Dog Drama and Choy's Antics

31 July, 2003

Another day closer to home. It was so wonderful to talk to you last night. I would love to go to the horse ranch with you! Well, nothing is going on right now. SSG Choy is being an ass to everyone. Just to satisfy my curiosity, I went to the barracks. Sure enough, I found him in his room. He tries to get out of as much work as possible, then tells us that he works soooo hard. He does nothing. He came out right as I looked in and asked, “What are you doing?”
‘Oh,’ I responded, ‘Just wondering where you were.’ He’s a bad person.
Conroy came in to tell me about a story from Pappy. He’s out on patrol, and a kid throws a rock at Sergeant Prince and Pappy’s truck. So they stop, and this is what happened:
“Sergeant Prince, you get that boy and don’t come back until you do!” said Pappy. So the Boy Prince took off for the kid, along with the scouts. They didn’t find the kid, so they went tactical. SWAT style, weapons drawn – they searched an abandoned building and found the renegade child. So the scouts and the prince caught the boy and zip stripped him. This is going on in the heart of Baghdad. They brought the child to CSM Sanders, and he ordered the child’s legs be zipped up too. So the child stood crying with his limbs bound. Then Pappy said (as he threw a rock that found its mark on the boy’s chest), “How do you like people throwing rocks at you?!” Like the boy could understand him in the first place. The boy hadn’t even struck him, but now Pappy was hitting him, while bound. The man is crazy, that is for certain. You talk to him and his little blue eyes seem so glazed and lifeless. He’s a mass of pig flesh with no mind, no sense. He’s a perfect product of the Army. Perfect.
Yesterday I was talking about Jimmy, since I got a letter from him. I was talking to SSG Ramos about him being at Camp David. Well, that’s at Thurmont, Maryland. Well, it turns out that Sergeant Ramos is from Thurmont, Maryland. So all of a sudden we are talking about his hometown. He all of a sudden lost his bearing and got relaxed, and then confided (in an air of someone being understood perfectly), “Yeah, there’s a parking lot up there where we used to get so fucked up and stoned! You know there’s a bend on the road, and my buddies got this one girl all drunk and stoned and stripped all her clothes off! Hehe. So they tied her up all naked to a tree, and cars would drive by and see her! Haha. We’d get so fucked up up there!”
I thought to myself, ‘Wow, this guy is a loser, and he’s still a loser, and he’s my boss. Wow. I can do better than this.’ Most of these guys are of bad character. It was only a matter of time before Sergeant Ramos let me glimpse into his world. I wasn’t totally surprised. I’m glad I wasn’t involved in drugs and drinking during high school or earlier. It really does damage people, I’m convinced. The whole time he was talking to me, he acted as if I could completely relate to him, as if he looked cool. I only felt sorry for him.
Nicols just came by to tell me about two incidents that happened. He was parked pulling security in a market. Suddenly, the car in front of him had a girl and a boy, about 3 years old and the boy was pointing a gun out of the window. “I thought I was going to have to shoot him, a kid! He was aiming and everything, holding the gun with two hands! I wasn’t going to shoot unless he shot first. So, I snuck around the side of the car and I was shaking. Then, I slapped the gun out of his hand. It was a fake! It was the most realistic toy gun I’ve ever seen! So it breaks. If that kid had been 16, I would have shot him. THEN, the father comes out yelling at me for breaking the toy. So, the LT gives him a dollar to buy another toy gun.
Then a guy tells us a bomb is on a bus. So we search a bunch of red busses but don’t find anything. He comes back and says it’s on the frame of a broken bus next to the school. So we find the bus, and a man in the bus points the bomb out to me, and there’s an RPG round on top of it. He just picks up the RPG round waves it around. We take it from him. Then, I have to reach in and pull one up from the top of the differential through a hole. I thought, OH GOD, I’m going to lose my arm. My hands couldn’t stop shaking and I was sweating so bad. So I got all the pipe bombs and we put them in a box. We make the Iraqi carry the bombs back with us, and he’s dying because it’s so heavy. Then we pass by a music band, and kids come out and it turns into a mini-parade! It’s crazy!
Also, our guards at the power station said someone threw a mortar round over the perimeter wall. But it didn’t blow up because the safety pin was still inside. Then we look across the street and there are 50 mortars just lying around. Kids play with them! We’re talking to the guards, and they don’t understand English – so we are giving them crap in English like. Then a man understands us and gets upset, ‘You don’t tell your elders that!’ Then they said ‘Kids tell their parents off in America, and shit on ‘em!’ The man seemed disturbed at this. ‘That’s so horrible!’”
Nicols also said they tried to show them a playboy picture, but everyone would turn away and hide their face. But if they showed a picture of their wife or girlfriend with clothes on, all the men would like it and go crazy over it! That’s funny, so what’s wrong with no Playboy? It’s discipline not to go for that stuff. I respect them for that.
Well, I just came in from outside, and a 3-7 IN war veteran sergeant was looking for his dog. Well, I guess he adopted this dog during the war and cared for it. Now it’s roaming around with a gunshot wound. “Who the hell shot my dog?” He asked in a genuine way that demanded an answer.
‘Our Sergeant Major. He’s a bit crazy,’ I answered. Hey, I was honest. POP! Went off loudly and I ran outside to see what happened (last week).
“Yup. I got that motherfucker, got ‘em in the heart,” Pappy (sergeant major said). I heard his squealing Texas gibberish floating through the air. I saw him and I thought,
‘This guy is crazy! He really is crazy! He shot a dog and shot him like nothing!’ I didn’t get confused over the dog, but firing a weapon within our camp. What if he missed or it ricocheted? He gave me the creeps, walking around screeching and talking to the air. His eyes would narrow and get bright. He walked off, and people gathered to see why the shot went off. Everyone just looked at each other confused.
“What just happened?” Knight 5 asked.
‘Sergeant Major just shot a dog, sir,’ I answered. He just looked around and exhaled greatly, and walked off. Anyways, today the sergeant asked me about that same dog. We presumed he died in the woods. Now he seems to be walking about, either him or his ghost.
“You tell your Sergeant Major he’s a shitty shot!” he said. I had to chuckle to myself.
I walked over to the puppies and the momma and watched them for a second. Sergeant Choy came over and turned the water on of the ditch where the puppies were laying. He said it was to water the bushes. The pups lay there to nurse and keep cool in the shade. At this time, Major Stanton came over and asked,
“Are you trying to drown them out SGT CHOY?” At least I wasn’t the only one seeing this.
“No Sir, but if I had the choice, I would cut their throats!” he said typically.
‘Ahhh, come on Sergeant Choy, all small creatures of the world deserve a chance to live,’ I said. He was just a tiny sour ball, a sour man. I just wanted to make a point that his brutality was no way to deal with his size insecurity.