balance (part one)

What follows is the first part of a discussion about Monterey, California. This will not be immediately apparent. So here we go:

I spent two and a half years at Fort Benning, Georgia, a fact that probably merits some very mild pity, which I totally invite and encourage. Benning is the U.S. Army Infantry Center, home to infinity-billion training units and courses -- including the Infantry Training Brigade on Sand Hill, about which I would just like to say fuck you, Sand Hill. There's also a Ranger battalion and a mechanized infantry brigade (or more, post-BRAC) just to fuck up the gender balance a little more and inflict a slightly higher level of sexual frustration on the infinity-trillion infantrymen who call Benning their home.

Because Fort Benning has uncountable numbers of nineteen-year-old riflemen, and because they serve alongside the twelve female soldiers who work there as personnel clerks and dental technicians, the neighboring town has certain distinctive features. Victory Drive, right outside the gates, has strip bars, strip bars, strip bars, and a couple of pawn shops. And some strip bars. They are, words fail me, dismal. At the end of the work week, the newest company of infantry soldiers is released from the fourteen weeks they spend restricted to the post; by Saturday evening, the strippers have all the cash those kids have accumulated in unused paychecks during those fourteen weeks. And yes, she promised to marry you, but no, she didn't mean it, and dude, tell me you didn't give her all your fucking money, because we still have to pay twenty-six dollars for this motel room.

Just to throw this in, here, my team leader greeted me at my first post-training unit by taking me to the Lucky Seven, a place that still makes me instinctively pat myself down for crabs when I think about it. While we were there, one of the strippers walked over and asked if Corporal [Name Deleted] wanted to shoot some pool with her. She was mostly naked. He did want to shoot some pool with her, yes. So he started pulling quarters out of his pocket to feed the pool table, but he came up one short. And then the stripper said, very slyly, that she would take care of it. And she reached into her...

(Skip this next paragraph, if you'd like.)

...vagina, with two fingers, and pulled out a quarter of her own, and dropped it onto the pool table. And as she sashayed away to get a cue, Corporal [Name Deleted] leaned over, shaking with excitement, and said something like, "Did you see that shit? That's so fucking hot." (And I said something like, "Yeah, there's nothing hotter than a woman who stores spare change in her vagina." But Corporal [Name Deleted] was beyond noticing Private Bray's deadpan routine.)

(Despite a solid effort, Corporal [Name Deleted] did not end up having sex with the stripper. And our next team building exercise was that he took me to his house to introduce me to his wife.)

The bars in Columbus are so depressing they actually begin to cause physical exhaustion: Heeeey look, it's three hundred dudes with army haircuts gathered around four women who don't want to talk to them because they're tired of sexually desperate soldiers.

Benning is home to the School of the Americas; they call it something else now, but it's still the School of the Americas, and School of the Americas Watch still wants to close it. One year while I was there, I joined a group that went into downtown Columbus to drink beer. When we realized that the place we went to was crammed full of anti-School of the Americas protestors -- they travel in by the thousands every year, I think in November -- there was a long pause. The group of protestors had a gender imbalance issue that was just like ours, except backwards, and we were all taking a few moments to notice it. And then one of the dudes in the group said, "These chicks hate us. And holy fucking shit, they're so fucking hot."

We went back the next night, too.

And that was Columbus, Georgia: I'm gonna try to fuck that chi-- hold on, I gotta fucking puke, blaaaarrrrrggggghhhh, and anyway, let's kick somebody's ass, you want another beer?

It was sometimes kind of entertaining, but mostly sooooooooo dull and predictable, and my first sergeant once explained to me that he drove home to Atlanta every day -- three total hours of driving, five days a week -- because "I can sit in my motherfucking backyard and not see one motherfucker with no goddamn army haircut." His neighbor was a doctor, civilian issue (one each); they sat in the yard and exchanged bullshit over beer and cigars, talking about "anything but the fucking army." Me, I spent every long weekend in Athens or Savannah, except when we piled a group into a car and headed for the beach in Florida or the mountains in South Carolina.

And thus endeth part one. Part two tomorrow.