to live, and we found a place in a trailer park in Petersburg.  And I mentioned in that post my sentiments about the manager of that trailer park.  But my family and I decided not to let that pickup driving, backwoods dwelling, varmint hunting, shotgun hauling trailer park manager interfere with our ability to get along and adapt to our new environment.  Even though we were treated as if we were “other-colored” people, we learned to improvise, overcome and adapt.  My son was getting along just fine and playing with his friends and time moved on.  Well, as I said, time moved on.  We all got integrated into life at Petersburg and Fort Lee.  Eventually, I got accustomed to life in Petersburg and Fort Lee.  You probably read that I would run through the woods surrounding the school where it was purported that Civil War battles had been fought.  I ran through those woods pretty much every evening after school without fail.  And you no doubt remember about the orchestrated run that was thrown together by the cadre at the Logistics Executive Development Course.  However, besides talking about running, I talked about country briefs and international politics involved in the course.  Or about being the target of a prank.  The prank was a promotion which never happened.  Yes, I was tricked into being wrongly promoted and then demoted in less than a week.  I also posted about the commanding general’s invitational deer hunt, where I got to be a swamp dog.  Yay.  That’s always exciting.  Not.  I finally even relayed my theory of relatives.   My theory of relatives actually had nothing to do with my attendance at the Logistics Executive Development Course at Fort Lee, Virginia.  No.  I just threw it out there on a whim (as I was reminded of it recently) for your reading enjoyment because I mentioned it in an earlier post as something that I would tell you about at a later time.  My most recent post talked about one of my hunting experiences in the swamps of Fort Lee.   But my most recent post dealt with a hard fact of life that we must all face at some point in our lives.  I called that hard fact of life the beginning of the end.  It’s about that point in time when your body begins to fail you.  However, today we are not talking about failure per se.  You have to kind of look at it in a lopsided way in order to construe it so that it is not a failure.  But it is not strictly a failure.  What I am talking about are stains.  Have you ever noticed that the likelihood of stains occurring, particularly on your clothing, increases exponentially to the amount of white-colored clothing that you wear.  These stains are likely to occur whenever you eat food.  Especially messy food.  I am referring to food such as ribs with lots and lots of barbecue sauce, hotdogs and hamburgers with lots and lots of catchup and mustard, salads with lots and lots of various assorted dressings, gravies, meat and food juices, and of course red wine stains.  I think that the Army issued soldiers dark colored clothing to hide stains.  Why?  That should be painfully obvious.  Cuz shit happens!  At least with dark colored clothing, stains are not as obvious when that shit happens.  However, there was a time just after the Vietnam War, where the Army issued white T-shirts and white underwear.  Why?  Maybe shit didn’t happen back then.  I seriously doubt it.  But who’s to say.  I wasn’t one of those guys that went around sniffing other people’s third points of contact.  Dogs do that sort of shit.  You know.  Sniffing other dogs’ hind ends.  But we all make allowances for dogs because they are just dogs.  We don’t expect them to know any better.  But I digress.  Why am I telling you all of this?  Oh yeah… Shit happens, stains make a mess, especially on white, and soldiers tend to be sloppy.  Why am I telling you all of this?  Cuz it was time for all of the officers attending the Logistics Executive Development Course at Fort Lee, Virginia, to attend the dining out ceremony.  Most of the officers wore their dress blues or mess blues.  But some of the senior officers wore their mess whites.  I always wondered exactly how in the hell they kept those mess whites immaculately spotless.  It is not like they carried around a portable dry-cleaning kit in their pockets just in case.  No.  I think that those senior sons of bitches starved the shit out of themselves so that shit wouldn’t happen, if you catch my drift.  Cuz just between you and me, they aren’t any less prone to oopsies and boo-boos than you and me.  And they are just as susceptible to the white-colored clothing rule that I talked about earlier.  I think that the real reason that they wear white to those functions is to deliberately force themselves to diet.  That way, they can work on their girlish figures in an attempt to maintain their height and weight ratios.  Meanwhile, the rest of us poor slobs just have to eat very slowly and meticulously and only use the spoon.  Oh yeah, it also helps to use napkins.  One in your lap and one as a bib.  I learned how to eat like that in Officer Candidate School.  It worked like a charm at that dining out and I ate with no stains or other exercises in futility.

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