Rock of the Marne

You know what really sticks in my craw? When political correctness demands that actual history be rewritten to accommodate those prone to outrage.

Don’t get me wrong, this isn’t another boorish rant on political correctness. It’s just a rant at shitty rewrites.

The Dogface Soldier was a song written for the Third Infantry Division, of which I was a part for about a year before transferring to a better job involving a red beret and sitting on my ass in front of a computer. In PLDC (the course required for promotion to Sergeant) we had to memorize this song, and actually sing it.

But the lyrics always sounded… off. Here they are as we were instructed:

I Wouldn’t Give A Bean
To Be A Fancy Pants Marine
I’d Rather Be A
Dog Face Soldier Like I Am

I Wouldn’t Trade My Old OD’s
For All The Navy’s Dungarees
For I’m The Walking Pride
Of Uncle Sam

On Army Posters That I Read
It Says “Be All That You Can”
So They’re Tearing Me Down
To Build Me Over Again

I’m Just A Dog Face Soldier
With A Rifle On My Shoulder
And I Eat Raw Meat
For Breakfast E’V’RY Day

So Feed Me Ammunition
Keep Me In Third Division
Your Dog Face Soldier’s A-Okay

When sung, it sounds even cornier than it reads. And this bugged me, so I looked up the song and found that it had been changed, somewhat dramatically. Here’s the original version:

I Wouldn’t Give A Bean
To Be A Fancy Pants Marine,
I’d rather Be A Dogface Soldier Like I Am.

I Wouldn’t Trade My Old O.D.’s
For All The Navy’s Dungarees
For I’m The Walking Pride Of Uncle Sam;

On All The Posters That I Read
It Says The Army Builds Men
So They’re Tearing Me Down To Build Me Over Again

I’m Just A Dogface Soldier
With A Rifle On My Shoulder
And I Eat A Kraut For Breakfast Everyday.

So Feed Me Ammunition,
Keep Me In The Third Division
Your Dogfaced Soldier Boy’s Okay.

(Bolded emphasis, mine.)

Was that really so offensive that they had to change it? The song was written in World War II. It was the music with which the legendary Audie Murphy is associated. Would anyone really have gotten their panties in a bunch if they’d just kept it as it was; an homage to the battles that distinguished the 3rd ID as a fighting force?

Here’s the music to the song:

I’m going to take a stab at putting something on here every day. Honestly, I probably won’t follow through on this because I’ll find myself straining to have an opinion on extremely trivial and mundane bullshit.

Kind of like Classmates.com.

After oh, let’s say 5 years of being pestered by these bastards I finally decided to sign up for the minimal subscription to view the people who’d signed my profile or some such. Whee. I could have spent that $15 on all kinds of things that would have provided more gratification; like a dozen boxes of thumbtacks to roll around naked on. Yeah, I ended a sentence with a preposition, what.

TL;DR version: 4 of the 8 people who’d “signed” my profile page had absolutely no connection to me whatsoever. These people I assume are plants by Classmates.com that trigger the “Hey hey hey! You’ve got people who want to talk to YOU YOU YOU” type emails that have been spamming my inbox over the years. That might sound all “tinfoil-hat conspiracy-ish” to you, but having worked for two different Social Networking companies I have enough first-hand knowledge to know better.

As far as the other 4 go, 3 of which were people I had barely known and one was an Army buddy I still keep in touch with every so often. So Classmates.com was batting .150 for people I gave a shit about.

I did have an email from a girl (well, woman now I guess) who I vaguely remember running against for 8th grade student council president. We both lost, to the cute girl who promised in her campaign speech to get rid of detention hall and secure the lunchroom borders. Or something. What’s funny is that we actually had a back-room conference with the principal after her victory to confer about her unethical promises and pandering*. I really had no objections since I ran on a platform of “I get to stand up in front of the school and be a jackass for 5 minutes for my own personal amusement”.

Anyway…

So yeah, I certainly didn’t get my $15 worth out of Classmates.com. And to top it off, I was spammed with more goddamn offers for crap I didn’t need as a part of the sign-up process. What the hell? I was already giving you guys my fucking money, and you felt the need to try and squeeze more out of me?

Were I Gene Siskel I’d give Classmates.com one big, desiccated middle finger up for being a waste of bandwidth and the single biggest disappointment as far as Social Networking sites go. Hell, it’s the granddaddy of them all and had the potential to be what Facebook is today. Instead, it’s a festering pit of pop-ups, spam, and things we should leave behind.

*She’s probably working for Karl Rove now although I can’t be bothered to log back in to that site and find out.

Back when I was a young Buck Sergeant in the U.S. Army, I ran into trouble trying to re-enlist. It wasn’t because the Army didn’t want to keep me around, even under Clinton they were smart enough to try and keep an NCO who’d maxed his promotion board.

No, it was the Company Commander who was holding up my re-enlistment because he knew I was going to take the option to bail on his ate-up unit as a part of my package. My enlistment was up in 2 months, and he wanted me to somehow take care of it after I joined them on a 3 month excursion to the Middle East. Apparently other people had jumped ship and his ass was in a sling trying to find competent NCOs who’d prop up his house of cards on their backs.

Whatever, I was 23, and resigned to GTFO of that mess on to either a cushy job as the BN Signal NCOIC (setting myself up for a relatively lucrative IT career as a civilian), or joining the 160th Special Ops Aviation Regiment on the way to trying out for Special Forces.

But I was getting the run-around with paperwork because of Captain Dirtbag, and my ETS (end time of service) date was fast approaching.

So one morning I was running Company PT and leading the formation in cadence on our 4 mile run. Something came over me and I channeled the spirit of Marshall Mathers and improvised the following cadence, on the spot, which was to be repeated line-by-line, by the entire company as we ran. (For those of you unaware of Army culture, I’m including footnotes so this makes more sense to you.)

Sergeant Coffee¹ what is up?
Will you tell me why, I can’t re-up²?
Is it DA³, is it the M-TOE⁴?
Or is it because of my C.O.⁵?

In hindsight, I could have gotten my ass put in a sling over this, and how. One of the senior E-6’s, upon me finishing my little improved cadence, exclaimed “damn!” with wide-eyed amazement and involuntarily covered his mouth out of shock. It’s a wonder how I got away with that, especially since I’d been yelled at for calling other cadences that were simply politically incorrect. Such as:

You go into the playground
Where all the kiddies play
You em-ploy your Claymore
And blow them all away

With a left-right-left-right-left-right-kill.
Left-right-left-I-think-I-will”.

For you paranoid breeders, that cadence is older than dirt and common in units without sand in their vaginas or concern for being politically correct. I do not own any claymores and would not be happy if someone used one on a playground. Besides, this isn’t even the worst cadence I’ve ever heard. That would go to an ex-Marine who was our unit Armorer in Panama:

(To the tune of The Beverly Hillbillies themesong):
Now listen to a story ’bout a man named Jed
Poor mountaineer, barely kept his family fed,
Then one day he was porking Ellie Mae
When up from his stuff come a-bubblin’ spray.

Next thing you know Ellie began to swell
Kin-folk said Jed this is what you do:
Get a can of Lysol and a coat hanger too…

I swear to god, this was an actual cadence, pretty much word-for-word, called while running the hills on Fort Clayton, Panama. And to top it off, there was a female Lieutenant running with us who called the guy out of formation and with tears in her eyes, chewed his ass for it. As we kept running by I could still see the hint of a remorseless grin on his face.

Anyway, that’s my fuzzy memory for the day.

1. The reenlistment NCO, in charge of getting me to stay in the Army.
2. Reenlist, duh.
3. Department of the Army.
4. Modified Table of Organization and Equipment – basically a unit’s inventory including soldiers.
5. Commanding Officer.

Boredom and the desert make for great pranks.

We were at NTC (The U.S. Army National Training Center out in the California desert) doing the tear-down of equipment and stuff to ship back to our unit so we could get the hell out of there. As an E-4 due to be promoted in the next few months to Sergeant, I got stuck running this detail.

For those of you who’ve never had one, the MREs (Meals Ready to Eat) we were stuck subsisting on, came with a nifty little chemical “heater” in the hopes that adding heat to the main entres would help offset the fact that most of them tasted like mashed feet.

You just slide the food pouch into the sleeve, dump some water into it, and then lean it up against a “rock or something” to heat. Literally, there was a diagram on the package of the package leaned up against a “ROCK OR SOMETHING”. Obviously both the manufacturer and the Army didn’t give us much credit for brains. That’s probably why they didn’t consider that we’d figure out that the chemical reaction released a lot of gas.

One of the good things about this detail was that we could cut out and go raid a mini PX (convenience store). After wrapping up 3+ weeks in the desert we were gorging on ice cream bars and gatorade, and weren’t really paying attention to the crappy MREs we’d been forced to eat until someone noticed that the ventilation hole in the Port-a-John outdoor toilet was the exact width of a 32 oz bottle of Gatorade.

It’s at this point of the story where I wish there was some complete jerk involved, or even some clueless, hapless private deserving of his fate by some twisted, junior-junior-NCO sense of logic. But there wasn’t. There was just PFC Seifer. Or was it Seeder? Crap, I don’t remember his name, but it’s not important. Blonde guy, about 20. Nice kid.

But he was about to be a casualty of bored soldiers in the desert.

I’m not much of a story teller so there’s no glorious climax to this tale. We ripped apart 5 MRE heaters and crushed up their contents using improvised mortar and pestle drawing upon our caveman roots or the native spirits of the land or some other bullshit. Then we dumped it into an empty, sun-dried Gatorade bottle, added water, screwed the cap back on, and shook it up. Standing on the back of another soldier I dropped the improvised gas grenade down the ventilation shaft and into the portable toilet, which was occupied by PFC S-whatever.

I say I’m not much of a story teller because by now you’re probably expecting this guy to run screaming out of the toilet with his pants around his ankles and a severe chemical burn on his ass. But naa, no such greatness was achieved this day. The Gatogrenade did make a loud report, like the sound of a shotgun blast or a car backfiring, muffled by the enclosed green plastic walls of the mobile outhouse. And there was a yell from its occupant, but it wasn’t one of pain; just surprise and anger.

And I wish we’d had the foresight to remove all but the barest essential amount of toilet paper. Because fortunately for PFC S. there were two full rolls in there that he could use to clean himself up after the explosion splattered the basin’s contents back onto the parts of him that were exposed at the time. Apparently it did take the two full rolls to accomplish this, and he still smelled like shit and whatever chemical additive they put in there in a futile effort to cover it up.

Good times.

Ok, so I’m not so much of a nerd that I’m going to piss and moan about George Lucas raping my childhood with Greedo shooting first and the rest of the crap he did when he screwed around with the original versions of the Star Wars films.

But I always did like the Ewok song at the end of Return of the Jedi. As a kid I thought it was catchy and it was kind of nifty how the end blended whatever the hell the Ewoks were singing, with English, although I was never quite sure what they were saying. I was mildly miffed that they replaced it with corny instrumentals for the “remastered” version. (Ok, the dumb-looking circular explosion effect when the Death Star went down was irritating too.)

So my assumption for the past 20 years or so was that the last line was “time to break the laaaaaaawww…” (queue Star Wars theme).

I never really got why after defeating the Emperor and restoring freedom to the galaxy it would be time to break the law, but hey, I was a kid and I wasn’t putting too much thought into it.

Still though, it didn’t seem very “Jedi”.

But this morning a co-worker of mine sent me a link to the lyrics to the actual song. They actually had lyrics to this thing?

Turns out, not only did they have lyrics, but there was a translation.

Here’s the song, and here’s the lyrics:

Yub nub, eee chop yub nub,

Freedom, we got freedom,

toe meet toe pee chee keene, g’noop dock fling oh ah.

and now that we can be free, c’mon and celebrate.



Yah wah, eee chop yah wah,

Power, we got power

toe meet toe pee chee keene, g’noop dock fling oh ah

and now that we can be free, c’mon and celebrate.



Coat ee chah tu yub nub,

Celebrate the freedom



Coat ee chah tu yah wah,

Celebrate the power



Coat ee chah tu glo wah.

Celebrate the glory.



allay loo ta nuv

celebrate the love

Glo wah, eee chop glo wah, ya glo wah pee chu nee foam,

Power, we got power, and now that we can be free,



ah toot dee awe goon daa.

it’s time to celebrate.

Coat ee cha tu goo (Yub nub!)

Celebrate the light (Freedom!)



coat ee cha tu doo (Yah wah!)

celebrate the might (Power!)



coat ee cha tu too (ya chaa!)

celebrate the fight (Glory!)



allay loo tu nuv (3 times)

celebrate the love



Glo wah, eee chop glo wah.

Glory, we found glory

Ya glow wah pee chu nee foam,

The power showed us the light



ah toot dee awe goon daa

and now we all live free

allay loo tu nuv.

celebrate the love.

“Celebrate the Love”? Meh, that’s just awful. I guess George Lucas really did take a steaming crap on my childhood. THANKS GEORGE.

P.S. Han did shoot first, don’t be such a fucking hippie.