My last training mission has ended. The remainder of our Ft. Hood experience will be cleaning and packing. I remember my last mobilization; we must have re-packed our gear a few dozen times, each time with some tiny detail added or excluded. Have four socks in your rucksack, six in your A-bag. No, make it five and five. And on the tarmac too, waiting for our bird, the bags were dumped and packed again with little piles of personal items left behind to be lost forever. The Army calls this Reindeer games.
The Army plays a lot of Reindeer games. Eight trucks my platoon washed for turn-in today will be driven on tank trails tomorrow. Dirtied again and cleaned again. A four-day pass requires counseling, a risk assessment and contact information. Each day these papers are reformatted and filled out again. I think of the movie Groundhog Day and I want to play the piano and rob an armored car and get the girl.
In the haze of Reindeer games, there are tricks to keeping your sanity. A long distance runner will find objectives along the way to run towards, goals to achieve to break the monotony of the trek. Surrounded by Reindeer games, we beat down monotony with our own goals, our own little moments of happiness to race towards. I’m racing towards four days and nights in Austin. Four days of medium rare ribeyes and tall glasses of Jameson, putting my gut and liver at peace one last time before I see the desert again.
And after I’ve run to Austin and my trek puts those days and nights behind me, I’ll look forward to another, and the Reindeer games will pass by like mile markers on the road to something better. Jumping through flaming hoops to find boat drinks and sunsets and Rockette girls on the other side.
- The Exodus
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