Teh funniez

So a couple of weeks ago I'm sitting at a table with a couple of former Army guys, swapping stories about various interesting places we'd been and the fun we'd had while there.

Like the time I was in Korea, and we were out on a field exercise. The weather was fair on the first day when we set up camp, but from that point on it rained continuously for the next two weeks. Much time was spent re-engineering the trench systems designed to keep most of that rain out of the tents, much caution was taken maintaining the various generators and electrical wires crisscrossing the area and powering the various tools of the trade inside those tents, much fun was had by all.

And day after day the rain fell and the soft ground became softer. And puddles of water rose and combined and became lakes and rivers, and unbroken high ground paths between points became rare. You could get nowhere in the camp without sloshing through standing brown water of uncertain depth and soft surface below. Every step was cautious, with eyes down to see just how close the water level was to the top of your overboots. Every time you lifted your foot you did so in hope that the mud below wouldn't suck that boot right off.

And nowhere was that worse than in the dirt track "road" that big trucks used to bring in supplies. Deuce-and-a-halfs can effectively rut solid ground, their effect on the mostly-submerged road was to create something like islands of mud pudding oozing up between rivers of sludge. And you had to cross that road to get to the chow tent - where trays of food product (known as "t-rats") were boiled to provide us hot meals twice a day. (Lunch was an MRE, if you were hungry.) And you couldn't cross swiftly - the line from the tent stretched across that road and moved forward slowly, with everyone in the line spaced at intervals favorable to surviving an attack and moving forward a few steps at a time as each person who'd made it through exited the tent with food in hand and attempted to negotiate the course back to their own tent to eat before falling rain filled the various sections of their plates.

So there I am, standing in that line, feeling myself sink slowly into the ooze, watching the water level rise around my boots, waiting for the moment I could step closer to my t-rat feast. The rain is falling, but I'm wearing green plastic raingear head-to-knees over my BDUs. (But it's hot outside, so I'm sweating enough under all that to make me wonder if it's actually keeping me dry.) And the guy in front of me glances back at me and says "hey, are you in the Air Force?"

"Yes," I reply.

"I should have joined the Air Force." He responds. "You guys don't have to put up with this shit."

What could I say?

"Yeah. Me too."

That story is funny. You either get the joke or you don't.

Even though I was living evidence to the contrary standing in the same rain right before his eyes, I calculated my odds of convincing him he was wrong as zero, or close to it. Because basically, he was right - or at least close enough.

So is Army vet James Joyner: "But most people in the Air Force have been office workers since its inception as a separate service. Truth be told, most soldiers and sailors do non-trigger-puller jobs, too. "

The warrior culture is similar to that found in a locker room. It uses brutal humor to lighten the tension and test the mettle of one's fellows. Airborne troops make fun of dirty nasty legs. Combat arms troops crack jokes about REMFs, the rear-echelon so-and-sos. The Army disparages the Marines and vice versa. In the Air Force, it's pilots and everybody else. In the Navy, it's Line and other. But anyone much above the level of an entering recruit understands that it's all one big operation.

And speaking of recruits, I wish I had a dollar for every one of my Army brothers who has explained to me over the years why he couldn't join the Air Force when he tried, and one for every Air Force Airman I've met who joined because his Army dad told him that was the branch to join (in many cases in conjunction with pointing out how wrong they now thought dad was).

But most of those without family advice or tradition join the branch they think best suits them. After joining some few find themselves spending a lot of time with one of the other branches anyway, and required to train and live to the standards of both. I'm one of those few.

Which might help explain why I've always thought this was funny - since the first time I saw it twenty years ago as a Xeroxed document making the rounds on an Air Force base:

I don't know who first created that cartoon, but I wouldn't be surprised to learn that it was an Air Force guy. And - because it did first go "viral" hand-to-hand in a pre-internet, pre-email age as a Xerox-copied document - I'm certain the Air Force facilitated that. That's not because our aircraft were required to transport the document, it's because Army guys at the time were still busy trying to figure out why the big white box in the office lit up when they pushed the button (from a safe distance in full protective gear with two broom sticks duct taped together).

And they might not have it figured out yet. While the joke is dependent on the cartoon, Army guys to this day are forced to tell it verbally, and it usually falls flat.

So a couple of weeks ago I'm sitting at a table with a couple of former Army guys, swapping stories about various interesting places we'd been and the fun we'd had while there....

(More to follow)

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