Combat Queer Online

Captain's Opinions

So today one of the captains comes over to me and another sergeant and starts talking. My unit has a lot of captains. I've never been entirely sure what they all do. At some point in the past, there must have been one commander or another that was very successful at either pushing Lts up a notch or two, or filling Lt slots with captains. Whatever the reason, we got a bunch of captains.

But that isn't really the point of the story. See, this captain, he's kind of in love with the Army. Joined up a lot later than most folks do. If he hadn't gone into the Army, he would have bough a little red sports car or cheated on his wife. He has that kind of relationship with the Army.

Well, he comes up talking about how wonderful it is that the Army protects religious freedom, how amazing it is that Baptists and Catholics and Mormons and whoever the hell else can come together and work towards defending freedom.

“Yeah,” says me, “That is pretty cool."

But then the captain, he leans in real close and says, “And this is just between us, but these Muslims, I mean I know we have a few in the unit, but these Muslims, they don't know one thing from another. That religion of theirs keeps them from being able to think clearly or know right from wrong. Who do you think it is they can never keep a democracy going over there. But that's just between us.”

And you've just got to bite your toung with officers, you've just got to smile and shake your

head, because you work for them, because no matter how ridiculous their ideas are, their plans are, well dear reader, you work for them, not the other way around. That's one of the big differences between the Army and the real world, one that a whole lot of folks never seem to get.

It doesn't matter what you think in the Army. It matters that you have a job. it matters how you do that job.

Sometimes that's great, sometimes you get to feel like that one very special light of freedom shining in a hard world, but friends, a lot of times it is just hard.

Domestic Violence In The Military

Domestic Violence is a real issue in military families.

Sadly, this doesn't shock me as much as it should. Domestic Violence is a very real problem in the military. People get so turned on by their own masculinity, their own important, they just can't deal with the needs of other people, especially their wives and kids. 

So the wives and kids get beat on.

What does shock me is the veritable cloud of support these guys ride on. In the past two months, there been several incidents around my post. An amazing number of people in the units checking in on these folks to make sure they're OK, checking to make sure he's surviving this attack on their persons and careers by their crazed, evil wives. 

I've never seen anything like it. It's not just the men, either. A lot of the women in the unit have been talking about these *other* women, these women who go and make up lies to get attention, or who treat their husbands so badly that they deserve to be hit. 

One woman in my unit said that this incident reminded her of all the sluts over in Iraq, the female soldiers who slept around, and then when were about to be called down for their behavior, started making up stories about how they were raped. The woman in my unit, she went on for a while about those horrible sluts ruining the careers of good men.

Sometimes it's all I can do to keep my chow down. I don't know how to respond to this level of bullshit. Women are just assumed to exist at this place of craziness, dishonesty, and weakness. Sure, some can rise above it by acting as masculine as possible, but oh man, those women. 

If soldiers do condemn their comrades for hitting their wives, the condemnation is often for stupidly endangering one's career, not for doing harm to someone they are suppose to... well, not do harm to. 

Part of my job is looking out for the soldiers who work for me. When one of them gets in trouble with Domestic Violence, that are still my responsibility. I have no fucking clue what do there. It not enough for me to chew them out for being violent ass-holes, I'm also suppose to put them on the path to redemption. 

It's fucking crazy sometimes. 

What am I going to do? Write a really good counseling statement? Send him over to the Chaplain's office? Put him in the front leaning rest for a few hours? 

Shit.

Sometimes this place really eats at you. 

So, Battlestar Galactica Ended

It's always a little hard on me when a long running, somewhat tightly plotted science fiction series comes to an end. All too often, a smart, beautiful story gets summed up in the stupidest, tritest way possible. The story just feels like it ran out of gas, ran out of ideas. It can be a real scar on the story. You just know that no matter how good the work was to begin with, well, it's not leading anywhere pretty. 

So lets look at a couple of examples of scifi stories that ended well and poorly.

The Dark Tower- For me, there is no more perfect instantiation of the "bad ending" form that The Dark Tower. I mean, there is some platonic shit going on with this one. The first book of the series, The Gun Slinger is one of the finest American novels, smart, dense, lovely in its strangeness, but by the seventh book, well, Dear Reader by the end the story is nothing more than a giant quivering mass of plot tumors.

The last books are just packed full of robots, teleporters, psychics, Very Special Appearances by the author himself, commentary on what it means to write a book like The Dark Tower, it just, it just wasn't about a lone hero setting out across the wilderness on a quest of questionable meaning. No, it was something else, something stupider. 

And then the author ended the series in a way that provided as little resolution as possible. 

<Spoiler Alert> 

Infinite Time Loop. It just keeps happening. It never ends. Boo Stephen King, Boo. That's not a proper ending. And yes, I know that the situation was ever so slightly changed on the next rotation, and that leaves open the possibility of some real conclusion in the distant reaches of time, but seriously, that's not an ending. That's a cop out.

Y: The Last Man-  Now, YTLM does it better. A lot better. Some how the series remained largely free of ridiculous late stage plot points. It even took the time to make fun of the ridiculous late stage plot point. Remember when those assassins tried to convince action girl 355 that the whole "death of all men" thing was really the Greek gods retribution for the Trojan War? Yeah, I liked 355 yelling at them about what a silly, asinine idea it was. Good stuff.  

But the end, it really worked for me. All those little plot lines, ideas, and tensions that had been with the series in the beginning got tried up in pleasingly messy ways. We got to see the world that women had built after the deaths of almost all men. We got to see the ways that they continued the species. We got to see where the main character's relationships took them. 

It wasn't just that we got to see cloning growing to meet the needs of civilization as a means of procreation, it was also that we got to see Yorick's daughter still being a little sad and angry with him. It was that we got to see old Yorick complaining about how all the monkey's were too well behaved. It was that Yorick never stopped trying to escape.

Just what the book deserved.

Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy- So Douglas Adams' masterpiece, the five part trilogy. Those books go around and around and around, and well, the fifth book gets the story to a place where the story can't easily go for another spin. 

The characters have gone out, done their things over and over, trivia's been provided, ideas have been tossed around, the story doesn't have much else to do. The last book, Mostly Harmless, it's a surprisingly sad book. Arthur, the main character, has lost the person he loved, the person who made the universe make a little much-needed sense. 

The book is grinding down to nothing. There's nothing left for the characters. It feels like the end. It's over.

But here's the thing. Like the much-loved FireFly, the story wasn't really over. Before his death, Douglas Adams began the process of writing a sixth book. I don't know much about that next book, you can't call it last because there might have been a seventh, an eighth, but it was almost real, a fish in the sea of possibility. 

Knowing that that sixth book almost existed, I can't accept that Hitchhiker's Guide is really over. The world ended the series, not Adams. But, I don't know, we have a hope is resurrection. Death has been defeated. Maybe one day in the celestial future, maybe there I'll get to find out what happens to Arthur Dent next. 

Hitchhiker's Guide is different from Dark Tower in that it does have a real ending, a good one, but then it still may go on. It's good.

But I haven't talked about the ending to BSG yet.

I'll get to it next time.

Author's Note: It looks like I accidently posted this blank before I had the chance to write it. Sorry about that.

NCAA Tournament

So, it is Basketball time, March Madness. I have up unto this point on my blog avoiding talking about sports. Why?

Well, I'm trying to make it as difficult as possible for you wonderful people out there out on the world wide intertubes to figure out who I actually am. I'm on my way off to Iraq with a pretty hoo-ahed out Army unit, and what with me both being and am talking about being a godsdamned queer and all, well, I worry about somebody putting it all together and murdering me. 

But that's not the point of this post. The point of this post is that I really want to talk about the NCAA tournament, specifically how excited I am to see some of my favorite teams there, how I can't wait to see a certain team loose, and the difficulties of  managing a bracket pool.

It's just difficult, because, well, let's say I'm really into the Zags, but would give a finger to see UCON loose(fucking Huskies, how often have you ruined my NCAA bracket?).  Let's say I go through, explain why not only is Gonzaga the single best team out there this year, but also that that school, that program deserve to win in a way that the rest of those teams could only dream of. That if the Zags don't go all the way, or at least make it to the Final Four, well, that just means that there is something fundamentally wrong with the moral structure of the universe.

And then let's say that I go on to explain why the men's basketball program at UCON will never be as successful as the women's program, and how I think that fact creates in that program an ugly tension that makes them unworthy of their high placement in the tournament.

Of course, in real life I probably don't think anything like that at all. I'm just being all hypothetical, creating a scenario.

Now let's say that some angry, depressed, deeply closeted E-4 goes online and googles “queer” and “soldier” and comes upon my blog. He undergoes that big horror that only a person who really and truly ashamed of himself can feel, but keeps on reading. He notices that analysis of the Zags three point shooting sounds awfully familiar, then he says, hmm, I wonder if that SGT CombatQueer over at my unit might be some sort of... queer.

And, over the months over in the sandbox, that fellow grows in his tension, and one day decides to show what a man he is by killing me.

And that's why I can't talk about basketball in the way I'd like.

Go Zags!

Old Man Logan, Part 6

Old Man Logan might seem like kind of a hopeless story. Anytime that anyone is pinning all of her or his dreams on something, well, that one thing tends to go pretty badly. The story shows this in little ways and big. 

You get the failure of the crops on Logan's family farm. You get the daughter of heros, Spiderman's granddaughter, turning out to be a power hungry criminal. You get crowds of downtrodden people praying for the return of Thor that will never happen. 

But it isn't just the good guys whose plans don't work out. Spider-bitch, Spiderman's granddaughter, the first time she sends her army out, that army is wiped out. The Kingpin is unable to hold onto his territory. Giant Loki got crushed under a falling building. The giant Venom T-Rex? Well, you'll have to see for yourself.

The centre cannot hold, things fall apart. 

What's interesting about the comic, though, is that no one stops hoping. For such a deeply pessimistic story, there are an awful lot of characters who seem to think that salvation is right around the corner. Logan keeps going Hawkeye keeps going, people keep making plans and trying them out.

Old Man Logan is really built on the idea of expectation, the idea that things will get better, that our best days haven't quite gotten here yet, not matter what the world looks like. Despite the beatdown of every single character, the idea that it'll all work out is still central.

The characters who have given up, Spider-Bitch's mother, Emma Frost in this issue, Logan himself, they are still shown in a negative light for their inability to keep the faith.

It's quite beautiful, and a little sad.

We finally find out what the package is in this Wolverine #71. Not to spoil anything, but it comes right on back to the idea of hope, of expectation. 

X-Factor #41

Man, I sure do love this comic.

I've only read half the issue so far, but I wanted to start writing the post. What's amazing is that thirty seconds ago I was totally ready to type up a description of how Peter David had let the readers down, and had slumped into mediocrity after a really strong run. 

Then it all came together. And it was awesome.

See, in so many comics the same things happen again and again. They move the story along, they can even go original places, but those little things, well, they don't change too often.

The last place I was so regularly surprised by a story was Firefly. It wasn't that I didn't think I knew what was happening, what was going to happen, but rather that I thought I did, and was delighted to be wrong.

It's like, it can be cheap and easy to use these things, and it's more difficult not to. The thing most people miss, though, is that the most difficult thing is to use common, well known tropes, but to use them in new ways, to make them fresh without becoming ridiculous.

And X-Factor is very good at that.

Re-Recordable Idol

There's a post I've been working on for a while, since late November. I'm a little ashamed to say that it's only about 800 words long, and it's not the best thing I've ever written. It's one that I really wanted to be good though.

The post focuses on Conservapedia, that bastion of anti-knowledge, and their Bible translation wiki. It's a neat idea, an open source translation of the scripture, but what's scary about it is that the point of Conservapedia's translation is not to perfectly carry the wording and meaning from the original language into English, but rather to re-write the Bible in such a way a to cause it to present ultra-conservative political ideas. I'm not making this up. They want to write it out so that Christ mentions Socialism as a great evil, homeschools the disciples, and votes Republican. Then they want to claim that that is perfect, God-spoken, inerrant Scripture.

One of the things that really bothers me about the Biblical inerrancy mess is that it not only builds an idol, it builds an idol into whose mouth anybody can put words. It scares the shit out of me.

Today at the unit this one E-5 was going around talking about the Apocrypha of John. He claimed it was a book of the writings of St. John that the Catholic Church(soooo scary) had kept out of the Bible because... well, he wasn't exactly sure, but mainly the Catholics are always up to something, so why wouldn't they try to hide the word of the Lord? He said that this book had been found in some sort of archaeological dig, and shined more light on the Bible.

Now, at first I thought he might have been talking about the Secret Book Of John. It's an interesting bit of Gnostic literature, if you find that sort of thing interesting. It starts out with St. John praying for guidance, then Jesus shows up and tell a long version of the Gnostic creation story, the one in which there are hundreds and thousands of Aeons, little gods that spring from the One Unknowable God. Eventually a Bad god, a blind stupid one named Yaltaboath comes into existence and builds the physical world as a prison for is mother Sophia, the god representing divine wisdom. It's crazy stuff. Heavily metaphorical. Occasionally beautiful, but strange to the point of uselessness. One of the big ideas of Gnosticism is that some people are vessels for the imprisoned Sophia, the divine wisdom, and other aren't. The folks who aren't they're no different than animals.

 My basic problem with Gnosticism is that it assumes that there's one group of people, the inner circle of the church, who are wiser and more holy by their very nature than the rest of us. It's kinda ugly.

Of course, this E-5 wasn't talking about the Secret Book Of John. No, in his non-canonical John book you have Jesus specifically talking about abortion, saying that it sends the souls of the infants automatically to hell(God apparently has bad aim with the punishment), Jesus talks specifically against homosexuals, and Jesus talks about the glorious wonders of war.

Now, I haven't seen this book, and I'm just going on what this E-5 excitedly told me, but friends, this mess worries me. It sounds like a lately written book, one written in the worst traditions of pseudepigrapha. This mess sounds like it is written by someone who wants to make a point, but is too damn lazy to make a cogent argument.

And in the same way the first and second century Gnostics had this idea that they were special, that they had some secret wisdom and goodness that put them a rung or two above the rest of us, well, it sounds to me like the writer of that E-5's book is doing the same thing. “Hey, here's the rest of the story,” he says, “the bit everybody else doesn't know. Now that you know, well, ain't you grand? Ain't you big? Don't you know something? 'Cause those other people, they tried to keep you from knowing, they tried to make you figure it out yourself, but now instead of thinking, you can just know. And that makes you a little better.”

 One of the big dangers with making an idol out of scripture is that anybody can get in on that game, anybody can claim the voice of God for themselves. All you have to say is, “Well, this bit of scripture says X,” and then for the folks following the idol, X is absolutely true. But anybody can say that scripture says X. Anybody can say that anything is scripture. People can have proof of or an excuse for anything once they get themselves a re-recordable idol.

It scares me.

King James Version Nonsense

So, at my unit today I had to listen to a couple of people argue about which version of the Bible they liked the best. 

Shock of shocks, the fellow who was getting the most excited and angry about this argument? He was all about some King James Version, the KJV. Let's call him Jim-Vo(yeah, it's a lame pun, but dear reader, I am tired and have to get up and go back to work soon. Forgive me).

It was pretty astounding. Jim-Vo recited this elaborate myth the "(his) preacher had told (him)" about how "the church scholars" had read all the different manuscripts, and how there had been all these differences, but then they prayed, and then suddenly, they *all* knew which manuscripts were true and they knew the right way to translate them, meaning that the KJV was a perfect divinely inspired document in English.

Now, I try not to get into religion arguments in the Army. They don't go healthy places. Because of that, I didn't ask Jim-Vo too many questions to clarify his position. 

Now, for me this is a weird situation. You have a Southern Baptist talking about Anglican scholars having a direct like to Almighty God. How often does that happen? What could be wrong with it? Right?

Sadly, no.

Here's the thing. Whenever I hear somebody going crazy about the KJV, I always want to say, 

"Why don't you go suck an old white man's dick."

And why do I say that? Well, in Jim-Vo's explanation of why the KJV is not only the best book ever, he also explained by other "versions of the Bible" are not only not worth reading, but are actively bad. The main two reasons are these: 

First, the newer translations are not old enough. They are "written" recently, at *secular universities* by...

and here's part two

liberal professors, women, some of whom are Muslims. That's right, the Islam is coming from inside the house.

Basically, the problem is that instead of transcendent, divinely inspired scholars, the non-KJV translations of the Bible are done by the forces of evil, namely those who don't look and act exactly like Jim-Vo.

So basically, the whole discussion of the KJV has nothing to do with the Bible, but is in fact an honoring of old, white maleness.

So really, would fellatio not just be a simpler, easier way for folks like Jim-Vo to show off how much that love old, white maleness?

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I guess that sounds a little mean on my part. Maybe I'll be more loving towards my fellow human beings in the morning.

People In My Unit

I love the people in my unit.

(Non-romantically, of course)

I know that may sound a little strange, what with some of my earlier posts talking about my frustration with the Army in general, my unit in specific, and some individuals in my unit in the more specific, but I actually do love these people.

And there are a bunch of them. They certainly aren't all perfect. Some I don't get along with at all. Some actively dislike me. Some are lazy, stupid, and trouble makers. But you know what, dear reader? For ever one or two individuals who cause problems, there are ten or twenty fine people who do their jobs well and treat each other properly.

Maybe it's because I've been in this unit for a while, but more than anything it seems like a family to me. A deeply dysfunctional family, but a family none the less. Come to think of it, there is no other group outside of my actual family of which I have been a member of for so long a continuous time as I have with this unit. It's a little bit scary. 

Sometimes, well, I wish I was closer to people in the unit. I've always kept these people at arm's length.  Not just because of the trans thing either. A lot of it was that, well, I don't always get along with people  very well. I tend to either be distant or something of an ass. I'm not good at doing the middle ground.

Fortunately, the distant thing sometimes works. Sometimes if people see you long enough, they'll sort of figure out who you are, and eventually there grows a familiarity that isn't exactly friendship, but is good and can be oddly meaningful. 

There are people in this unit who I have known since before I realized that the trans thing probably wasn't going away. There are people in this unit, going to the sandbox with me, who have known me since before I rediscovered Christianity, long before I knew a single thing about the Episcopal Church. Maybe this unit isn't my favorite place in the world, but it has been a part of my life long enough to be a part of me. 

So here I am, on good if distant terms with the soldiers of my unit. I have one or two friends here, maybe. Maybe they're the sort of friends I can have outside of the Army, I'm not sure. I don't know if I could point to any one single individual in the unit and say, “SGT Such-and-Such is a deeply meaningful person to me, and I love her or him.” I don't think that I feel that way about any specific person, but as a group, as a whole I love these people. I'm going to the sandbox to serve these people, to do my job. 

I may not have the warm and fuzzies for these folks, but I'm going to Iraq for them. If that's not love, well, it should be close enough.

Watchmen Movie

Before I left for basic training, the last movie I watched was Forest Gump. 

See, when you leave for basic, you have to show up at MEPS, the Military Entrance Processing Station. The day I got there to leave for basic, well, there was a lot going on. Lot's of people joining, leaving for various schools, doing every little thing that a person can do at MEPS. The place was swamped.

So there I was with a group of young men who were about to head out to our training base. Some folks were excited. They'd never ridden a plain before. It was a big deal for them. 

But everything was taking forever. Some sergeant there decided that we couldn't be left to our own devices, so he pulled out a television on a rolling cart and turned on a movie to keep us pacified. 

That's how I saw Forest Gump for the last time before basic.

Over the never couple of months, I thought back to that movie often. I had a hard time at basic. I bumbled a lot. I tripped up. I made mistakes. But something about the memory of Gump saying, "Because you tols me to, Drill Ser-geant," I don't know, it helped.

That movie connects history to character, forces it to make some sense.

And that helped me some.

Now, Watchmen tries to be the same sort of movie. Both films try to explain what it means to be American through the adventures of odd-balls through time. Both talk about Vietnam and what it meant to America. Both ask questions about what it means to be a hero. Both a little sad and a little hopeful. Sure, there's a whole lot more sex and violence in Watchmen, but what can you do? Zach Snyder didn't direct Gump. 

Now I'm standing on the edge of another cliff, about to be tossed into another big adventure with the military. A much bigger adventure than any I've yet been on. 

I wonder if it's going to look more like Gump, sweet and meaningful, or like Watchmen, angry and heavy-handed.

I think that the biggest difference between Gump and Watchmen is that the newer movie is surer of itself than the older one. Gump never claims to have the answers. He's just a dim witted, oddly kind person who happens to along for the ride. The characters in Watchmen, they act like they know the deal, they know the solution. Maybe the points the same, that nobody has all the answers, and that anyone who thinks they do is dangerous, but... I don't know, I think Gump might make the case a little bit better.

So, am I going to Iraq because I think I know how fix the world, or am I participating in something beyond my reckoning? Beyond my horizons?

I wish I knew.