Dear Family and Friends:

Damon "Napoleon Dynamite" Robertson, -or- How to Get in a Lot of Trouble in One Day

....

Start your day off tired. And I don't mean "I didn't sleep well last night." I mean "I'm fed up with this whole region of the world" kind of tired.

Go to the "office," get told by a loafer Sergeant that you're on watch today, which means you're sitting in the office staring at the paint as it fades. Watch him drive off on a "duty run" that's actually more fun than duty; i.e. an assignment you'll never get, and he'll always do himself. Sit there a while in the office, totally indolent, and sleep.

Get woken up by a Navy Chief who, instead of asking for help, intimates sideways via sarcasm that you'd better get off your worthless, lazy Marine a** and help him sink a flag pole into the ground. He doesn't actually ask for help-- remember this. The direct approach, even with swearing, would have worked for me. It's the "Criticize=Motivation" approach I'm pretty numb to, and especially from a Navy Squid who thinks that me and my Marines are his little *%@$#es

Take an honest moment. Look inside yourself. Find an amazing lack of concern for his plight. Sit there as one of your junior Marines, the one closest to the door, walks out to see what's up.

Endure the chief's second tirade a moment later. Still he never directly asks, never directly orders us to help-- even an order from a senior man outside of my chain of command I would have respected on any other Sunday. Not today.

I'm tired of his mouth. I stand up slowly, cold, not hot or angry. I stand in the doorway.

Now, if you want to get into trouble like me, offer the following in a casual, conversational tone:

"Hey, we've got a medical kit inside for any of you that are too butt-hurt to work today."

Then don't back down.

The way the story gets filtered to your chain of command will be something like this: "We kindly asked your Corporal for help and he responded with extreme beligerence. We just don't know what we did to set him off."

Oh God make it stop...

...

Later, when the loafer sergeant comes back, he sends you to clean your rifle. You choose to do so out in the rain because you'd rather do it there than in the office with him while he talks about banging a 20-year old air force chick. The picture of his wife and three daughters is sitting on his desk.

He tells me, after the rifle is clean, to go and fetch a Humvee. I ask him if I can go get a pizza while i'm out. He asks me if I'm going to get him any. I ask if he has money. He says no. I say No pizza. He says I can't go get it then, just the humvee.

This is the third time this week he's tried to extort food/coffee out of me, and the last two times I swallowed any dignity and gave in to his demands for Personal Servitude (this is something senior Marines can get court martialled for, mind you). He doesn't reimburse me for the expense. The "favor" of using a government vehicle is his part of the bargain. I should be thankful enough to get him something.

Go get the humvee. Get pizza while you're at it.

Come back and hear a lecture about disobeying a direct order. Acknowledge that you did it. It's true. Then tell him that providing him with food as a condition for permission to use a government vehicle constitutes personal servitude and that he's never reimbursed you before, and it's unacceptable. Listen to him tell you you're a nasty NCO, that you're only out for yourself, that you're a bad influence on the junior Marines, and that you need to square yourself away.

Stand up so the short man feels your height. Calmly tell him what he can go do with himself-- make sure to use words your mom would scold you for.

...

That's how to get in a lot of trouble in one day.

[Five minutes later my integrity makes me about-face in the mud, re-enter the office, stand at parade rest and repent of my indiscretion. Bottom line, other conditions aside, what I did was wrong. There's no excuses when I'm an E4 and he's and E5. Inexcusable behavior.]

:D