Good evening folks. I’ve always wanted to say that. Good evening folks. You know. Like the newscasters do when they start off a broadcast. Except, I’m not really starting off a broadcast. What I’m doing is starting off a philosophical edition of my blog tonight. Cuz something occurred to me while I was at the Ordnance Officer Advanced Course at Aberdeen Proving Ground, Maryland. Prior to attending the Ordnance Officer Advanced Course, I always had the impression that lieutenants were treated as the scum of the earth by everybody. That impression was obviously not correct because not all the lieutenants were treated as the scum of the earth. But if you’re one of the poor bastards who is treated as scum of the earth and all you know are other lieutenants who are treated as the scum of the earth, then obviously you draw the conclusion that all lieutenants are the scum of the earth. Even if your logic is flawed. Then, you arrive at the advanced course and all of the course instructors start to feed you this bullshit Kool-Aid about the land of milk and honey where the sky is always sunny. Does this sound like it’s too good to be true? Oh, believe me, it gets better. They tell you that as a Lieutenant, you were the scum of the earth, but that is all behind you now. They tell you that once you go forth as a graduate from the advanced course, the gods of fate will smile upon you. Where once you were a redheaded stepchild, you will now be looked upon as the fair-haired blue-eyed son of fortune. You will be blessed in all things. Let me tell you something. As I sat there listening to that cash shit, I was thinking back to my life as a Lieutenant. I had known some graduates of the career course or the advanced course, who were also scum of the earth. Those scum of the earth had been relieved for cause. In other words, they were your average run-of-the-mill, worthless twits. So, I knew all of that bullshit that the instructors were feeding us was simply that. Bullshit! But those instructors kept shoveling that shit just as fast as they could like their very life depended upon it. They also seemed to have had an endless supply of that shit piled up behind them. And apparently the smell didn’t bother them much at all. I guess if you stand in shit slinging it all day, every day, you get used to the smell. Anyway, they kept telling us things were going to be different. All we had to do was wait and watch. Well, then I graduated from the advanced course. And suddenly the skies were blue and sunny. All of my woes were magically gone. It seemed that bad luck had just disappeared. I had arrived in the land of milk and honey. In short, it was a miracle. I went on an extended stretch that seemed like it was too good to be true. Before I attended the advanced course, I seemingly couldn’t do anything right. After I attended the advanced course, it seemed like I could do no wrong. Everything started when I was trying to swing command sponsorship for my family to join me on an overseas assignment after I left the advanced course. I called assignments and was connected to a lady who seemed to recognize me, which I thought was odd. I didn’t know that anybody at the assignments branch knew me. It turned out that I was wrong. There was a Captain at the assignments branch that had been in my Officer Candidate School (OCS) class with me. She had won the physical fitness award for our class, and she had remembered who I was. We chatted for a little while to catch up and to talk about the good old times that we hadn’t been having. And then I explained to her what I was trying to accomplish. Within a few minutes, I had everything I wanted laid out for me. The next few years of my life were going to be rosy. What I didn’t know at the time was just how rosy my life was going to be. The assignments I drew weren’t just good, they were great. I couldn’t have selected better assignments if I had hand chosen them myself. Was this truly the land of milk and honey as my career course instructors had promised or was this merely a well disguised Primrose path, down which they had led me? While it was true that everything was as they had predicted, I had to think back to how things had been when I was enlisted, and I had been stationed in Korea. I had a really choice assignment back then as well. I also recalled my tour of duty at the Electronic Proving Ground at Fort Huachuca, Arizona. Times had been good there as well. Even the year and a half that I spent at Lowry Air Force Base in Denver, Colorado, had been some really choice duty. And the one thing that all of those assignments had in common was that they were from my enlisted days, long before I was ever a commissioned officer or a lowly scum sucking Lieutenant who hadn’t yet attended the career course. So, was there any merit to the course instructors’ words of wisdom concerning the land of milk and honey or was it all just jaded bullshit designed to send some poor lost souls on a suckers trip down a Primrose path? My money was riding on the Primrose path theory. Cuz, like I have always said, “You bullshit the baker, and you might get a bun. You bullshit me, and you don’t get none.” Yeah. I think I smell another exercise in futility coming along.
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