Song and Dance – An Ode to Military Humor

When I served as the Commander of the 305th Supply and Services Company in the 227th Maintenance Battalion At Yongsan, Seoul, Korea, the company passed several major tests and milestones.  And the company picked up new missions without skipping a beat.  My company had participated in the Team Spirit field exercise, but we had finally deployed back to Garrison at the end of the exercise.  After Team Spirit operations wound down, daily life in my company returned to normal.  When I say that things returned to normal, I mean that the usual things such as monthly ten-percent property inventories, daily physical fitness, weekly training activities, assigned MTOE (Modified Table of the Organizational Equipment) missions, and other duties as assigned were being performed.  If you have read some of my recent posts, you have probably picked up on a common theme woven throughout those posts.  That common theme was the dumb shit that soldiers managed to bury themselves in or the stupid predicaments that they found themselves in from which they could not be extricated safely and in one piece.  What that usually meant was that those soldiers usually wound up causing themselves serious bodily harm or even death.  It has often been said that you can’t fix stupid.  Don’t get me wrong.  The Army sure tries.  I have also giving you examples of how the Army tries to fix stupid.  However, it usually doesn’t work.  In my most recent post, I wrote about a soldier and his escapades with electricity while attempting to hang the TV antenna on a power transmission pole.  He was almost successful.  Alas, almost only counts in horseshoes and in hand grenades.  That incident ruined a damn fine Lieutenant.  Lieutenant Woodson witnessed the incident and was never the same afterward.  He arrived back at the scene just in time to watch the soldier fry himself.  In his words, Woody said, “The soldier shocked the shit out of himself, Sir.  He hit the ground hard.  He don’t look too good.  I don’t think he made it.”  In the aftermath of that incident, it took me several months to convince Woody to seek counseling.  By the time that he did seek counseling, I fear that it was too late to help him much in terms of saving his career.  I always wondered what I could have done differently.  My Battalion Commander and I talked about my upcoming change of command.  Yes.  It was getting to be that time for me to pass the Guidon to a new commander.  The Battalion Commander said, “Wright, you should find somebody just like you to replace you.”  I replied, “There’s just one problem with that, Sir.  I am not a twin, so you are never going to find another person just like me to replace me.  But good luck trying.”  My conversation with my Battalion Commander did start me thinking about my swan song.  No.  I was not going to stand up on a stage and impersonate a big ass bird.  But just in case you’re curious, the most frequent note blurted in the call of a Trumpeter Swan is the “B.”  However, the vocal range of the trumpeter Swan is from the note of “A” to “E.”  Does it sound like singing?  Well, if you are bored and don’t have nothing else to do, you can Google “what does the Swan sound like” to listen to a clip of a Swan to determine for yourself if it is singing.  Of course, whenever I heard the phrase “Swan song,” I always envisioned a Looney Tunes cartoon of a big ass bird walking up to a microphone on stage at a symphony orchestra concert in a big auditorium being conducted by some other cartoon character and singing some classical music clip.  Naturally, since the big ass bird is performing its Swan song, it would naturally have to swoon and either faint or outright die halfway through the performance right up there on stage in front of the whole audience.  And of course, in keeping with the fact that this is a Looney Tune cartoon, the concert is sold out and the death of the bird is expected.  When the big ass bird drops to the floor with a thunderous roar, the crowd rises to its feet and throws roses onto the stage to bid adieu, au revoir, or ciao.  Wouldn’t that be a grand performance?  Yeah.  Just not mine.  Like I said, I wasn’t going to stand up on a stage and impersonate a big ass bird.  Anyway, about a month later, my Battalion Commander called me to tell me that he had found a perfect candidate to replace me.  He asked me to come to Battalion headquarters to meet my replacement.  I went down to Battalion headquarters to meet the potential replacement.  The guy was a young physically fit Quartermaster Captain.  The only strikes against him that I could see were that he was a quarter beggar and that he thought he looked pretty.  Other than that, he seemed to be okay.  The Battalion Commander asked me to throw a company party on his dime and invite him and his staff and the new company commander candidate to the party.  I said that I would set things up.  When I left Battalion headquarters, I started thinking about my change of command.  No.  It would not be my swan song.  But it would be a new song.  I wouldn’t sing an actual song.  Cuz I don’t think anybody wanted to listen.  And I didn’t exactly sound like one of the world’s greatest rock ‘n roll stars.  So maybe it would be a song and a dance.  Wait a second.  I couldn’t dance worth a shit either.  Nope.  I guess that was out.  Well, it appeared that my song and dance had been set in motion without any exercises in futility, but I wasn’t yet exactly sure what the final performance would be.

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