Puppy Love

My puppy, who at 3 1/2 months weighs 40 pounds, happens to adore blackberries soaked in Prosecco.

(I only gave her one, I swear.)

English In the Workplace

Lieutenant Kim, as his name suggests, is Asian. If I made a stab at his country of origin I’m sure I would be so far off as to frustrate the entire continent of Asia so I haven’t bothered, even at a very personal or secret level, to assign him a region. It’s a big continent and I don’t know much about the facial features associated with various parts of it. But I do know, from his accent, that English is not his first language. I also know that he is new to the battalion and has handled the discomfort of transition in one of my least favorite ways -- he’s trying to speak like, act like, and in all ways be like the enlisted community. It doesn’t feel natural or sincere and so he comes off as insecure and affected.

Our annual three week field exercise, FEX, is a very big deal. It involves over 600 personnel, lots money, and its purpose is to prove to some big military guy in the sky that we’ve not only been training, but that we’ve retained that training and understand how to apply it in a contingency situation. No one wants to blow it, so we practice. Practice happens a few times in homeport, each time lasts one day, and is called CPX. We had a CPX this week.

For the upcoming FEX I’ve been assigned to the MOCC which means I’ll be working with a super butch bull-dikey Equipment Operator. Together, operating on scandalously minimal sleep and unappetizing food, the two of us will record, communicate, and account for all convoys to include transportation of troops, fuel runs, and anything else that requires personnel to travel in vehicles.

This past CPX Butch and I were done with our work before noon and had nothing to do for the rest of the afternoon. She vanished and I sat around in the tent with our equipment and talked trash with my roommate from Cuba (we have a mutual friend whose ex-girlfriend tested positive during the last command drug sweep). By 1400 we were ready to go home and started asking around about the scheduled end of the exercise, always called EndEX.

Right around 1430 Lieutenant Kim walked into the tent and I asked him, “EndEX Sir?” He looked at me with a blank stare and then at my roommate. She said, “EndEX Sir. EndEX?” He shot us another quizzical look and then said in his thick and sometimes undecipherable accent, “What are you talking about?” And I answered, “EndEX Sir. Are you here to tell us that it’s EndEX?” Suddenly the subject changed, I can’t remember to what, but the Lieutenant was very interested in the new topic because he’s intent on being one of the troops, and I thought I was off the hook with the whole EndEX thing. But I was wrong because when the conversation came to a lull he asked, “Now, what were you talking about?” I answered, “We wanted to know if you came in to tell us the exercise was over. The end of the exercise. EndEX.” Lieutenant Kim looked me in the eye and said, with his accent and a stern tone, “You need to learn how to speak English.” And then he walked off.

I noted the irony, and the proof that Lieutenant Kim wasn’t sincerely interested in speaking or acting like the enlisted community (although, for the record, the word EndEX is universal among the ranks), and then promptly forgot about the exchange.

But this afternoon, gossiping with two women in engineering about who was pregnant and who lost her baby, I learned that the Lieutenant’s comment during CPX is the talk of battalion.

He deserves it.