Chemistry Finals

Chemistry has never been an easy subject for me. I didn't take the prerequisite like I was supposed to. I know, there are prerequisites for a reason. But look, it had been about eight years since I was last in school and I've already had to take enough of these "Hey you've gotten kind of stupid over the years" classes that don't give you any transferable credit so I figured I'd take my chances.

Needless to say, I have to study to keep up with this class. It's really not a problem, I just gotta put some extra juice in it to keep up the ol' GPA. That being said, I'm taking an exam. Third one of the semester and it's no joke, I'll tell you that much. I should have studied more, but I was sick. Strepp infection in my throat; you ever had that? First time in my life; it really sucked. I don't have insurance so I was self-medicating and feeling properly sorry for myself for half a week. Somewhere in between the cans of Progresso soup and washing down Vitamin C tablets with Bud Light I, forgot about my impending test. Such is life.

I'm doing my best, trying to concentrate on stoichiometry and limiting reagent problems when my cell phone keeps going off. I had it on vibrate, but I was getting power called; I mean: it was blowing up. Try focusing on Ionic Solubility rules sometime when your celly's dry humping your leg like a bored Chihuahua. I couldn't even look at the stupid thing, if I pulled it out of my pocket I would've got kicked out of the test.

Ok, so now I'm kind of mad, I mean what's so damn important that you can't just leave a fucking voicemail, right? I turn in the test and walk out of the room, now the phone's fallen all the way down in my pocket and it's jangling all my coins around, sounds like my new Chihuahua just got a chain collar for his birthday.

Soon as I can, I'm checking the voicemail- the missed call list. Intriguing, to say the least. The first message is from Gloria, my friend's cousin and a friend of mine. I don't know her all that well although we're in both in the National Guard and she helped me move once. That more than qualifies her for a free beer over at my place any old day of the week. She says to me- well, to the recording device anyway- "Hey Jake, my Prima just told me. Tough break. If you need anything just let me know, ok?"

Huh?

I know, right? Then the next message, it's from a Platoon Sergeant that I've never even heard of. He's got this big, pissed-off voice that Sergeants like to use when they're mad, "Sergeant Myers, this Sergeant First Class Pantoja. You're late for Soldier Readiness Processing today, this doesn't look good on your first day with the unit, or as a leader. Call me back when you get this."

What?

Things are starting to become somewhat clear; apparently there's been some kind of mistake. This cat thinks that I'm in his unit. Well, I'm not. He says that I'm late for processing. Well no thank you, my friend. Only time a Soldier in the National Guard needs to do any kind of "processing" that requires them to be somewhere in the morning on a weekday is when they're getting deployed. I know; I've had to do it before.

Simple mistake, right? I muster up all the good-nature I have and call the guy back. He answers on the second ring, (or second whatever, no one's phone just rings anymore). At any rate, he picks up.

"Sergeant First Class Pantoja."

"Good morning, Sergeant. This is Sergeant Myers, I'm returning your phone call."

He clears his throat, "Sergeant Myers, is there any reason why you weren't at first formation this morning?"

"Yeah, about that, Sergeant, I think there may be some confusion here. I'm not in your unit, are you sure your admin gave you the number to the right Sergeant Myers? There are a few of us."

I hear some paper being turned on the other end. I can tell that he's got one of those big aluminum clipboards with a bunch of paper on it. "Myers, Jacob M." Then he reads off my social.

"Well… Fuck me."

"I'm assuming that the information is correct." It took me a second to recover, but I answered the man, "Yes, it's all correct, but Sergeant I was never informed that I was being transferred into a new unit, much less that I had to be somewhere today. When did all this come down?"

"Last week. Your old unit should have told you."

At last the problem becomes clearer. Now, I'm not trying to speak ill of the support I generally receive from my unit chain-of-command, but some of these cats and kittens rode the short bus to boot camp, if you know what I'm saying. I knew that if there were any answers to be had, I'd have to get in touch with one of them.

"Fair enough, Sergeant. I apologize for not being at my appointed duty station. I honestly didn't know."

He seemed to lighten up a bit. "These things happen. Just make it down as soon as you can. You've got a lot of paperwork to catch up on."

"Sergeant," my curiosity got the better of me. "What unit am I in now?"

"First Platoon, Alpha Company, First Battalion, Two Hundred and Twenty Second Infantry." I knew the unit, and I knew why they were processing today. But as I am not unlike most humans, I had a basic need to verify my suspicions.

"And the SRP is for deployment?"

"Afghanistan. Eighteen months."

Nice. Real fucking nice.

The next call I made was to Sergeant First Class Winters, the senior enlisted leader in what is now, apparently, my old unit. Took me three tries to get her on the line, I was somewhat perturbed.

"Hello?"

"Sergeant W, it's Sergeant Myers. How are you?" Pleasantries must be observed. I was mad, but I'm not an animal.

"I'm fine. I'm at work though. What's up?"

"Oh you're at work? How 'bout that. Yeah, I was in class up until a minute ago when I got an emergency phone call."

"Oh my God," she says with concern in her voice, "What happened?" Did she honestly have no clue?

"Well, I was taking a Chemistry exam- doozy of a test by the way, and I get a call from a Platoon Sergeant at the triple deuce infantry."

"Really!?"

"Really. </SPAN>Well, according to this gentleman, I am now a member of his fine organization."

"Oh, yeah." There was a moment of silence between us.

"Oh, yeah?"

"Well, your orders came out last week, didn't they?" Have you ever felt your blood boil inside your veins?

"That's the word on the street."

"Bummer."

"Yeah, bummer. Sergeant?"

"Yes?"

"Did you think that maybe somewhere in this process of receiving orders and transferring me to a new unit that- I don't know and I'm spit-balling here- but maybe we could have let old Jakey-poo know that he was gonna be humpin a ruck and kicking down mud huts in Ass-crack-istan for the next eighteen months?"

"Oh. No one told you?"

"That would be my point, yes."

"Well, someone should have told you."

"I'm inclined to agree."

"Whose job is that, anyway? I'll talk to them."

"It's your job, Sergeant. It's your job."

I don't know why I was in the mood to have one of the most pointless conversations of my adult life, but I did feel a little better for having vented.

I do want to make something very clear: I'm not complaining. Not in the strictest sense, anyway. I understand fully my obligations to my country and all that. I knew what I was getting into when I enlisted years ago. To tell you the truth, I don't have much sympathy for anyone who gets deployed and then spends the rest of their life whining about it. It comes with the territory; simple as that. Purpose of the reserve component is to activate in times of emergency and war.

What I was upset about was the manner in which I found out I was going. Come on! We're supposed to be professionals here; running an organization. Yet my friend's cousin gets the news before I do. Go figure. Hey, at least she was nice enough to call me up. That's more than I can say for my last unit.

This isn't my first rodeo, either. I spend a year in Iraq during the third year of troop rotation into the country or OIF III as we called it. Total time gone was just shy of sixteen months. I wasn't in any hurry to repeat the experience, but like I said; it comes with the territory.

The drive to the processing station was filled with endless mental chatter. I had to sort out all my finances, figure out what to do with my house… At least I didn't have to break up with a girlfriend this time. I hadn't even been home a year yet and I guess I just never bothered to get a new one. Looks like it was for the best.

I know; "Hey Jake, why you gotta break up with your old lady, man?" It sounds stupid at first, but you got to know where I'm coming from here. Relationships just don't make it through something like this most of the time. I mean, unless you got a real good thing going- you have to be honest with yourself about it- it's probably not worth all the heartache and hassle. Maybe I shouldn't be so clinical, but try to keep an open mind when I tell you that I know what I'm doing. Trust me when I say that unless you plan on getting married, or really give a shit about your current marriage, it's probably not worth it to stay together.

Oh, and telling my mother; God! Look, I'm just as masculine as the next guy as my florist will gladly tell you, but the hardest thing I had to do last time around was tell my poor mother that I was going. It wrecked her something fierce then, but this time I'm going in an infantry unit? Well, I was just going to have to lie to her, no doubt about it. I'll tell her it's a new type of unit and that our job is to monitor the inside of movie theaters for popcorn safety and coordinate tetherball games at elementary schools. By the time she figures it out, I'll be home from the deployment and she'll have nothing to worry about. Problem solved.

First piece of good news I get all day comes as soon I get to the processing center. I see my old boss from my first tour, Staff Sergeant Parker. He's a real good dude, he left the unit right after we got back home but now it looked like we were once again in the same boat. He saw me come in and he started to yell across the room, "Well fuck me! Look who decided to come to work after all!" He walked over with a big, toothy grin and shook my hand.

"I would've been here sooner but you know how your mom is, never wants to say goodbye."

There's something you should know about Soldiers, (or just about anyone in the military); nothing is sacred to us. If you spend every waking minute of every day with the same group of people, material for jokes may start to decline so subjects that may have once been considered taboo get ripped wide open: Mothers, race, religion, sisters, your invalid grandmother; it's all fair game. No one gets upset, they just try to get a better come-back.

Staff Sergeant Parker starts to catch me up, gets me a copy of my orders, shows me what paperwork I've got to do, where I've got to go, what people I've got to talk to. It's all pretty much the standard affair: fill out the finance paperwork so at the next post we go to they can tell us it's wrong and we have to do it over, get fifteen vaccine injections so at the next post someone can lose our shot records and we'll have to get them all over again, too.

Just an aside here: One benefit of any branch of the armed services- in case you were thinking about joining- is all the free vaccinations. Oh, it's a hypochondriac's wet dream, let me tell you. I'm immune to just about every kind of -itis and -pox there is. I have to admit though, I was a little disappointed last time around when they stopped our anthrax series one shot short of completion. They've got to spread all six of the shots out over a year- that's always a great sign- and the FDA recalled it after everyone in my unit was five shots deep. Look, all I'm saying is that if my kids are going to have nine heads because of it, fine, the damage is done, at least let me get the damn immunity out of it. It's kind of like seeing a guy on the street with a sign that says, "Kick in the nuts for chocolate cake." Let's say you're a bona fide choc-o-holic and you just got to have the cake, so you go up to the old boy and say, "I've considered your proposition, sir, and I accept." Then he kicks you in the jimmies and just runs away. There you are, laying in the road with sore baby makers, but alas:

No chocolate cake.

Now we're done with processing for the day so Bill (that's Sergeant Parker's first name; we can use those off duty), and I go for a beer at a bar close by. We're catching up on this and that, he's telling me about the wife and five kids; how they're all taking the news. This is going to be his third deployment in five years. He can count the months he's been home during this time on two hands.

It's more because of his job. A lot of people don't know this, but we have jobs in the military just like in the "really real world". Bill happens to have had an infantry job at one time, it's how he got pulled into this unit, that brought me to my next burning question.

"How did I get pulled into this? I've never been in the fucking infantry."

Bill started laughing so hard he almost choked on his beer.

"You're not the only one, man. Most of these kids don't either. They're trying to get you all sent to infantry school next month before we bug out."

I was again perplexed by the logic. "How does that happen?"

Bill shrugged, "Don't have enough qualified people, so they started volun-telling people they were going."

"Huh. So how did I get picked?"

"High PT score."

PT score is your Physical Training score, based off of an annual test where you do push-ups and run and all sorts of other bollocks. It's supposed to measure your overall fitness.

"You're shitting me."

"I shit you not."

"So pretty much," I reasoned, "Because I'm not fat and lazy, I get sent to Afghanistan."

Bill giggled over his Bud Light. "Pretty much."

"Punk rock."

I have to say that the parallel here between our last deployment was eerie. Here we were, once again. Just put into a unit, ready to deploy, trying to enjoy a beer before we're not allowed to have any more.

Bill sees it, too. He starts reminiscing about the last time we were downrange. Funny stories, the things that we remember first. The time I had to get batteries for our Hummers in a hurry and ended up having to wrestle a stubborn old motor Sergeant from 3rd Infantry Division in the middle of the night for them. I lost, but he gave them up anyway. (Hey, he had some kind of crazy old man strength or something. Don't judge me.)

Yeah, it's funny. We laugh about the dumb things; Hajjis that'll sell you anything, liquor smuggled in Listerine bottles, crap people did and didn't do, trouble they ended up in. We don't talk about the other stuff. The stuff that you think about and it brings bad smells to your nose and a sticky feeling in your gut. All the crap we know we're getting into again.

Like I said: I'm not complaining. Just doing my part. That's what I tell my mom when I finally drink up the nerve to call and tell her what happened. Despite my assurances, she doesn't believe my story about the new Tetherball Unit I'm a part of. She asks me what I think about the whole thing. I tell her that I think I'm going to have to go no matter what. She gets the joke, that wasn't her question and we both know it. I have my political opinions and I vote, I do my part. Do I think this is right?

Well, I think it's anything but black and white. I think there are too many Soldiers that didn't get to come home like I did. I think the bastards that start wars should have to fight them. I think I don't know what to think. I think I did pretty well on my Chem exam, but I won't know until tomorrow. I just hope I get to finish the semester.