Both hailed from Florida: Bill from Tampa, Tim from a rural community so far north that, “it might as well have been in Georgia.” In the gym, our dynamic could be summed up by that old chestnut about how many bodybuilders it takes to screw in a lightbulb. I always suspected that part of the reason they lifted with me was for contrast - the bodybuilding equivalent of a bride positioning herself next to the homeliest bridesmaid. But on the first night of a 96, I could be found with our platoon’s other music lovers clunking bulky, black binders onto the finished oak coffee table that I had helped Tim, the third cog in our weightlifting triumvirate, load onto Bill’s truck at the Goodwill a couple of miles from Camp Lejeune’s front gate.īill was tall and yoked. Tomorrow, we would lust after working class strippers at Toby’s or drive to Wilmington to get shot down by college girls. Overlapping guard platoons equaled a “96” - a four-day weekend - every three weeks. One of the job’s few perks was the schedule. We were the unwitting, led by the unqualified, doing jack-shit for the unlucky. Young men who had raised their right hand to serve their country but then - instead of only partaking in institutionally sanctioned substance abuse at the barracks - took a puff of a joint at a party while home on leave. A few had committed heinous acts, but most had just popped on a piss test. The job itself consisted of a 24-hour shift babysitting 20 to 40 military detainees and prisoners in an open squad bay that reeked of human excrement and industrial-strength bleach. Several of our staff non-commissioned officers seemed downright incompetent.
After a little over a year, brig company’s leadership had failed to impress me. Instead, I had pulled guard duty at the base brig. Joe character Mutt and the neodog K-9 Corps in Robert Heinlein’s science fiction novel Starship Troopers). I had enlisted into the military police career field with hopes of becoming a working dog handler (my impression of the job shaped to an embarrassing degree by the G.I. We sweat to the B-side Al Green that my weightlifting buddy Bill insists on playing bitch about the married marines who doubled their pay while avoiding the day-to-day bullshit of barracks life and sizzle with resentment at the temporary lapse in judgment that landed us in the suck.
If it’s a payday weekend, we drain Heinekens and Red Stripes. Picture a frat party with almost no women and even less common sense. The year is 1998, but I don’t imagine Camp Lejeune barracks parties have changed much since. Twenty or 30 military police - one of the most universally reviled occupational specialties in the Corps - the drunkest we would ever be in our lives. On the first night of our platoon’s scheduled four-day weekends, we would huddle in clumps around our muggy, maroon-carpeted barracks to drink and talk shit.
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