Additional Train-up Week Photos

The school's official photo squad also took some lovely action shots the morning we were doing tactical movement (the morning I wasn't playing paparazzi), which can be found here, along with other platoons rotating through the other lanes.

Speaking of tactical movement day, I felt impressed to comment during train-up week on the word "freakin'" or "frickin'," but never quite found a place to squish it into the narrative. There are times and places in the military when colorful language is not just permitted, but where it is the norm. Over spring break this March, my best friend from college and I ran into Catherine Imes and one of her college friends outside the Palazzo in Florence. We chatted for about a half-hour and then parted ways. Afterward Jord asked me if Catherine and I were actually friends or just happened to know each other from class. The question surprised me, as I am quite fond of Catherine, so I asked what he meant. I finally got it out of him that he didn't think we would have that much in common since she, um, had a mouth like a sailor. "Well, um, she is a sailor." I had grown so accustomed to her non-Grandma-friendly colloquialisms that I hardly even noticed it anymore. She's certainly not an anomaly.

Here (USUHS, med corps, maybe all of the more "professional" sectors--I don't know) and now (2009), we operate under a kinder, gentler, more PR-friendly military. Or maybe just more PR-friendly. Or at least someone told someone that. To be honest, I don't really know how far-reaching and official the language clean-up has spread. What I do observe is that I am told that when I hear "freakin'" gunfire, I am to hit the "freakin'" ground and "freakin'" return fire. I never did a count, but I would estimate that had nothing been freaking anything else, certain of our debriefs would have been twenty to thirty percent shorter. The frequency with which the comically un-salty euphemism sprinkles the discourse of certain of our classmates and trainers speaks of both an incredible and admirable amount of discipline and conscious effort focused on breaking a habit and a previous habit of speech so peppered with expletives and emphasis as to have been nonsensical.

It's not that I don't appreciate the effort. And the sentiment. It's like a moist towlette for the mind. Somewhere between YouTube and embedded reporters and winning hearts and minds, we became more aware of who was watching and how we affected them. But, like a moist towlette, it is neither invisible nor automatic. It is a conspicuous reminder of the schmutz that was there before and the institutional decisions to counter it, an artifact of who we were that points to who we are becoming.