This story would not be justified if I didn’t take a brief moment to acknowledge the injuries and victories earned at 4th platoon’s Great Rodeos.
On an occasion, Drill Sergeant would take a Sunday off, and with good reason. Being a Drill Sergeant is a demanding job. He has to be there every morning when we wake up until we go to bed at night. But, every now and then since there is no training on Sundays, he would have the day off. He would always tell us the night before that he would expect to come in Monday morning and see 1 coat of freshly polished wax on every square inch of barracks floor. This meant stripping off the many accumulated layers of wax and starting fresh. This sounds simple, but is a full day’s work of operating a floor buffer.
These were the days that we discovered better uses for the floor buffers. For those of you who have never had the pleasure of seeing a floor buffer, it is basically a 5000 RPM electric motor, mounted vertically to a rotating floor buffing disk. Extending about 3 feet out of the motor is a “T” shaped handle with a lever. Depressing this lever sets the motor into motion, buffing the life out of the floor beneath. What we eventually came to figure out, was that if you tape the handle in the depressed position and sit on said buffer, another soldier standing nearby would be more than happy to plug it in for you. The following scene would be one of elicit profanities, gambling, and body parts whirling around in every direction.
Now, I have never ridden a bull, and I’m not sure that I ever could, but I can tell you that I can ride a mean buffer longer than any other soldier in 4th platoon (or at least any other soldier who was stupid enough to try riding a floor buffer). At the last buffer rodeo, I won eight dollars, a contraband candy bar, a quarter sized gash and a permanent bald spot on the left side of my head from flying off and striking something hard on the ground - probably the perfectly waxed floor.
The next morning Drill Sergeant had guessed that something was up. He was probably tipped off by the copious amounts of blood on my pillow, followed by noticing the golf ball size scab that had formed on my hairless skull. Drill Sergeants’ first assumption was that a fight had occurred. Fighting is strictly forbidden and is punishable by a week of extra duty*.
There was only one excuse that we could use to avoid getting caught with a head injury of non-justifiable nature (which is pretty much any head injury). The only way out is to tell Drill Sergeant that you slipped and fell on your head while doing hand-stand pushups. “Bull shit” Drill Sergeant would always say with a sense of unnatural humor in his tone. He would never punish us after that though. I suppose he figured that our concussions, lacerations, contortions, and bruises were punishment enough for our non-sense (i.e. buffer rodeos). It was either that or he knew that you can’t fix stupid.
At one point or another during our training, every floor buffer that 4th platoon had ended up being shipped out for repairs. I can’t imagine why - you would think they could create a more reliable commercial floor buffer!
* Extra duty is a punishment issued to soldiers in which they are doing extra things around the barracks until midnight, every night, costing the soldier relaxation time and sleep. If there is nothing to be done around the barracks, the overseeing drill sergeant will have that soldier doing pushups until midnight.
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