A Brush With The Army
Sep. 9th, 2005 12:35 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
poliphiloJoe and I go to the Fulwood army barracks in Preston so he can collect his sick pay.
The army is a big, cumbersome bureaucracy- a bureaucracy plus organised violence.
Julie is our contact person. I guess she's in her upper 20s. She wears her blonde hair in a pony tail. I ask her if she's army. "No, I couldn't stand it. I'm too insubordinate," she says. "I'm a civilian. I can clock off at six and go get drunk."
I like Julie. She's not like the squaddies we run into. She makes eye contact and doesn't act like she expects someone to jump all over her at any second.
We were told to turn up before 10.00, but the Sergeant Major who doles out the sick pay isn't ready for us. He has to make a trip to the bank to collect funds.
Like I said- a bureacracy. "If I had to work in this system," I tell Joe, "I'd cut myself every bit of slack I could get away with."
I'm reminded of boarding school. It's partly the nineteenth century architecture and the way it's built around big squares. But it's also the atmosphere. Boredom, anxiety, bolshiness.
The Sergeant Major comes back from the bank. He speaks so soft and Scottish I can barely hear him. He too avoids eye contact. He opens a big brown envelope and deals out the twenties one by one.
The army is a big, cumbersome bureaucracy- a bureaucracy plus organised violence.
Julie is our contact person. I guess she's in her upper 20s. She wears her blonde hair in a pony tail. I ask her if she's army. "No, I couldn't stand it. I'm too insubordinate," she says. "I'm a civilian. I can clock off at six and go get drunk."
I like Julie. She's not like the squaddies we run into. She makes eye contact and doesn't act like she expects someone to jump all over her at any second.
We were told to turn up before 10.00, but the Sergeant Major who doles out the sick pay isn't ready for us. He has to make a trip to the bank to collect funds.
Like I said- a bureacracy. "If I had to work in this system," I tell Joe, "I'd cut myself every bit of slack I could get away with."
I'm reminded of boarding school. It's partly the nineteenth century architecture and the way it's built around big squares. But it's also the atmosphere. Boredom, anxiety, bolshiness.
The Sergeant Major comes back from the bank. He speaks so soft and Scottish I can barely hear him. He too avoids eye contact. He opens a big brown envelope and deals out the twenties one by one.
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Date: 2005-09-09 02:48 pm (UTC)Now, as you know, the US Navy doesn't usually allow alcohol in its fleet. But when we were in the Persian Gulf we couldn't often get ashore or even drink in most places so we brought along cases of beer which we would have on a barge alongside during those short periods when we were in port. We would put the beer on ice in 55 gallon drums and someone would hang a white bedsheet over the side of the ship onto which we would project movies. Steel Beach.
The beer was kept locked up while we were at sea but a guy I knew from Maine, name of Jim Givens I believe, snuck down into the hold and stole a case of beer. We snuck it into an electronics room behind the radar room, cutting out some insulation and tucking the case into a freezing cold air duct. After we got off duty each day we would go into the electronics room and have a can of beer. We called the place Jim's Bar and Radar.
Matter of fact, we got paid in cash, too, if we wanted.