Knee Deep in the Hooah!

I wrote most of the following while drinking Sniper’s Brew Colombian Supremo and enjoying a slice of Claire’s Lemon Pound Cake.

I do the taxes for my household. Strange that the genesis for this skill was Marine Corps Boot Camp. As I recall I had just been fired from some momentary position of authority, in the early shuffling stages when every action of the Drill Instructors signified potential chaos. It was perhaps the first VUCA* environment I’d been exposed to in the Corps before I had the vocabulary for its definition.

Drill Instructors can detect fear, I had little, which wasn’t necessarily congruent with my frame. At 19 years I was 6’2” and weighed around 170 pounds. I don’t remember raising my hand, I was wiser, informed both from life and from my high school compadre, Grant. It was Grant who was the principle inspiration for my current circumstance. Grant was always a Marine at heart. He also loved weapons and anything with a sharp edge on it, still does and now he’s a cop in Texas. Stronger than most of his peer group, Grant carried 50 or so pounds that he didn’t need. He was a recruiting machine to all that knew him when he returned from his transformation.

I distinctly remember Grant warning me not to volunteer for ANYTHING. So when we were asked if, “Can any of you darlings handle percentages?” my demeanor must have betrayed me. So there I stood in the inner sanctimony of the drill instructors’ room. I’m sure the next uni directional dialog was something along the lines of, “you bettter know what the frick your doing” and/or “don’t frick this up.” The irony for me was that through the simple act of doing taxes for my Drill Instructors, they were humanized. It was as if I had insider information, the curtain had been pulled back a bit but it wasn’t something I could necessarily articulate at the time.

I think I wound up doing the taxes for most of the Series (translate: other Drill Instructors from other platoons). It’s also how I found myself the scribe of Platoon 3121. That’s it. There’s not some clever twist to the story, it’s just it’s tax time and I’m reminded of this event. I could have easily entitled this “Thankful for Tax Time”, because this year I’ve shown my oldest son how to do his taxes and shared the above vignette about how I first honed this skill. Life always seems to come full circle.

Dedicated to Kilo Company Platoon 3121 and Senior Drill Instructor SSgt Brown, and Drill Instructors Sgt Barrett, Sgt Bivians, & Sgt White

With Utmost Respect ~ Semper Fi, Hank

*Violent, Uncertain, Complex, Ambiguous

Disclaimer: {I’ve taken a few liberties to protect the innocent, if there is a statue of limitations and any criminalities then all stories are a work of fiction. The characters do not exist except in the mind of the author and any resemblance to persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental. Truth is stranger than fiction and my lawyer advised me to include the above. For those that were there…, Semper Fi}

Used by permission KDH Copyright © 2009 Sniper’s Brew All Rights Reserved.