(An essay about learning military lingo.)
“You don’t wanna be an airman no more, get yerselves promoted to SERGEANT!†shouted Sergeant Strale. On reflection, this was practical, even empowering advice. Only in the last ten years had the armed forces lifted the ceiling on women in the military (formerly limited to two percent of the corps), equalized men and women’s salaries, opened hundreds of closed specialties, and made promotion to higher ranks a reality. Sergeant Strale had enlisted in the days when women were recruited for their typing skills, made to wear skirts and heels, and expected to marry officers and leave the military; but he was quite the feminist in his ambitions for us—no less, when we had done well, than swift and well-earned advancement to “Chief Master Sergeant of the whole entire YEW ESS AY EFF!â€
Not all advice was empowering, even when it was practical. “Schneider, you don’t get it together, yer ass gonna be on rollerskates, right outta Lackland,†screamed Sergeant Santera, Sergeant Strale’s assistant. I was on the cement apron in front of our barracks, and I had marched right instead of left, or perhaps I had wussed out before the end of our morning run and collapsed panting on the cinderblock track, or maybe I had fallen into formation half a second late; it is hard to remember, there were so many incidents.
Sergeant Strale, as a male TI with a female flight, maintained a modicum of decorum, winking broadly as he told us that FIGMO meant “Finally, I Got My Orders†or when he said that SNAFU meant “Situation Normal, All Fouled Up.†Sergeant Santera was under no such constraint, and as a female TI may even have felt the need to prove her cussedness. She was about two inches taller than me, which meant when she tipped her head forward and screamed, my eyes were level with the crown of her ranger hat, which bobbed and tilted in front of me like an asp angling for a strike. Though my armpits gushed with perspiration and I prayed for an earthquake or nuclear attack to release me from this misery, I could not help noticing that Sergeant Santera’s diction was impeccable, the “don’t†like “dough†with an n at the end, and “gonna†very nearly one syllable. Her inflection rose and fell as if it were itself on rollerskates, gliding effortlessly around a rink in almost-flawless TI Haiku, an interesting bit of craft with irregular metrics and feminine endings:
The Screaming
You don’t get it toGETHer
Yer ass gon’ be on ROLLerskates
Right outta LACKland
— Sergeant Santera, Lackland AFB, August, 1983
I, a desperate understudy trembling in my fatigues and BCGs, listened carefully, if not to the meaning of what Sergeant Santera was saying—mostly, she was telling me I was clumsy, slow-moving, and disorganized, a message that rarely changed, and was unfortunately true—but the alluring way she said it, in such perfect, honeyed, elegantly scanned Air Force English. How I yearned to cross the river into her world.
Posted on this day, other years:
- The study of LGBT leadership: Bad questions from nice people - 2015
- My del.icio.us bookmarks for August 25th - 2007
I wonder about the cinderblock track, could it have been a cinder track (common) without the blocks. Cinderblock being another term for concrete block, commonly used for building walls. A cinderblock track is not impossible but unlikely.
Also, what are bcg’s?
A pleasure to read.
I think you’re right, it was a cinder track–a spongy surface (cinderblock would be extreme even by military standards). Easy enough to check.
BCGs (explained earlier in the essay–the darned problem of excerpting anything) are Birth Control Glasses, so called because they are *that* ugy… heavy black frames.
Cinder tracks are sharp reddish volcanic gravel. Nasty stuff to fall on but pretty grippy for running, in a low-tech sort of way. They make synthetic rubber tracks the same color as cinders. Tradition, I guess.
You can still run safely on a rubber track when it is raining. You won’t see much of that in California, but I bet you did that at Lackland. That blast of cool air in front of a squall line can feel pretty good. Until the rain hits.