Recanting Holzhof

Book 3 The Holzhof Enchantment 1 John 4:1,  “Dear friends, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God”.  I …

HueBirrRue Deh • The Holzhof Enchantment

Later that week Iraq was invaded by American and I was told it probably would fall under ” Needs Of The Army” that I couldn’t pursue an education at West Point.

Looking back knowing what I know now I should have gotten royalty pissed off at that ignorant statement and demanded Top, my First Sergeant give me some advice saying that “my first lines of defense have utterly failed me and all our officers have their heads in their asses!” And just repeated that until the First Sergeant spoke to me.

Our First Sergeant was an outstanding human being, who spoke directly and smiled at his own jokes, demanded great things of his men and didn’t put up with piddly details. He would have certainly guided me in the right direction.

As it was I decided I wasn’t fond of officers and that 10 years of only having them to talk to and hang out with would suck the very marrow from my soul, so I put the letter in my paperwork folder and focused on my job instead.

I was in a tank platoon that didn’t drive tanks in Kosovo, but there were tanks on the FOB or Forward Operating Base and I got to crawl around I’m them, with shoes on I’m just over 6 feet tall and and my shoulders are more broad than most peoples which made getting around in the the tank pretty difficult. It was cool to work on but I was glad to be infantry and not stuck in the belly of a tank trying to move around, the tank scene in Indiana Jones makes it look like there’s all the room in the world in a tank… There’s not.

Life went by in Kosovo pretty uneventfully I started running every day and doing the treadmill, Christmas came and I met Uncle Phil from Fresh Prince through a USO event I also met Drew Carey and the Bengals Cheerleaders, they all came to Kosovo through the USO which was pretty cool.

My infantry platoon members would check on me from time to time but we didn’t have much to say to each other.

Brian was living in the same row of Cone Box storage containers as I was so I’d visit him pretty often. We were always glad to see each other and had gone to a few places in Germany together.

Brian was not happy with his living situation he had grown up with parents who worked in finance and inhereted 5 million dollars and shipped his Porsche from America to Germany as a lower enlisted man. Brian was accustomed to a higher standard of living but he never complained about that, what drove him bonkers was his roommate, a guy literally named Teddy Bear. That was his legal name.

Teddy Bear was a bit off kilter he had been a fudge packer in a fudge packing factory before joining the Army and would talk about it all the time, back in Germany I avoided Teddy Bear. There was plenty of good German beer to drink and everyone had something harder in thier freezer in the barracks and shared freely, but Teddy Bear didn’t consume alcohol he drank microwaved Robotussin by the liter from a large German mug. Nasty.

Besides braiding 550 cord into key rings Teddy Bear didn’t do say or think much, and he never left his room under any circumstances. He was always there. This drove Brian nuts..

Brian was bodybuilder, had fought a few times in the UFC and liked getting out and doing stuff. There wasn’t much to do in Kosovo so he lifted heavy and yelled at Teddy Bear.. That’s what Brian’s life was reduced to.

Brian had a lot of muscle magazines with men in speedos on each page, but when I had attended Bodenseehof a Russian who couldn’t speak English very well bought the same magazines, followed thier advice and grew a significant amount of muscle as a result. So in spite of all the pictures I knew the advice was worth reading.

Brian’s favorite magazine was muscle mag, so whenever I’d go over to hang out he’d tell me about a different interview he had read, taught me the names of his favorite body builders and explained how to “feel the the lift” when lifting weights. We never worked out together, but we’d spend a lot of time talking about working out, using different techniques to grow larger and the stories bodybuilders had.

Brian never gave any advice on weightlifting but I did learn a lot from hanging out with him.

Spring started to arrive and I think everyone in my unit was glad for it.

People started getting cycled through a rotation to Sophia, Bulgaria for a weekend of R&R.

When Brian came back from his three day in Bulgaria he had a footlocker full of steroids.

He never offered any to me and I had no interest in taking them, but they were there.

We visited in his room with Teddy Bear there braiding away and talk about Muscle Magazine articles and Brian would talk about his steroid usage and a new workout routine that he had tried based off the advice he was getting from his magazine.

A few weeks went by and Brian said to me that he had injected oil into his calves and worked out his calves for three hours and that the muscle had turned to the consistency of jello, that he grabbed a fist full of calf muscle and his calf kept the imprint of his fist.

I thought he was exaggerating but a couple days later a sergeant from my mortar platoon stopped me and said they were on a dismounted patrol in the mountains climbing steep hills and Brian kept screaming to slow down because he wasn’t using all of his leg muscles, only his quads and shins. The sergeant went on to say they stopped to examin him and Brian performed his party trick, grossing everyone out. Then the sergeant laughed, screamed “It was disgusting bro!” And walked off.

I really got along with the tank platoon. They were just as wild and crazy as the infantry and Combat Arms in general but they seemed to actually think about the consequences to thier actions before acting upon them whereas the infantry guys lived off impulse rather than thought process and suffered many unnecessary consequences as a result.

The tank platoon had a quicker wit and more eloquent humor with the ability to imply something inappropriate rather than having to say it out right as shock factor humor.

I was more myself around the tankers but as with the village in Papua New Guinea, the FAYD group in high school, the church people in Orlando and the students at Bodenseehof I was in and accepted but didn’t really belong and couldn’t fully relate. I didn’t have to know how to operate a tank inside out. I was potentially going to dedicate twenty years of my life working on tanks. My platoon and MOS motto wasnt “Death Before Dismount”

But I was in a tank platoon for several months and enjoyed the company immensely.

I think I was deployed nine months to Kosovo, we didn’t ever drive around in tanks we used HMMWVs and did patrols on foot providing a presence for KFOR

I started struggling with weight gain in Kosovo it was like Narnia there, “always winter and never Christmas” and I had worked out hard in basic training but still had never achieved an endorphin rush from exercise.

I was told to go to the gym in my free time and spend as much time as possible on the treadmill. I hated it but I did it.

Eventually it became apparent that I needed guidance so I was put into a Remedial PT program and my Squad Leader, God love him was well intended but he also struggled with his weight and simply didn’t have the experience or know how besides the by the book process. So we struggled together but i learned nothing.

Meanwhile in the mortar platoon one of the sergeants was having marital problems, started a caffeine addiction. As in buying a pack of caffeine pills and popping a Box at a time. He did lose 60 pounds in a couple of months without doing any exercise but he made everyone nervous.

While in Kosovo I received a letter from West Point stating that based off my ASVAB scores I was in the less than 1% of enlisted that qualified for free education through them on the condition that serve six years as an officer. If I had been married or had any obligations to anyone for anyone at the time I would have taken advantage of the opportunity right away.

As it stood I was struggling with balancing working full shifts and doing PT on my own and keeping my weight down and wasn’t sure if I wanted to serve 10 years for a free education.

I had a career but didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life.

I was told to talk to some officers who were working in the office that oversaw the unit. Everyone made jokes or just smiled at the coincidence of their rank and name’s being cartoonishly inappropriate Captain Love and Major Nutter just needed to work for a guy named General Stud to complete the story.

Anyways, I went to the two officers but they were of no use in terms of giving advice or being passionate about their education process and the sort of payoff you get from being an officer. They looked at the letter with a little bit of interest and muttered something not worth remembering and dismissed me, even though I was still trying to figure out if they thought it was worth my while to pursue.

I thought about it for a few days, tried making conversation with several officers, but they all kept aloof, wouldn’t drop military pretenses and spoke vaguely, they were bougie with no life experience qualifying them to advise anyone on anything and I could smell a lack of confidence on them that the enlisted talked about and motivated the enlisted men to simply “yes” an officer to death then work around the walking corpse.

Ultimately I decided not to pursue a career as an officer, i saw them as distant on a personal level, detached from reality, and not the sort of people I wanted to fraternize with for ten years with. They saw themselves as intellectuals rather than merely fortunate and left a bad taste in my mouth.

friend who was more coherent wasn’t having it and claimed the taxi as theirs. Ultimately we got a different taxi to Amberg where Brian got a tattoo on a whim.

I was waiting outside of the tattoo parlor people watching when Brian ran outside screaming and laughing like a madman he threw smoothing blue from his pocket at a couple holding hands and did a dance.

When he calmed down he explained that he slept with that girl a few hours ago and had thrown her bra in her face in front of her boyfriend.

I said “Huh” and he finished getting his tattoo.

That Monday the whole base was on lockdown and speeches were given about gang activity and race relations. As we were waking to work I started thinking about that tattletale who had gotten me arrested and asked what the Army word for a Narc is. Someone yelled CID and demanded I say who I saw that was CID at the strip club, I said I had no clue but the Hispanic guys had a discussion about this and said someone at that club was a narc CID and we were all getting punished because of the rat.

Later that day four different black guys walked up to me and told me “good looking out on CID” and called their N-word with the A sound on the end.

Everyone said they would figure out who the CID was and take care of him. I decided it was a great decision to not become a cop or military police.

Not long after that people started asking me to induct them into the Freeemasons because they said I carried my self like one and spoke one. It took a few years to figure out why people thought I was a Freemason and the best explanation I can come up with is that the church I attended and spent all my free time at was a Southern Baptist church, masons have to get their masters to get higher in thier organization and Southern Baptist have to have a masters to work for the church so that denomination attracts masons who have to confess a brief in a diety.. That church was wierd enough that i believe I did talk to a few Freemansons growing up and thier influence rubbed off on me.

All four years in though I was confused for a mason.

C) KFOR: Peacekeeping In Kosovo

I settled in to military life fairly quickly and before I knew it a deployment was coming up. I think I got to Germany in late June or early July and was deployed to Kosovo by October, my paperwork was slow I’m being processed. I was inprocessed to my division but not my platoon so I deployed to Kosovo with a tank platoon