War - Horrible As Fuck
THE DUKE JOINS
AMERICA'S ARMY
AMERICA'S ARMY
It’s a fine day to be the best a motherfucker can be, is what
The Duke deduced with regards Thursday morning. It’s a fine day
for to go about protecting freedom and democracy and business
interests and so on. A fine day to make the hypothetical leap
from insignificant maggot-riddled scum to the plateau graced
only by the heels of the finest sons a bitches ever to chew gum
threateningly.
What occurred is that a substantial dose of existential angst
somehow infiltrated the granite-esque defences of The Duke's
blood-stream. I was taking a minute for to evaluate and so on,
draw up some of the old scientific data analysis with regards
The Life De Duke, and I gotta admit, the results were fairly
disheartening.
The Duke deduced with regards Thursday morning. It’s a fine day
for to go about protecting freedom and democracy and business
interests and so on. A fine day to make the hypothetical leap
from insignificant maggot-riddled scum to the plateau graced
only by the heels of the finest sons a bitches ever to chew gum
threateningly.
What occurred is that a substantial dose of existential angst
somehow infiltrated the granite-esque defences of The Duke's
blood-stream. I was taking a minute for to evaluate and so on,
draw up some of the old scientific data analysis with regards
The Life De Duke, and I gotta admit, the results were fairly
disheartening.
If you want the truth, if you can handle it, then here it is,
and that truth is that in all the years I’ve walked the earth, I
ain’t ever once shot a fella of a different nationality. I never
lay on my back in someone else’s guts, terrified to move in case
the fella staring down at me might realise I was still on the
taxable side of dead. I never put my life in the hands of a
stranger, putting my complete trust in their judgement with no
thought of sexual gratification.
I got me a craving for all that kinda kooky nonsense you see on
the adverts; Join the military, and then go sky-diving and so
on, and maybe climb a mountain, and then shoot a terrorist or
three.
I mean come the hell on, The Duke, even Billy Bragg was in the
military before he went ahead and wrote some of the best songs
of all ever.
So what The Duke did was he Signed The Fuck Up for to become a
member of America’s Army.
In case you didn’t know, what America’s Army is, is a massive
online multiplayer video-game, created by the military to serve
primarily as a recruitment tool. Look at how fun this is, seems
to have been the thinking. You fat little sons a bitches could
be doin’ this shit for real, if you took five minutes for to
follow the weblinks and so on.
Well, The Duke has no intention of signing up for any military
of any kind, even if it were one I was eligible for. In case you
didn’t know, The Duke is a pacifist, and is willing to defend
the pacifist ideal to the brutal, bloody death.
In America’s Army, however, I don’t have to worry a damn thing,
ideologically speaking, since it’s all concerned with the
“virtual” and so on. I can kill folks left and right, and the
worst that’ll happen is someone will question The Duke’s sexual
preference via the in-game chat. “Why’d you shoot me you f---ing
faggot fu-k homo?” and so on and so forth.
On the other hand, this is about the most realistic game a fella
could hope for, to the extent that you can’t even shoot a
motherfucker until you’ve completed a whole bunch of tedious
training exercises, up to and including written examinations.
It’s like if folks had to complete a NASA internship before they
got to play Space Invaders.
So I signed up on Thursday night, and there I am, Friday
morning, standing at a rifle range. There’s a drill instructor
standing in front of me, keeps calling me “soldier” even though
I said at least twice that my name was The Duke De Mondo, and
even went so far as to offer him a witty critique of some
Deodato flicks, but no, Soldier it is.
Turns out that what I have to do is get myself acquainted with a
rifle or two, and maybe learn to throw a grenade. This, I come
to see, will help when I need to shoot some Israelis or Iraqi’s
or Koreans or maybe some of those heathens who question
The Duke's assessment of the new Prodigy record..
I don’t know what the calibre of the gun is, or any of that
technical malarkey, since I was thinking about Stanley Kubrick
when the instructor was telling me, but it turns out that it
doesn’t matter a shit in a pastry, since it does what most guns
do, ie, shoot folks. In this case, though, it’s just a bunch a
targets set up in front of me. They pop up every now and again,
like in those Wild West games you used to get on the Sega Master
System, were evil drunken communist cowboys would pop up at
windows and then you had to shoot them, but watch out, cause
sometimes they had a kid or something too.
I do some shooting, and the drill sergeant tells me it’s just
about wonderful, the shooting that I been doing. He wants to say
this again and again, how good this shooting is, but
unfortunately it tends to inflate my ego a tad, so when I go
over to pick up the next rifle, I just for no real reason shoot
a fella in the face.
Next thing I know The Duke is in the clink, man. Luckily I
brought a harmonica with me, and I get to belt out at least
thirty five renditions of Chimes Of Freedom before I hit Esc and
get the hell outta there.
The result of my crime is that I gotta do the shooting again,
but I put my head down and struggle through it, thinking all the
while that shit, man, war is hell is what it is.
Turns out I was a tad premature with regards the old thinking-
about-how-unbearable-this-is, since what happens next is that,
after I fling a grenade or two by way of the old training, I’m
sent to a damn medical school of some kind.
Shit, man. I only joined the army half an hour ago and already I
wish I’d joined, like, the civil service or some shit instead.
Turns out I have to listen to three lectures regarding first aid
and all that, and then I gotta do a test on each. The first aid
one I pass pretty easily, hitting the top 70% mark, proving that
whilst I don’t know a band-aid from a liposuction tube, at least
I know how to bluff through a test or two.
The one on tourniquet’s and controlled bleeding that takes two
attempts, and worse, after failing the fuck out of the first
one, I have to sit through the whole damn lecture again. What I
do for the most part is just check out the lass sitting to my
left, chewing away on the end of a pencil, trying to look all
mousey and all with her ponytail and glasses, when really, what
she wants to do is rip The Duke apart with the force of her
libido. I try to make a little conversation, but she just keeps
saying “Hi” and then sometimes “How you doing?” even though I’m
trying to get her opinion on Sergio Leone.
The army, man. It changes a motherfucker, is what.
After all the tests and what-not, including one on vehicle
recognition that takes five attempts to pass, it’s time to do a
spot of the old parachute jumping and what have you. They
hoister The Duke thirty feet in the air, and then fling me the
hell off a crane of some kind. First time I break my damn legs,
and then the next time I pass it with a grudging “Satisfactory”,
and I make sure and mutter about cock suckin’ son of a bitch as
I hobble off the field.
Turns out that the parachute training came in handy, though,
since next thing I know I’m in an airplane and all these fellas
are standing round me shouting about “Thirty seconds!” and I
can't help but notice that the door in front of me is wide open.
Sure enough, I’m soon thrown out of the craft, and trying to
navigate my way towards a circle painted on the ground. It takes
a few attempts, and even though I manage to land inside the
designated area on a couple of occasions, the sadistic sons a
bitches want more.
But it’ll be worth it, I’m thinking. It’ll be worth doing this
stupid shit again and again and again, because once this is over
I’m fairly sure I’ll have enough badges or whatever to get
deployed. I’ll get to shoot folks in the head, if I can just
land in this stupid circle a couple more times.
And, it transpires, no sooner have I been told that the last
jump I did was satisfactory, than I’m on my way to some exotic
location for to shoot the fucking guts out of a bunch a
insurgent rebels of some kind.
Far be it from The Duke to take the easy option, by the way. Not
only did I endure all those hours of examinations and parachute
jumps orchestrated by fascist cyborg bastard scum, but I also
made sure to watch plenty of the old War Cinema, just so as I
know what I’m in for.
I get the crazy notion sometimes that a load of folks don’t
really appreciate the levels of insane barbarity awaiting them
the other side of a recruitment officer. Maybe it’s the gung-ho
fearless spirit of the young, or the fact that the adverts make
it look like some kind of summer camp glowing with adventure and
romance and hardly an innard to be seen, but whatever the
reason, I’ve had enough friends and relations go off to get all
green and brown around the wardrobe to know that there’s a lot
of fucked-up shit out there in army land.
So I made sure to catch up on all the developments in the field
of blowing up strangers, by way of viewing the likes of Steven
Spielberg’s Guts On The Beach and Francis Ford Coppola’s Vietnam
Apocalypse or whatever.
To be thrown headfirst into some Godforsaken landscape
surrounded by a bunch a folks you never met in your life,
sharing only a thirst for the heads of some foreigners, that
right there, though, is the kinda shit no amount of Tom Hanks
can prepare a man for.
What happened is that, post-deployment, The Duke was told to
protect a bridge of some kind from some sort of enemy or other.
I never had time to note the particulars, since I was more
worried about the bullets flying around my head every step I
took. I looked around me, watching as all these fellas sprinted
and cheered and shot and flung grenades, and all I could do was
lie on my stomach behind a wall, feared to the nuts to move an
inch.
Americas Army has an ingeniously simple method of sorting folks
into goodies and baddies territory. It took about two hours
worth of wondering and pondering and considering before I
plucked up the courage to ask somebody how come I can’t be a
terrorist.
When you join a server and choose a game and all that, you get
to pick either Defence or Assault. Whatever one you choose,
you're the good guy. Thing is, the folks on the other side,
they're the good guys too. It just so happens that you see them
as terrorists, and vice versa. As far as you’re concerned,
you're an American Soldier fighting some filthy motherfucking
evil. To the motherfucking evil, it’s the other way around.
This raises all sorts of philosophical questions about who the
“baddies” really are, about the hypothetical line between good
and evil. I’d probably have come up with some highly stimulating
thoughts regarding all that, if I wasn’t too busy hiding below a
truck, terrified of one of those grenades landing beside me, and
me too cramped to get away in time.
During some down-time I take the opportunity to talk to some of
my comrades. I’m wary about this, scared of striking a
friendship when I know only too well that at any minute my
newfound buddy could be drenched in the hot sex-juice of an AK-
47. A man would go mad in the field, though, if he didn’t have
anyone to talk to, so I get to chatting to a lad by the name of
SEXY_JESUS, and another called TOP_DOGG.
SEXY_JESUS tells me he’s been on the frontlines for about a
year, and that he’s 13 years old. I’m staggered by the
revelation. Not only does this mean he was first exposed to this
soul-destroying chaos when barely a teen, but also, he’s got a
moustache the likes of which The Duke couldn’t grow with the aid
of even the most potent of fertilisers.
TOP_DOGG, he just arrived, it turns out. He and SEXY_JESUS tell
me all about the horrors of war. They talk about TK, or Team-
Kill, when a soldier just all of a sudden decides to start
thrusting the sex-limb of death into his friends. They shudder
as they discuss The Lag, some benevolent entity that causes the
world to stutter and shake for up to twenty minutes at a time,
that renders even the most frenzied of movements impotent. I
have a smoke as they regale me with terrifying anecdotes.
Later, I’m talking to someone who tells me about the honour
system inherent to the game. I learn that for every kill someone
makes, another point gets added to their crest. Some missions
are reserved sorely for folks responsible for 80 deaths and up.
A friend tells me that he uses his honour rating to get laid.
“Chicks dig honour points”, he sagely notes.
I tried this on The Duchess, telling her that I’ve been up to my
knees in bloodied pixels, but she couldn’t care a flying dung
for my bravado. I make a mental note, however, to be sure and
tell Kirsten Dunst about my rating, should the opportunity ever
arise.
“I loved you in The Virgin Suicides, Kirsten, and incidentally,
I’ve got, like, at least 50 points right now. Probably be 52
before the nights out.”
There’s a price to pay for it all, though. For all the respect,
the recognition, the thrill, there’s the small matter of a
fella's soul to consider. Sometimes, as I sat outside a burning
city waiting for the enemy to wander past, I ever considered
reciting some Wilfred Owen, if it wasn’t for the fact that such
activities would guarantee The Duke one less skull to worry
about.
Sometimes it just gets too much to bear. Like when I’m required
to do medical duties, and a soldier is screaming for help two
feet away, but I can’t move or I’ll get shot, in times like that
I even consider writing a poem, or talking about my true love
back home, knowing that the more romantic I get, the more likely
a bullet in the hole becomes.
In the field, waxing whimsical is a suicidal as shooting
yourself in the teeth with a rifle on account of Kurt Cobain did
it one time.
So I struggle on, man. I can’t turn back now. I’ve seen things;
I’ve lived things that I can’t erase from my brain. I've seen a
man with a thousand-yard stare, and last time I checked, mine
was at 782 yards and counting. I’m out there with the
SEXY_JESUS's and the TOP_DOGG’s and the SNIPER_47’s and all
those brave young motherfuckers who keep Hollywood stocked with
heartrending stories to tell.
I now know what Kilgore meant when he said “I love the smell of
napalm in the morning.” He meant that in the morning, the smell
of napalm was something he really loved.
Thanks folks.
Drop The Duke A Line Via Electronical Email
and that truth is that in all the years I’ve walked the earth, I
ain’t ever once shot a fella of a different nationality. I never
lay on my back in someone else’s guts, terrified to move in case
the fella staring down at me might realise I was still on the
taxable side of dead. I never put my life in the hands of a
stranger, putting my complete trust in their judgement with no
thought of sexual gratification.
I got me a craving for all that kinda kooky nonsense you see on
the adverts; Join the military, and then go sky-diving and so
on, and maybe climb a mountain, and then shoot a terrorist or
three.
I mean come the hell on, The Duke, even Billy Bragg was in the
military before he went ahead and wrote some of the best songs
of all ever.
So what The Duke did was he Signed The Fuck Up for to become a
member of America’s Army.
In case you didn’t know, what America’s Army is, is a massive
online multiplayer video-game, created by the military to serve
primarily as a recruitment tool. Look at how fun this is, seems
to have been the thinking. You fat little sons a bitches could
be doin’ this shit for real, if you took five minutes for to
follow the weblinks and so on.
Well, The Duke has no intention of signing up for any military
of any kind, even if it were one I was eligible for. In case you
didn’t know, The Duke is a pacifist, and is willing to defend
the pacifist ideal to the brutal, bloody death.
In America’s Army, however, I don’t have to worry a damn thing,
ideologically speaking, since it’s all concerned with the
“virtual” and so on. I can kill folks left and right, and the
worst that’ll happen is someone will question The Duke’s sexual
preference via the in-game chat. “Why’d you shoot me you f---ing
faggot fu-k homo?” and so on and so forth.
On the other hand, this is about the most realistic game a fella
could hope for, to the extent that you can’t even shoot a
motherfucker until you’ve completed a whole bunch of tedious
training exercises, up to and including written examinations.
It’s like if folks had to complete a NASA internship before they
got to play Space Invaders.
So I signed up on Thursday night, and there I am, Friday
morning, standing at a rifle range. There’s a drill instructor
standing in front of me, keeps calling me “soldier” even though
I said at least twice that my name was The Duke De Mondo, and
even went so far as to offer him a witty critique of some
Deodato flicks, but no, Soldier it is.
Turns out that what I have to do is get myself acquainted with a
rifle or two, and maybe learn to throw a grenade. This, I come
to see, will help when I need to shoot some Israelis or Iraqi’s
or Koreans or maybe some of those heathens who question
The Duke's assessment of the new Prodigy record..
I don’t know what the calibre of the gun is, or any of that
technical malarkey, since I was thinking about Stanley Kubrick
when the instructor was telling me, but it turns out that it
doesn’t matter a shit in a pastry, since it does what most guns
do, ie, shoot folks. In this case, though, it’s just a bunch a
targets set up in front of me. They pop up every now and again,
like in those Wild West games you used to get on the Sega Master
System, were evil drunken communist cowboys would pop up at
windows and then you had to shoot them, but watch out, cause
sometimes they had a kid or something too.
I do some shooting, and the drill sergeant tells me it’s just
about wonderful, the shooting that I been doing. He wants to say
this again and again, how good this shooting is, but
unfortunately it tends to inflate my ego a tad, so when I go
over to pick up the next rifle, I just for no real reason shoot
a fella in the face.
Next thing I know The Duke is in the clink, man. Luckily I
brought a harmonica with me, and I get to belt out at least
thirty five renditions of Chimes Of Freedom before I hit Esc and
get the hell outta there.
The result of my crime is that I gotta do the shooting again,
but I put my head down and struggle through it, thinking all the
while that shit, man, war is hell is what it is.
Turns out I was a tad premature with regards the old thinking-
about-how-unbearable-this-is, since what happens next is that,
after I fling a grenade or two by way of the old training, I’m
sent to a damn medical school of some kind.
Shit, man. I only joined the army half an hour ago and already I
wish I’d joined, like, the civil service or some shit instead.
Turns out I have to listen to three lectures regarding first aid
and all that, and then I gotta do a test on each. The first aid
one I pass pretty easily, hitting the top 70% mark, proving that
whilst I don’t know a band-aid from a liposuction tube, at least
I know how to bluff through a test or two.
The one on tourniquet’s and controlled bleeding that takes two
attempts, and worse, after failing the fuck out of the first
one, I have to sit through the whole damn lecture again. What I
do for the most part is just check out the lass sitting to my
left, chewing away on the end of a pencil, trying to look all
mousey and all with her ponytail and glasses, when really, what
she wants to do is rip The Duke apart with the force of her
libido. I try to make a little conversation, but she just keeps
saying “Hi” and then sometimes “How you doing?” even though I’m
trying to get her opinion on Sergio Leone.
The army, man. It changes a motherfucker, is what.
After all the tests and what-not, including one on vehicle
recognition that takes five attempts to pass, it’s time to do a
spot of the old parachute jumping and what have you. They
hoister The Duke thirty feet in the air, and then fling me the
hell off a crane of some kind. First time I break my damn legs,
and then the next time I pass it with a grudging “Satisfactory”,
and I make sure and mutter about cock suckin’ son of a bitch as
I hobble off the field.
Turns out that the parachute training came in handy, though,
since next thing I know I’m in an airplane and all these fellas
are standing round me shouting about “Thirty seconds!” and I
can't help but notice that the door in front of me is wide open.
Sure enough, I’m soon thrown out of the craft, and trying to
navigate my way towards a circle painted on the ground. It takes
a few attempts, and even though I manage to land inside the
designated area on a couple of occasions, the sadistic sons a
bitches want more.
But it’ll be worth it, I’m thinking. It’ll be worth doing this
stupid shit again and again and again, because once this is over
I’m fairly sure I’ll have enough badges or whatever to get
deployed. I’ll get to shoot folks in the head, if I can just
land in this stupid circle a couple more times.
And, it transpires, no sooner have I been told that the last
jump I did was satisfactory, than I’m on my way to some exotic
location for to shoot the fucking guts out of a bunch a
insurgent rebels of some kind.
Far be it from The Duke to take the easy option, by the way. Not
only did I endure all those hours of examinations and parachute
jumps orchestrated by fascist cyborg bastard scum, but I also
made sure to watch plenty of the old War Cinema, just so as I
know what I’m in for.
I get the crazy notion sometimes that a load of folks don’t
really appreciate the levels of insane barbarity awaiting them
the other side of a recruitment officer. Maybe it’s the gung-ho
fearless spirit of the young, or the fact that the adverts make
it look like some kind of summer camp glowing with adventure and
romance and hardly an innard to be seen, but whatever the
reason, I’ve had enough friends and relations go off to get all
green and brown around the wardrobe to know that there’s a lot
of fucked-up shit out there in army land.
So I made sure to catch up on all the developments in the field
of blowing up strangers, by way of viewing the likes of Steven
Spielberg’s Guts On The Beach and Francis Ford Coppola’s Vietnam
Apocalypse or whatever.
To be thrown headfirst into some Godforsaken landscape
surrounded by a bunch a folks you never met in your life,
sharing only a thirst for the heads of some foreigners, that
right there, though, is the kinda shit no amount of Tom Hanks
can prepare a man for.
What happened is that, post-deployment, The Duke was told to
protect a bridge of some kind from some sort of enemy or other.
I never had time to note the particulars, since I was more
worried about the bullets flying around my head every step I
took. I looked around me, watching as all these fellas sprinted
and cheered and shot and flung grenades, and all I could do was
lie on my stomach behind a wall, feared to the nuts to move an
inch.
Americas Army has an ingeniously simple method of sorting folks
into goodies and baddies territory. It took about two hours
worth of wondering and pondering and considering before I
plucked up the courage to ask somebody how come I can’t be a
terrorist.
When you join a server and choose a game and all that, you get
to pick either Defence or Assault. Whatever one you choose,
you're the good guy. Thing is, the folks on the other side,
they're the good guys too. It just so happens that you see them
as terrorists, and vice versa. As far as you’re concerned,
you're an American Soldier fighting some filthy motherfucking
evil. To the motherfucking evil, it’s the other way around.
This raises all sorts of philosophical questions about who the
“baddies” really are, about the hypothetical line between good
and evil. I’d probably have come up with some highly stimulating
thoughts regarding all that, if I wasn’t too busy hiding below a
truck, terrified of one of those grenades landing beside me, and
me too cramped to get away in time.
During some down-time I take the opportunity to talk to some of
my comrades. I’m wary about this, scared of striking a
friendship when I know only too well that at any minute my
newfound buddy could be drenched in the hot sex-juice of an AK-
47. A man would go mad in the field, though, if he didn’t have
anyone to talk to, so I get to chatting to a lad by the name of
SEXY_JESUS, and another called TOP_DOGG.
SEXY_JESUS tells me he’s been on the frontlines for about a
year, and that he’s 13 years old. I’m staggered by the
revelation. Not only does this mean he was first exposed to this
soul-destroying chaos when barely a teen, but also, he’s got a
moustache the likes of which The Duke couldn’t grow with the aid
of even the most potent of fertilisers.
TOP_DOGG, he just arrived, it turns out. He and SEXY_JESUS tell
me all about the horrors of war. They talk about TK, or Team-
Kill, when a soldier just all of a sudden decides to start
thrusting the sex-limb of death into his friends. They shudder
as they discuss The Lag, some benevolent entity that causes the
world to stutter and shake for up to twenty minutes at a time,
that renders even the most frenzied of movements impotent. I
have a smoke as they regale me with terrifying anecdotes.
Later, I’m talking to someone who tells me about the honour
system inherent to the game. I learn that for every kill someone
makes, another point gets added to their crest. Some missions
are reserved sorely for folks responsible for 80 deaths and up.
A friend tells me that he uses his honour rating to get laid.
“Chicks dig honour points”, he sagely notes.
I tried this on The Duchess, telling her that I’ve been up to my
knees in bloodied pixels, but she couldn’t care a flying dung
for my bravado. I make a mental note, however, to be sure and
tell Kirsten Dunst about my rating, should the opportunity ever
arise.
“I loved you in The Virgin Suicides, Kirsten, and incidentally,
I’ve got, like, at least 50 points right now. Probably be 52
before the nights out.”
There’s a price to pay for it all, though. For all the respect,
the recognition, the thrill, there’s the small matter of a
fella's soul to consider. Sometimes, as I sat outside a burning
city waiting for the enemy to wander past, I ever considered
reciting some Wilfred Owen, if it wasn’t for the fact that such
activities would guarantee The Duke one less skull to worry
about.
Sometimes it just gets too much to bear. Like when I’m required
to do medical duties, and a soldier is screaming for help two
feet away, but I can’t move or I’ll get shot, in times like that
I even consider writing a poem, or talking about my true love
back home, knowing that the more romantic I get, the more likely
a bullet in the hole becomes.
In the field, waxing whimsical is a suicidal as shooting
yourself in the teeth with a rifle on account of Kurt Cobain did
it one time.
So I struggle on, man. I can’t turn back now. I’ve seen things;
I’ve lived things that I can’t erase from my brain. I've seen a
man with a thousand-yard stare, and last time I checked, mine
was at 782 yards and counting. I’m out there with the
SEXY_JESUS's and the TOP_DOGG’s and the SNIPER_47’s and all
those brave young motherfuckers who keep Hollywood stocked with
heartrending stories to tell.
I now know what Kilgore meant when he said “I love the smell of
napalm in the morning.” He meant that in the morning, the smell
of napalm was something he really loved.
Thanks folks.
Drop The Duke A Line Via Electronical Email
