The Shark Attack and other Army Shit

Theory

I don't know who noticed who passed who first, but I'm pretty sure I'm the one who first said something. It's my way. If there is an opportunity to say something obnoxious but supportive to someone while giving them a way to respond equally obnoxiously and supportively, then I'm happy as fuck and will say the thing. It's my way. I probably grumbled some horrible expletive deleted under my breath, the kind of metaphor that would make Richard Nixon blush. "Stab your mother in the ovaries with popsicled rat ejaculate." He had passed me at least once before, then I passed him, and now he was passing me. Both of us, known as "candidate" at the time, carrying rucksacks weighing specifically 60 pounds plus water, walking ten miles as fast as we could, dodging the many other candidates, passing and being passed by, as we stepped, and stepped, and stepped. He looked back at me, gave a mean but joking look. We stepped and stepped. He got ahead. I kept stepping. Then, without even realizing he was there, I was passing him. I'm not even sure he looked at me, but I did hear "fuck you" as I passed. Later he passed me again, and we exchanged more good natured expletives deleted. Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you. It was at the last hundred meters that this little exchange became an art. He and I looked up, not noticing each other before, but finding ourselves neck and neck, with just another 60 or so steps to go. This was a time in my life when I could carry 60 pounds for ten miles and then sprint with it. We sprinted, hard, running our dicks off, screaming fuck you fuck you fuck you, and crossed the finish line at the same time. 

I don't think I would have come up with these games if I hadn't been in the army. I went through some things there that put me into a different kind of conversation with my body. I still sometimes reminisce fondly about the "Star Course." You have a compass and know that 60 paces for you is 100 meters and 10 of those is a kilometer, and you have a map and a protractor and pencil and some grid coordinates, and you figure out that you need to go about 4 kilometers in that direction, and this terrain feature will tell you if you've gone too far, and this will tell you if you've drifted too far left or right. You start at midnight and go till about ten in the morning. It was amazing, the strangest meditation I've ever experienced, my mind sang in some funny ways as I counted 60 paces again and again in a pitch black woodland in North Carolina. (My actual deployments to Afghanistan and Iraq were their own thing, and not exactly creative revelations. Mostly just lots of driving around in circles in dusty places, and getting the shits. There was one night, on election day in Baghdad when we patrolled for 24 hours straight, and played a game called "there I was,"  where you start by saying "there I was" and then describe everything around you in a 1940s mid-atlantic film noir accent.)

I wouldn't make everyone trek for miles and miles, nor would I want to recreate the Shark Attack (the first day of basic training, where all the drill sergeants run up to you with their veins-popping-out no-neck screaming heads and you have to pick up your bags and hold them over your head and then they scream at you to run up the hill and you run up and then you run back down to grab your shit and then run back up again and then back down and then you do push ups and flutter kicks and bear crawls, and even though there are a few hundred new soldiers and about thirty drill sergeants it feels like there is just you encircled by a hundred drill sergeants all yelling and spitting into your face, and it's actually pretty fun) or all other manner of deprivations and degradations. But there is something special in a good old fashioned army smoke session. Doing pushups and running in fucking circles till you puke helps you realize that it's not so bad, actually quite fun.

Method

In that spirit, there are some interesting ways to use army shit in these games. A foundational one is the experience of receiving furious instruction and complying furiously. In the normal world, despite my goofiness, I think I'm quite mild mannered. Curious to conjure ways to change this. Otherwise, there are a ton of sets and pieces to be taken from military things. Tactical thinking and the clashing of pieces in a three dimensional space (somehow wondering if I can import Dungeons and Dragons play into this, though I don't want it to get too LARPy), change of spatial awareness and thinking of points in the park as objectives, hero sprints, glass houses, whatever. I'll think more about it, and try to turn some of these sets and pieces into bigger games.

Here are a few bullet points for game sets and pieces:

• praise runs and insult runs. You run or move or do an activity, and the other players shout grand words of encouragement, but then, in a second iteration, they shout horrible insults and disparagement as you run. Then we compare our inner experiences during these different shouting matches. 

• land navigation. I measured off 100 meters somewhere in the park, which for me is 60 full paces, and can teach others their own pace count and then see what we can do through creating 100 meter intervals.

• glass houses. Haven't really thought out how to use these, but here is what it is: SWAT like training, where you draw boxes on the ground and pretend they're buildings and practice room clearing, moving in a sort of dance with your fire team into the room. It's where I heard the expression "slow is smooth, smooth is fast."

• hero sprints. Because I'm a fucking goof, it's what I called "bounding overwatch", where one soldier runs to a covered position as another soldier covers him, and then the other one moves up as the first covers him

• battle drill 1A. Your basic infantry fire and maneuver tactics: 1-react to contact, 2-one element suppresses, 3-other element maneuvers, and 4-assaults, 5-consolidate.

• whatever else I can remember, checking my copy of the ranger handbook and some other shit.

• There are also the Paradoxes of Counterinsurgency Operations, which is way more fucking Zen than you would have thought the army was capable of.