Hecate In My Boot Camp Days
Landing.for.text.search=> HECATE ETACEH <=hcraes.txet.rof.gnidnaL
++++++++++++++++++
+ Now Here..
+ I am posting a memoir chapter of my “Army Stories” book,
+ even while I also try very hard to wrap up excerpts from
+ post-modern ancient mystery romance “Dark Of Light”
+
+ And me especially trying to wrap up our study of
+ Our Divine Sister Hecate. .. {Here}
+ So I want you to know why I’m posting this from
+ the other book now. …
+
+> Because now I suddenly suspect Our Divine Sister
+> has UNVEILED her divine sovereignty TO ME NOW,
+> sending some blessing thru my Father’s memories.
+
+ So below are pages 30 thru 43 of “Army Stories”.
+ Open the 247 page Pdf file… {Open.Pdf.File}
+ The book’s Overview Page… {Here}
+++++++++++++++++++++++
(I’m sorry this excerpt is so long. There’s also a fun post where Sister Hecate “owns the road”… {Here} .. which is shorter and it’s a Female Divine Fantasy Dancing Fair too!!)
(This long excerpt below, this is an exploratory fictional memoiur of MY EARLY MANHOOD, really trying to see what really almost happened at that time. It’s a rather long chapter of a previous novel.
.. And right here while writing this, I am finally connecting the dots of Our Divine Sister’s powerful and mysterious presece with me then.
.. (And I mean “powerful and mysterious” like if you search in the posts for “fisher king”.)
.. So, this long excerpt here, from AN EARLIER MEMOIR in my mind now this material is jybing and gibbing and chiming CLEARLY with what it seems like I have learned here of the ways of OUR MOTHER’S ELDEST DAUGHTER, in the first book’s material.)
So the following excerpt begins on paperback page 30 of “Army Stories”.. {Open.Pdf.File}
My boot camp days. Might surprise you. Actually I had three different periods of army basic training, three time periods, me performing different roles, evolving viewpoints inside the army hierarchy.
Each basic training period with moral injury of more or less degree, degrees of injury that seemed like kind of brutal initiation degrees, speaking truthfully, initiations into some unbelievably wise school, and order, of philosophy.
My first boot camp was THREE YEARS, in U.S. Army’s youth preparation arm, at Milby High School in East Side Houston.
Our Milby was a really tough school, big old high school, knives seen in hand, knife play real or threatened now and then, or always rumors of it. I carried a handy harmless pocket knife with a sharp point.
I caught a bright-bleeding knife cut to the side of my hand one time, me with another ROTC fellow, us two idiots, for the benefit a few ROTC colleagues who were standing around.
We two stupids thought an improvised demonstration, of a knife move from an Army training film we’d seen, but a demonstration of that move by two idiots, we thought that would be a good idea.
A pressure bandage at the school Nurse’s office. No problem.
No cigarettes allowed around the doors, big school crowded on a limited lot, situated on that large city’s inner old east side, being at that time a large swath of poor housing.
Housing Mexican people mostly. Including a girl with a Mexican Native face of breathtaking magnificence, whom I courted briefly, holding hands but once. She sighing to my whispers. I looked, but found none other shining in my eyes. Ambassador Austin, courting in Mexico City, found a princess sighing to his whispers.
There was, on purple velvet, inside a very ornate gilded glass antique case, close inside of Milby High’s front doors, a large antique display case, golden in appearance, in the school’s entry hall, and that’s a place of hollow echoes. A large glass-encased prop with which we often took our photographs.
It was a magnificently taxidermied wildlife head, a thing of moist horn, and summer’s fur, and life, gleaming eye, done quite beautifully. Reflecting its own honor on the purple velvet. The taxidermied head of the last buffalo ever hunted down out westward from there, in Central Texas, further on toward Mexico, once a country of vaqueros.
We called ourselves the Buffalos. Our colors were the colors of that gold and purple cabinet.
And it was the golden age of paperback books, a fact to which I owe my education.
I would read Thucydides and Mad Dickinson, and the completely wretched Rise And Fall Of The Confederate Government, that is an actual book, the Rise And Fall Of The Confederate Government, and I would read lots and lots more far far more more interesting than that, all of it from paperback racks of a drugstore near my bus stop. My money got in cash each Sunday, working at a neighbor’s grocery store.
One Houston teevee station had a show of Hollywood movie classics, for which the stylish blond-color wooden teevee box of our living room was MINE for a lengthy hour after school. I always occupied a very small area of floor, for my cinema studies, in that long-hour voyage to Classic Hollywood, every school day afternoon.
very near the teevee pictures, I occupied a tiny islet of the floor. I noticed Wizard Hitchcock, and The Sovereign Spider Empress Bacall, and fell in love with Shakespeare movies.
Loved especially young Rooney as Puck in that famous film of Midsummer Night, the instant Rooney’s Puck is leering out from under the shrubs, right? It’s God Pan, the only one, leering right out of the bushes, leering right out of the teevee box, leering straight out at me in my living room, close up the teevee screen. Wham. So you see, I am a Shakespeare fan.
Our tiny cadet training battalion, for such we were at Milby High, about sixty of us, on average, during my six half-year semesters. Sixty is a small number rather something kind of like U.S. Army Old West often was. Ours was a very limited but serious business. We took it seriously.
We raised the flags at the start of school hours every morning. A slightly onerous little detail of two or three, with someone of our cadet sergeants or lieutenants leading, whatever flags it was. This was only staffed with volunteers, you understand.
At the end you whisper to your mates, Attention and Hand Salute, Order Arms, At Ease. Our single flag pole stood centered in a little yard of grass and compact trees, just right outside the Buffalo’s doors, on a major bus route of the large city’s bus utility.
I have a fond memory relating to this, that I am hesitating to tell you, quite surprisingly, because I don’t want to share it with anybody! This memory is so beautiful to me. But it is this…
I’m guessing this was in my second week of High School ROTC, but it may have been my third, but not the fourth.
The clothes I’m wearing, it’s a little sketch of a soldier uniform in KHAKI but, yes, it is an actual soldier uniform for the likes of me.
These clothes I’m wearing could have been the stiffly wrinkled khaki work clothes of a greasy car mechanic, legendary individuals who were called grease-monkeys from the way their clothes looked.
Yes, without a good conservator to look over these two sets of khaki shirts and trousers, with two little cloth patches and two metal pins for each shirt, and a cloth cap with its pin, and my own shoes, and only my hand-drawn notes from a brief lecture on how to assemble the ensemble. Without someone hand-caring for these clothing items correctly, well then, that morning behind the school, I would have been just a kid wearing a grease-monkey suit, with a significant weapon on my shoulder. In Houston.
By the way, this story concerns me, third-week-of-high-school me, helping a nice old lady walk along her way unmolested, on a long city block in a slum. It’s a nice story. I’m telling you right now, that is what this story is about. Just so we don’t lose track.
Well, my dad was a grease-monkey sometimes, but he had been a soldier too, and still kept a few of his best old uniforms.
.##JUMP-IN POINT.. My blog is “neural” .so. it happens in another post i’m imagining you, yes you, should have a link landing here. ..BONUS:: Unless something’s broken, put the URL in ANY browser window. .. .. URL=> https://stonerileydruidclassroom.wordpress.com/2020/05/15/hecate-in-my-boot-camp-days/#EighteenthCenturySword
And he kept an enemy flag that he had captured out of an enemy storage closet, and an old antique Eighteenth Century parade sword that he had looted from a shattered museum, in a shattered enemy city, having entered the museum though a broken door in a burning street.
By my estimation, this prize has you mobile afoot, thus geared very light for travel, so aiming for a port on the coast somewhere close-by, so your armament is light in extreme, so you’ve got probably, like, a standard bayonet, M-1 carbine, a few bullet cans left full, and your insignia OF petty rank prominently displayed on your helmet to deflect all visual attention, and your helmet of course.
But you are one of the recent huge attack’s first-shock surprise-assault troops returning to their base, and YOU ARE STILL ALIVE.
So the main thing certainly is, you’re walking downhill toward the coast, and you’re looking for some lunch. And there is a burning city, there’s a BURNING CITY, RIGHT THERE, and there’s a BURNING MUSEUM, a BURNING MUSEUM, and the door’s broken open, so of course you go in and see what’s waiting for you.
He was a soldier of air and foot at that time, a First Lieutenant.
We had no ammunition at Milby High, but a sufficient armory of M-1 World War Two Garand rifles, the ones with a flat single-piece roughened butt plate and an eight-bullet clip. And the bayonet mounting stud just rear of the muzzle, if I recall correctly.
Be that detail as it may, the M-1 Garand has multiple hard-steel things of thin width protruding at the front end and it has a sledgehammer’s face on the butt. And it rests pretty easy on your shoulder, and gives a firm grip. Rather too heavy than they should be, but definitely a handy club. And there were optional shooting lessons in the summer.
We had a few of the smaller M-1 carbines too, supposedly meant for our unit’s officers on parade, but very much out of style for that, and never used for that. I admired it.
The sturdy, compact, imminently portable, M-1 carbine, which my father also chose, but him for carrying earnestly, as a soldier of air and foot in World War Two Europe. Him an aircraft landing pilot in their largely suicidal air-to-ground assault arrangements at that time.
Crash the thing, and if you live, scream the soldiers to debark, then grab your useful little automatic-action gun and straggle home to your airfield across the Channel. Preposterous. Straggle home through scenes of carnage, in which you do take part. And struggle through the horrid dreams. The army duty of my father.
At Milby High, out back the school, our sturdy little wooden headquarters, a kind of simple lumber cabin, seemed to carry on the U.S. Army Old West theme.
And it was in there our armory was hidden, behind a locked door reinforced with iron bars. A storage room of Army firearms at a tough high school. Eventually I had a key to get a key to open it.
That is to say that trust was key. The actual keepers of our keys, our attending adults, would eventually loan keys to me on request, trusting in competence and honor.
I learned there first about rifle rifling, from our Panamanian U.S. Army four-stripe sergeant. A quiet man who took things quite intelligently, our deputy commandant.
Me still first semester there, me seeing rifle rifling first time. Me peering up an M-1 barrel, in the yellowish light bulb light of that small hidden armory room.
Some came for our military drumming squad, who practiced earnestly far above my drumming skills. Others simply for the sense of voluntary discipline, our neat dressing and polite comportment.
I tried to set a good example.
Some, such as me, came premierly for the optional field summer training. A thickly forested Army base, at the far end of a long evening bus ride, the summer squad-maneuver, survival, and shooting practice there. And the occasional brief command role for me, for a vivid three weeks.
We were, in fact and law, U.S. Army Cadets. We were child soldiers from a Houston slum.
And the incident I want to mention to you, I am explaining it here.
My nice old lady, the slum, the long slum block where I kept her peacefully unharmed while she walked, remember that. I mentioned to you earlier, so you wouldn’t get lost. But I think you did get lost.
And I have been left there on guard duty, left there by one of our Cadet Lieutenants who trotted briskly out there with me that morning, to the back street behind the athletic fields. Left me to walk the long way forth and back, on the school’s side of that street of course, just inside a little fence, walking slowly in a formal manner like I had been recently instructed the day or so before.
Me showing myself there on guard duty on this long slum block, with my good Army club and a personal pocket knife, to stay for the balance of that early school hour.
You understand, that semester I had chosen ROTC in the first period every morning. So it is now maybe twenty minutes after school opened that day.
And so it’s all the school’s whole athletic fields out there out back.
And that time of the morning it’s all empty of people. The whole school place back there is all just gates and fences and markings on the ground.
And over there on the public side of the street, like where my nice lady surely lived, at that hour, the streets over there looked empty of people too.
Me third week high school kid, with an industrially designed club, which looks exactly like a heavy rife, the club resting pretty easy on my shoulder, and of course me dressed in my hand-tended, actually legal, junior, junior, junior, junior-soldier uniform.
It worked out beautifully that morning. She and I, all went well. Nearly choreography it seemed. Side by side, the low fence between us, a fence easily vaulted if emergency required, me slowing my steps to hers immediately when she appeared.
So then, me ambling along at an alert attention beside her, me beside her just past the low fence, and I was watching all around about us in the quiet city, me silently step for step. Me with a very good club and a pocket knife.
And yet, of course, I’m watching her from the corner of my eye. I sees the moment when she is surprised and happy, suddenly realizing I’ve taken her protection as my duty.
Then on parting she smiled a smile, on parting, at the far end of that block. She smiled up at me a smile that is the shining final grace note of my memory. Then she and I went on our ways.
I think likely was a Mexican Native Toltec lady, guessing from her lovely face.
Well that’s it, simple. Nothing else to tell. No incident of note occurred.
Eventually I had a silver diamond on my collar. One shiny metal pip big as the end of your finger.
Yes, they had promoted me far enough for it to be even actual commissioned-officer work, with extremely limited scope for taking on responsibilities, of course, and no more extempore knife demonstrations certainly, but me actually an officer with these trainee child soldiers as my actual soldiers, and my main mission them.
I think I did it well.
Along that line, there was a time, on a summer range, we were preparing to shoot very old World War One pattern machine guns, called euphemistically Browning automatic rifles.
I, with my silver diamond on my collar, during the several quiet minutes of range preparation, rose up from my place as ammunition feeder, me prone beside one of the heavy automatic rifles. Me prone beside my partner, who is lying with the rear end of our heavy weapon resting in his careful hands, his young hands becoming used to it.
I rose seeking reassurance on an urgent safety matter that had come to mind.
These firearms were extremely sturdy in appearance, but antiques, designed for World War One.
The bulky steel moving parts, enclosing the explosion chamber, or impelled by hot gases from it, were visibly worn round along some edges. But they did not appear loose, may the gods all help us, or cracked. This machine gun where I lay, and the next gun beside me, looking carefully, looked okay, I estimated.
But how about our ANTIQUE AMMUNITION??? That turned out quickly all was well.
During those quiet moments of range preparation, with my silver diamond on my collar, I had risen, hurried left then right along the quiet firing line, kneeling at each of the stations. Kneeling among our people lying there. Inspecting our antique ammunition and its antique packaging.
No chemical deterioration seen or smelt, no impact damage or moisture visible to brief inspection. I had carefully estimated all was well, thence returning promptly to my place as trainee ammunition feeder, with my face beside the waiting gun machine, which was being held, very carefully and very still, in my young partner’s hands, although, obviously, not yet loaded.
I seemed to be a natural at this line of work, seemed so to myself. The thinking it required seemed perfectly visible and open and cogent to me. That felt almost like a pleasure, almost. And anyway, there was the national military conscription patiently awaiting on whatever day I turned eighteen.
So why not go with this? Why not become a commissioned officer? Why not??? My father was.
But I saw hidden things. It seemed to me the world is full of ambient revelations commonly ignored. And a bit of PACKAGING MATERIAL I’d found, and I am now holding this FLAT PIECE of packaging material in my hand, a bit of printed cardboard, it came pretty close to focusing suspicion.
Douglas MacArthur. The famous Useless General of Bataan who called himself a hero. Never tired of that, called himself a hero every lying fascist breath, and ran for President of course. Ran on the Lying Fascist ticket. Douglas MacArthur. And, like me, MacArthur was a product of U.S. Army Old West.
Long ago, these antique cartridges we had, these big bastard cartridges, thin but nearly as long as your hand, these old cartridges we had, were packaged to be shipped to him. Shipped across the ocean to him where he was U.S. Army Dictator of the Native Republic of the Philippine Islands.
According to the printed date on the printed card I’d found in every ammunition box that I found open, according to this antique printed card, which I was now holding in my hand, closely examining, the mother-fiker wished us Browning automatic rifle users well, shortly before the Empire of Japan invaded.
He wished us know that all was well, and safe, there in the Philippine Islands, and happy, where we were, presumably, if we had received these particular ammunition boxes, with Dictator-General MacArthur’s reassuring greeting card inside.
Us opening the boxes shortly before, or maybe it is during, the Japanese invasion of the Philippines.
The cruel insouciance of the man astonished. A commissioned officer.
Now, I had seen the card in mine at first, but had ignored it. Now reached in my ammunition box again and found it. And I felt struck with pride to be here, to be here with these here on virtue’s side, in this revealing matter.
In old British terms, in the old language of his Scottish heritage, MacArthur’s name Mac-Arthur even proclaims him KING ARTHUR’S SON!!!
Me become an officer? The power to will loss, and direct loss, and pain, and grief, and sorrow, that command power does corrupt a human being.
I held up my printed greeting card, and through it sent my greeting back through time, the grand salute of flying finger.
And the moral injury? I mentioned moral injury back at the start, if you recall.
My moral injury was this… I turned against my father in some hard but subtle way that has not been unraveled yet.
But I’ve always had my memory of that lady.
(- This excerpt ends on paperback page 43 of “Army Stories”. -)
(- The book’s Overview Page, lots of options, is.. .. {-Here-} -)
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