Tag: us military

A Trio of Overlooked Video Games Dealing with Corruption

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The dangers of Insider Threats

A promise was made a few weeks ago to make a post about corruption in three action/adventure games released on 2012. This will be that post. As for what I have on the schedule, expect a review about a gender-role flipped isekai manga over the weekend.

Max Payne 3, Sleeping Dogs, and Spec Ops: The Line are a trio of 2012 video games that all deal with corruption and were in several ways criminally underrated by gamers at the time. Three pretty niche series, even despite the graphical showing with something to say about each of their own themes plot-wise. We’re going to look over the plots of all three and what I believe are the reasons they were all overlooked even now.

For the first of these three: Max Payne 3

Aventura Brasileira

The nine-year difference between the unraveling of the second game sets this installment apart from the rest of the series by sending titular Max Payne to Sao Paulo instead of keeping him in the NYC tri-state area. And the game explains why he’s voluntarily exiled from the city. In flashback scenes, Max isn’t exactly done mulling over the plot of the previous two games, walking in on his family dying in the first game and seeing people he regarded as friends double-cross him in the second game. To be fair, none of them were expected to keep specific loyalties to him. His alliance with people like Alfred Woden and Vladimir Lem, as well as a love affair with assassin, Mona Sax, were all out of convenience.

They each answered to their own bosses, though the corruption angle was relatively muted in the first game. The only corrupt figure in the first game was fellow DEA Agent B.B., who was not only on the Aesir Corporation‘s payroll, but had also helped orchestrate the murder of DEA Agent Alex Balder. Which explains how this was an inside job, though this part seems more like an afterthought, all things considered. I’ve been trying to wrap my head around B.B.’s role, but I haven’t been able to reach any significant conclusions.

The face of a… winner?

For Max Payne 2, the interconnected web of conspiracies concerning Max himself unravel in the second half of the game, but are present from the beginning. Woden, being part of the Inner Circle, initially used Max’s services to remove the connections between Woden himself and Aesir’s president and CEO, Nicole Horne. For Woden, only he and Max were privy to the relationship and for Max, she ordered the death of Max’s wife and child, so the vendetta was fulfilled and everyone “won” in the end. As it turns out, Woden wasn’t the only one with a tentacle in another pie. Vlad had an affair with another detective, Valerie Winterson, who’d been ordered by Vlad to remove Mona Sax from the picture, further complicated by Mona’s relationship with Max. Imprisoning a contract killer is one thing, but when she’s dating your junior, it’s easy to see how things get complicated with this intricate test of allegiances. Needless to say, everyone failed. Winterson was gunned down by Max in an ultimatum, Woden, dying of cancer anyway, died trying to stop Vlad, and Vlad shot Mona in the back and later paid for it, thanks to Max.

Yet, none of that was why Max was in Sao Paulo in 2012. In the flashbacks, an altercation with a mob brat who fit right in on Jersey Shore led to the brat’s death and the comeuppance from his father. Max dealt with the mob before, going after key figures in the Punchinello Family, but the father of the brat Max killed in the bar necessitated a six-figure hit on Max. He could spend the rest of his life dodging mobsters or leave. Conveniently, a fellow beat cop who was in private security for the rich and famous in distinct parts of the world — including Brazil — entices him with an opportunity. The first one was to protect a divorced socialite onboard her yacht while traversing the Panama Canal–except that went to s[pill-popping]t when a far-right Colombian paramilitary stormed the yacht and massacred all the inhabitants. It’s worth noting that the pirates were tipped off about the incoming yacht in a plot to frame Max for the violence and plant dirty money onboard. Max can’t escape these inside job affairs, can he?

Fast-forward to the plot of the third game and lo and behold, the Mother of All Conspiracies puts Max and partner, Raul Passos, at the center of it all. Private security once again for the rich and famous of Sao Paulo, a trio of brothers of the Branco family, businessman Rodrigo Branco, politician Victor, and airhead socialite Marcelo, pay the duo to protect them and their family including Rodrigo’s trophy wife Fabiana. Things go wrong when armed gangsters from the Comando Sombra gang storm the penthouse and take Fabiana hostage. This is resolved quickly and to celebrate, these idiots helicopter into a nightclub in Sao Paulo. That time, Fabiana is taken and held for ransom. Most of the family is recovered, but the ultimate mission from Rodrigo is to get his wife back. The first lead takes them to a football stadium in Sao Paulo where the duo bring three million reais to the CS, only to be interrupted by a right-wing paramilitary group known as the Cracha Preto (Black Badge).

Three million short and no closer to finding Fabiana, the next lead takes Max and Passos several kilometers up the Tiete River. A seafaring compound for drug smuggling operations by the CS, they were merely holding the woman in transport until the pair gun their way through the CS, but let her slip through their fingers again. At this point, come the next performance review, Senhor Branco was speaking with the commander of the 55th Battalion of the “elite” Special Forces Unit (Unidade de Forcas Especiais) of the Brazilian Military Police. Passos and Max convince Rodrigo to let them continue their efforts, but the Cracha Preto crashes into the offices of the Fabricas Branco and shoots everything from the office chairs up. Once again, Max is confronted by a painful failure. He was able to secure the building but not fast enough to keep Rodrigo from danger where he was assassinated in the chaos on the main floor. Complicating things further, a bomb is planted in the office to erase the evidence of the murder of a specific individual. Not that Max walks away from the wreckage empty-handed, with a dying paramilitary confessing that they were said to be after Max and that Fabiana was taken to the Nova Esperança favela.

The Max we all know and love

Max upgrades to his baldheaded beardy look and investigates personally running into trouble not five minutes into his impromptu investigation. Another cop from Sao Paulo PD, named Wilson da Silva, is also on the case and conveniently bumps into Max, giving him the details on the people holding Fabiana in custody. This heavily armed slum gives Max a proper Brazilian welcome with lead trinkets which he does in typical fashion reciprocating in kind. By the time he makes his way up to the Emperor’s Palace, the man he’d been chasing since the penthouse crash, Serrano, has not just Fabiana, but her sister, Giovanna, and Marcelo in custody. Clearly, they weren’t happy that Max was a grade-A f[gunshots]k up in a world of f[rocket launcher]k downs and sought to buy Fabiana’s safety personally. This effort goes nowhere, and Serrano kills Fabiana in cold blood. Another tense negotiation ended with an antagonist’s bullet broken up by a bigger dog barking and slobbering into enemy territory. The UFE make the rounds in a trademark raid on the favela looking for fresh meat to sell on the black market.

This isn’t an exaggeration either—the police in Brazil do carry out raids at the heart of the favelas to curtail organized crime, usually in a bloody and performative manner, though of course not all of them are this corrupt. The instance shown in the game sees the UFE pull out all the stops and fearing that he might be next, Serrano and the CS abandon ship. Giovanna and Marcelo are escorted elsewhere to be killed, and Max is left to fight through these makeshift infantrymen to the ground level. It’d be one thing if the UFE were there to arrest only the gang members, but innocent civilians are being carted off and handed to, you guessed it, the Cracha Preto for a hefty sum of money.

Max eventually finds Giovanna and Marcelo in time to save only Giovanna as Marcelo had been set on fire in a tower of tires, known as a “microwave oven.” He avenges Marcelo and has to escort Giovanna to safety through a public bus stop. Actually successful for once, but Max is essentially left behind while Passos, who was phoned up beforehand, helicopters the mother of his love child out of there. Da Silva returns to inform Max that he’d been a plaything from pretty much the beginning—not just by the Brancos but also allegedly from the Panama job.

But that’s all a moot point as there are more pressing matters to attend to. Max learned and da Silva knew that the 55th was in bed with the Cracha Preto, but the level of corruption wasn’t well understood. Countries with troubled histories like Brazil can easily have their corruption written off as a legacy of authoritarianism or its military junta. But neither realized that they were involved in the organ trade until Max was set out to raid the condemned Imperial Palace Hotel. The paramilitaries were witnessed burning the dead in trash bags, the civilians carted off earlier were found and as we learn, Serrano was among those rounded up by the UFE. The movie Elite Squad (Portuguese: Tropa de Elite) shows how aggressive the Military Police can be in matters of gang crackdowns, but doesn’t accuse the BOPE of being corrupt themselves. Max Payne 3 does show the UFE’s corruption inside and out. The hotel was the belly of the beast that Max dealt with before moving onto the UFE HQ itself. Unveiling himself as the mastermind behind the grand conspiracy to rule Sao Paulo with an iron fist is none other than Victor himself.

If he’d been elected Mayor of Sao Paulo, he would’ve made things much worse

Remember when I said this was the Mother of All Conspiracies? No lies or hyperbole detected. The game ends with Victor facing a trial and being found hanged in his cell, either through suicide or through mob retaliation, seeing as he walking around the general prison population. For all its faults, this may be the one time lack of oversight or corruption did some good. I’m certain here in the U.S., an imprisoned government official would be placed in solitary for their own protection. In Mafia III, the Faster Baby DLC reveals at the end that white supremacist Sinclair Parish Sheriff William “Slim” Beaumont was put in solitary for a 15-year stint, serving 12 before he was shot dead on his front porch in 1989 under mysterious circumstances. The black community had reason enough to hate him, but I think he was killed by fellow white supremacists for turning on them. Officer Tenpenny said it best: “Homies for life? Street loyalty? That’s all bullshit, Carl.” It really do be your own people.

Takes a traitor to know a traitor

Now, why do I think MP3 was overlooked? If you look at the cutscenes of this game and put them side-by-side with those of the first two games, it’s a major departure from the graphic novel neo-noir style it worked with. It would’ve been welcomed by fans to see it ape a modern comic book style, but RockStar spearheading the game’s development, absent of Sam Lake and Remedy Entertainment made it look and feel less like Max Payne and more of a spiritual successor. The first game was released in July 2001 on a shoe-string budget and had to do so much with so little. The last game was released in late May 2012 and cost RockStar some hundred million dollars to produce with a swanky new engine that showed how aged and disheveled Max looked after two games playing shootdodge in New York and New Jersey. The assumption was that beautiful-looking games sold like hot cakes, but MP3 was more like Hydrox cookies. The progenitor of the sandwich cookie overshadowed by the more successful Oreo.

Still Max got his proper send off and with the passing of his voice actor James McCaffrey in 2023, the only thing in the series’ future is a remake of the first two games at an as-of-yet unannounced release date. I’d welcome a spiritual successor, though, instead of a half-baked Max Payne 4. And on that note:

Sleeping Dogs – 九龍嘅遺產

歡迎嚟到香港

A spiritual successor to the True Crime series, Sleeping Dogs follows Hong Kong-born San Francisco cop, Wei Shen, and his transfer to the Hong Kong Police Force. The British legacy of colonization comes through in this game with nearly every Hongkonger in the game having a very western/English given name. Jackie, Winston, Vincent, Peggy, Sonny—you might know people with these names IRL. Goes to show that in recent history, Hong Kong and its territories were more British than they were Chinese. Speaking of British, the superintendent of the HKPF, Thomas Pendrew, is one of the only white people to be seen for miles.

Snoozing Mutts begins with Wei and his informant partner, Naz Singh, making a deal with the Triads. After a cop walks in on the deal, one of the Triads cleaves him up, Wei and Naz parkour their way out of Dodge, but are cornered by the police. At this opportunity, HK Police conduct an AAR on Wei and reveal that he’s being placed as the newest member of the Hong Kong-based Sun On Yee, this world’s stand-in for the real-world Triad group, Sun Yee On. His mission is to get close to key figures and unveil their main boss, starting at the bottom.

After this brief, Wei is put into a cell where he runs into a childhood friend from the Old Prosperity Projects, Jackie Ma. A budding gangster and soon-to-be Triad himself, Jackie gets Wei close to Red Pole (read: Lieutenant) Winston Chu, a foulmouthed, tattooed gangster operating out of his mother’s restaurant. Like their western counterparts, East Asian organized crime groups also make use of slice of life crimes from extortion to protection rackets to money laundering, but unlike their western counterparts, they like to present themselves as protectors of their neighborhoods, more so the Yakuza do this than the Triads as I’ve noticed in most crime media from this part of the world, so Winston’s operations being in the back of his mother’s restaurant is not unheard of at all.

Per the initiation, Wei survives getting surrounded by Sun On Yee, before Winston’s rival Sammy “Dogeyes” Lin shows up to antagonize Winston’s faction, the Water Street Boys. I know better than to walk into a new place like I own it, but Dogeyes pulls up wheeling his giant balls onto Winston’s coffee table. How offended was Winston at this? He went to a local fair to turn the vendors over to Winston’s side. Small, but noticeable losses that smack Dogeyes in the income. But the real prize here lies in a ketamine dealer, Ming, whom Wei tries and fails to get into police custody. In front of an interrogation table for the second time, Wei’s cover holds up well enough for Pendrew to reveal to the interrogating officer that Wei’s no ordinary thug, but one of their own. And I see why Wei wouldn’t initially want the Inspector Teng on the case either. He’s already got one mouthbreather, Raymond Mak, on his shoulder, he doesn’t want another one, but the powers that be have Teng as a secondary to Raymond.

One of Hong Kong’s finest

For the police side of things, Ming is nothing but a middleman. The true prize for the Sun On Yee is distributor Popstar. To get to him takes some more class-A acting that sees Wei catch him in the middle of a handoff that ends with a killing. Once that goes to the HKPF, Popstar goes to prison and soon after Winston shows that there’s a brain directing the brawn. Is it really a coincidence that Popstar goes down right as this new guy shows up? Though Winston didn’t think this up in a vacuum with enforcers like Conroy Wu giving him the idea simply because Wei failed a vibe check at his introduction. Thankfully for Wei and the plot he’s a seasoned thespian who was able to spin Popstar’s incarceration as an opportunity for Ming to eventually double-cross Winston and the Water Street Boys… had Ming not just taken a brand new ventilation system to the cranium. And you don’t need an undercover cop to learn how cutthroat organized crime is. Nor even the drug trade, at least if you’ve been anywhere near a TV to see the failures of the opioid epidemic and the war on drugs in real time.

So, Wei’s spared death and continues to get closer and closer to key figures in the Sun On Yee, even suggesting brilliant ideas for Winston and co. And once Wei actually meets the Dragon Head of the Sun On Yee, David Wa-Lin “Uncle” Po, rather than admit that most of the ideas were his, he hands off credit to Winston. This is a glimpse into face culture in East Asia. Even if you, the underling, are competent and capable of wiggling your way out of danger, the boss a.k.a. your superior, is the most important representative of your group, clan, guild, etc. So, by showing Winston to be the most competent and an infallible genius, Uncle Po grants him his favor. Better yet for his mission, Wei has seen the Dragon Head, a key figure in the Triads for his undercover mission.

山主的新义安

That said, undercover police work alongside plain old policing doesn’t get Wei a lot of love from his handlers, at least not Raymond. With a growing history in the triads, Raymond may be the one who most wants Wei off the mission during certain checkpoints. Ratting, snitching, internal security risks; whatever you wanna call it, there’s tons of checkpoints where it can go wrong for Wei and yet, only once has it been shown that his position was close to compromise, and that was resolved rather quickly in the beginning, but Raymond isn’t convinced and wants to leave this to whatever specialized organized crime unit HKPF can muster. Unfortunately for Raymond and fortunately for a time, for Wei, this is shot down each time by Superintendent Pendrew even after Winston and his bride, Peggy Li, are gunned down at their own wedding.

This removes an obstacle and puts Wei in Winston’s seat in the Sun On Yee, however, I look back on this mission and can’t see it as nothing but an inside job itself. In the mission, Winston asks Wei to bring the chairman his favorite wine. On his way back, gunshots go off inside, and the enemy isn’t dressed like a typical Triad gangster this time. The caterers are the ones who initiate the attack on the wedding, and they don’t discriminate. Once Winston and Peggy are dead, it’s free game. Uncle Po is wounded and recovering in the hospital on life support, and right after this, you go after the two people responsible for the hit: Johnny Ratface and Dogeyes, both of whom get their vengeance from Mrs. Chu, Winston’s mother.

Never mess with a mother’s babies

Now, I say it’s an inside job because of how it’s all set up. The Wiki says that Dogeyes orchestrated it and with Triad resources that’s easy to see, though if I’m allowed to put out a feeler for a bit, I question whether this was thought up independently or whether it came from another source. I’ll touch on this later, but for now, Winston’s death puts Wei in his shoes and Raymond’s lost faith in this entire endeavor. Pendrew still allows him to operate with carte-blanche but runs into conflict with Wei himself when he suggests that he should abandon the people who got him to his position in the first place. He doesn’t and Pendrew winds up double-crossing him at multiple points, notably at Uncle Po’s funeral. And it’s not like things get easier with Dogeyes turned into char siu. The next obstacle comes in the form of Big Smile Lee. He’d been trying to become the next chairman with Uncle Po incapacitated but another, Two Chin Tsao, so called because he could eat all of mainland China and still die of starvation, is suggested by Red Pole Broken Nose Jiang. A risk for the whole of the Sun On Yee? Sure, but it was Jiang’s suggestion that Two Guts Two Chin take the helm, though his past as a heroin addict has weakened his resolve to the point where most other Triads think him unfit to rule, even Jiang who might’ve simply made him a placeholder/seat-warmer of sorts. You later reaffirm his tetraphobia in his own house with a fellow Triad called Old Salty Crab.

Think of him as your mischievous uncle

The last leg of the game is where Big Smile Lee’s faction takes center stage as the main antagonists. His personal enforcer Mr. Tong kills Jackie and tries to kill Wei after Lee learns that Wei was undercover. A fierce final mission and battle sees Lee’s enforcers, Tong and Ponytail, dead and Lee himself thrown into an ice chipper face first. For all that he’s done, he should’ve gotten in feet first, but carrying an enemy into a deadly trap seems more like Like a Dragon shenanigans if Kazuma or Ichiban were different people.

Feels a bit useless though, knowing that Pendrew’s “hard work” is gonna get him promoted to Interpol. By this point, both Wei and Raymond know of Pendrew’s corruption but can’t touch him due to his status until Jiang, who also knows Wei is a cop, delivers a USB with video evidence of Pendrew murdering Uncle Po. Furthermore, the discussion between the two reveals that his corruption goes back decades with the two collaborating to reach their respective positions. The course of the game was where dispute erupted between them and Uncle Po gets one last callout before his funeral gets arranged. This is the evidence Wei uses to lock Pendrew up in the same prison housing most of the Triads put away by Wei. Most likely, general population where, like Victor Branco in Max Payne 3, he won’t get any protection. It doesn’t look like Hong Kong’s penal system is as draconian as its mainland counterparts, but with this many Triads inside, it’s gonna hurt.

So let’s look at why Sleeping Dogs is underrated. This review by Yahtzee Croshaw of Zero Punctuation/Fully Ramblomatic fame should get the point across, but to get it down to brass tacks: it was left to cult status. Praise for the star cast, voice acting, game design, world-building, and set pieces. Even Cantonese speakers who’ve played it could tell that a lot of care was put into the game’s use of English, Cantonese, and Honglish. A bit better than Zenless Zone Zero’s use of Cantonese during the Waifei Peninsula arc, which is a fictionalized stand-in for Hong Kong. It was still a cool easter egg though…

But to go back to the ZP review of Sleeping Dogs, setting aside the accusations of GTA clone, the main crux of the game is that Wei is supposed to be caught between two loyalties. Too much of a Triad for the HKPF and too much of a cop for the Triads, but he maintains his loyalty beginning to end. Not really atypical, real-life undercover police stick with their law enforcement agencies of employment even after the mission is completed, and continue to work for the police until eventual retirement, assuming that’s not their last case. This is a time-honored tradition IRL and in media. Off the top of my head, there’s two examples, real and fictional, of an undercover cop leaving the force.

In the co-op game, A Way Out, Vincent Moretti, is revealed to actually be an FBI agent who spearheads an elaborate operation to take down a drug dealer who’s since made a home in Mexico. After he’s killed, in his ending, he reveals himself to partner, Leo Caruso, and attempts to arrest him, but Leo dies after a gun battle. The ending sees him with his wife and infant daughter (whom they’ve been struggling to conceive for years) as he announces his retirement from law enforcement altogether. In real life, British cop Neil Woods spent 14 years undercover, rubbing elbows with the worst of the worst Britain ever had to offer. The experience took him to dark places and motivated him to write two books criticizing the heavy-handed approach to the war on drugs in Britain and America.

The real culprit for Sleeping Dogs’ status has to do with poor sales. The game cost the developers at United Front Games $30 million and when pushed out the door by Square Enix, they expected a better sales goal and a potential franchise, but with Sleeping Dogs being a spiritual successor to the True Crime series, this claim is one I have to call into question. Not to mention bigger releases from established franchises were releasing that year and the following year from the Tomb Raider reboot to Halo 4 to the announcement of Grand Theft Auto V to be released in September 2013. It still did well enough to earn its place as a great selling game in Britain and America, but not enough for Square whose real crown jewel was the Final Fantasy franchise. Thankfully, the Definitive Edition was released in 2014 complete with all the DLC and expansion packs, showing that even after United Front’s closure in 2016, the publisher still had faith in the game, which is more than can be said of the last game we’re looking at.

Spec Ops: The Line – Still a Hero, Son?

A real hero wouldn’t do even an eighth of what goes on in this game

Delisted and buried, Spec Ops: The Line may qualify for lost media if it wasn’t for all the gameplay videos released, the video analyses, and the ROMs that remain the only way to access the game these days. Even that’s difficult without a stable internet connection. While drafting up this post, I’ve had it quit on me multiple times until I did it through a mobile hotspot on my phone. Side note: it may be due to the location, but I’m positive that if my rig was in a bigger city with more traffic and therefore more customers on a livelier server, it would take considerably less time to download. RPCS3 is a bit finicky in some areas, but if it works well enough to let me play Mortal Kombat 9, flaws notwithstanding, then anything is possible.

Spec Ops: The Line follows on a time-honored tradition of adapting Joseph Konrad’s 1899 novella Heart of Darkness. A fictional tale of a sailor’s journey through Leopold II’s Congo Free State, it’s a harsh criticism of the Belgian king’s personal territory on the journey to find Kurtz, an ivory trader who’s taken a godlike role among the unsuspecting native tribes. Something that was given a glimpse of in, interestingly, Red Dead Redemption.

Trusting Dutch was a ruinous decision, but not the worst fate to befall American Indians, all things considered.

The tale ends with Kurtz meeting his end at the unnamed protagonist’s hands, something that’s consistent across nearly all media depicting the story, such as 1979’s Apocalypse Now where Captain Willard navigates the Mekong River with a Navy PT boat on a mission to find and kill rogue Special Forces Colonel Kurtz. Being in the Army now, this falls out of line with real-world military protocol. That high up and last assigned to a specialized unit, Kurtz would’ve been arrested and interrogated and likely would’ve faced a court-martial for desertion and treason, seeing as, like the character he’s based on, he also became a madman calling himself God among the native Vietnamese. He also meets his end by the protagonist’s hands.

Come Spec Ops: The Line time and the story beats are the same as Francis Ford Coppola’s troubled movie, but this time it’s a small squad of Delta Force operatives on a mission to find and apprehend Lieutenant Colonel John Konrad, which is consistent with protocol. Kudos. Col. Konrad’s mission was to provide relief to the citizens of Dubai in the wake of a sandstorm but tragedy strikes in the form of another sandstorm and the situation looks like post-Katrina New Orleans but worse… and sandy. The colonel takes matters into his own hands and worsens an already bad situation.

Delta Force operatives Capt. Walker, Lt. Adams, and Sgt. Lugo go in to relieve the situation. Thing is, Konrad is clearly not alone, seeing as the 33rd Battalion known as the Damned Thirty-Third is still in the city, and it’s on Walker’s assumption that the whole unit is rogue and therefore, free game. They’re in the way of the mission and as fellow soldiers, they put up a fierce resistance on the way to Konrad. The course of the game sees Walker make difficult decision after difficult decision culminating in a prosecutable war crime. The white phosphorus weapon system is a controversial weapon used by the U.S. military during the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. It’s chemical compounds leave horrific burns on all parts of the body that it meets. Despite Lugo’s objections, Walker greenlights its use on a compound that was actually housing civilians.

It’s common for trauma victims to retreat to a fantasy of their own design

This salient point is both a turning point for the group and a stark critique of military operations in the region at the time that led to the Iraq War’s inconclusive outcome the year prior in 2011 and Afghanistan’s failure a decade later. I remember watching gameplay of the game ages ago and the shock and awe of the results of this weapon… f[military drums]k everyone who says that these games glorify war; this is a perfect argument against that. The rest of the game gets considerably more nightmarish.

Even the loading screen tips get progressively more hostile, with messages advising the player that continuing forward is the worst choice to make. I wouldn’t be surprised if halfway through someone booted up a different game or simply put the controller down and had a walk. The last half and final leg of the game sees Walker get to Kurtz’s compound where plot-twist, he was dead the entire time. The herculean task of saving and rebuilding Dubai from scratch was too much for the man. Tragedies, unhappy civilians, dwindling resources, unpredictable outcomes; what sets Kurtz apart from the movie and book was that he didn’t try to make himself King of the Emiratis. Maybe doing so would’ve seen the game marked for banishment from the region, especially at a time when Middle Eastern-American relations were being put to the test in Baghdad and Kabul, as part of the reason Six Days in Fallujah couldn’t release in 2007, so the corruption angle isn’t so much rogue field-grade officer sells out his men for a golden AK. More on the point of rogue battalion-sized element overstays their welcome with good intentions. Or, in layman’s terms, why the U.S. hasn’t been very good at building democratic nations abroad in recent memory. The only success stories come from Germany and Japan post-WWII. Everywhere else has been a bag of trail mix.

Walker and co. also go in with the best of intentions but well after the gut-punch of using a chemical weapon on civilians, his sanity takes such a heavy hit that the pieces that used to be his brain warp his surroundings substantially. All that time he thought Konrad was mocking him from comms, it was all in his head. Moral choices were even corrupted by his gradually disintegrating psyche as a means of rationalizing the hell he’s in, lying to himself that he’s doing good when he’s another evil come to molest what’s left of the city.

Side note: for all the good that not just the U.S. military achieves, leaders can make or break an experience and looking at Walker as a soldier myself, there’s multiple instances where further harm could’ve been prevented had he simply called the mission a failure and gone home. Hell, Adams is another officer with him, he could’ve done it too. But let’s not ignore the human element. The game is designed as a critical satire, sans laughter, of the modern military video game at the time and military operations back then. I have the luxury of criticizing Walker with all that’s been made available from the game and real life. I won’t say too much about my leadership in the Army yet, but the working strategy is to simply learn from leadership good and bad. Retired and current servicemembers definitely have similar stories if you spend some time in the appropriate spaces. See r/Army and r/USMC among others for more details.

Back to the game: Walker at last gets to Konrad whose corpse was under heavy watch presumably since the start of the game. He then has a mind battle with who he thought Konrad was supposed to be, facing criticism after criticism after heavy criticism. Max always felt worthless in Max Payne 2 and 3, but he knew what kind of guy he was in those games. Walker could be shown a mirror and not realize Satan was in it in his own uniform. And here the game has multiple endings.

A destroyer in a cape is just another aura farmer

In both pre-endings, Konrad picks up his gun and aims it at Walker. In one ending, Walker, also aiming his weapon, can shoot back to unlock the post-ending. In the other, he can accept his fate and let Konrad shoot him, which is meant to be interpreted as a suicide. The final shot is the city in ruins as the screen goes black. The post endings have three paths. Soldiers are sent to retrieve the now broken Walker and here you get a last response. One ending, Walker shoots the soldiers dead. He grabs a radio from one and repeats the same line that he uses in the beginning, “Gentlemen, welcome to Dubai,” seemingly living the last of his days among the wreckage. Another ending, open fire on the soldiers and accept this upscale suicide by soldiers. His last moments are an audible flashback to one of his prior missions within Delta Force. Credits roll. Third and arguably the most haunting ending, surrender your weapon and return to base or more likely the U.S. to face a trial for treason and, going back to white phosphorus, crimes against humanity, though the political landscape of the time would likely see that charge ignored if brought up at all. The driver of the Humvee asks how he got through this hell, to which Walker replies, “Who says I did?” and whether this ending is canon or not, a close look at the background shows that it repeats, a sign that with all that goes on in the game, the nightmare is only starting for Walker.

Now the corruption claim I make here depends on definition. It gets muddier in this game. On the one hand, none of the characters collaborated with any enemy forces, sold soldiers down river, or anything of the sort. On the other hand, no one is really innocent of anything. On the surface, there’s the Damned Thirty-Third occupying the city and Walker’s group firing on fellow soldiers, but scraping a layer back, Dubai getting slapped with apocalyptic conditions shows the destruction of the social order. Mob justice was dished out to perpetrators of otherwise slice of life crimes like theft and of egregious sins like full on rape and murder. There wasn’t a gray area when applying mob law. Killing a man’s family was on the same level as stealing drinking water. Konrad was a fool to think his unit could put its best foot forward here and restore order and Walker was a fool to keep his faith in his mission. There’s an option to fire on civilians after they beat Lugo to death, though at that point I don’t think acting or abstaining makes much of a difference anymore. The gates of hell were coming to you, not the other way around.

Some may see Spec Ops: The Line and question why this instead of something like L.A. Noire which has corruption pretty much from the first case, as The Professional has a lore video on how deep-seated the corruption is:

Channel: The Professional

I omitted that as I thought it was too easy to make a case for L.A. Noire. It’s hidden for a lot of players in the beginning and doesn’t show its face once you get to insurance inspector Jack Kelso. Cole Phelps is a good protagonist on his own and Extra Credits critiqued him and his world. Sings the praises of enforcing the law with an even hand yet several cases show how uneven the long arm of the law is applied. A white kid gets off with having weed in the glove compartment of his car; a child molester, one of two, reports his car vandalized by the very brat he tried to rape, with another child molester being let go because he wasn’t guilty of murdering a woman – the police have more on the husband in that case and could probably get a warrant for both him and the rapist, the former for domestic violence and the latter for obvious reasons. Even Phelps and his partner on the ad vice desk, Roy Earle, accept a tip from a shady looking guy for a price, and the head of the whole weed distribution ring isn’t even personally charged with much. And some of this is well before Kelso gets a more important role. A look at the corruption of the LAPD in L.A. Noire would necessitate its own blog post. So look at Spec Ops: The Line as having a different kind of corruption, borne from good intentions with complicated answers to difficult issues. No one was gonna walk away from that blood-free.

Becoming the villain while still believing you’re a hero

Why was Spec Ops: The Line overlooked? Deliberate design choices played a role in its underperformance. Some critics couldn’t get through the stiff gameplay or are even critical of its story. The heavy themes are enough to turn off a casual and a far cry from seasoned CoD and BF veterans of the time. It deliberately made itself look ugly to tell players that the modern military craze had to stop at some point, though that point doesn’t really come across until CoD’s 2013 release of Ghosts. That game was hated for the way its campaign ended and come Infinite Warfare time, the sci-fi babble was a f[gun cock]k load of bulls[bang!]t. Battlefield 1 emphasizing the oft-ignored World War I was a step in the right direction, while CoD’s 2017 release went to World War II, its roots, and gave us a rare instance of the Holocaust in an interactive medium.

That said, the criticism, while wanted by the game’s designers, overlooks the message it was meant to convey. Modern military shooters were overrated by 2012, and even then, DICE and the combined developers of Sledgehammer, Infinity Ward, and Treyarch weren’t doing themselves any favors back then or even now with Black Ops 7 releasing later this year and Battlefield 6 releasing while I was drafting this post. But whatever, a series that fell asleep in 2002 came back a decade later to slap some sense into the gaming industry and died with the industry walking those slaps off with pride instead of shame.

Well, there you have it: Three games, all released in 2012, all overlooked back then and in some cases even now whether it broke off from a prior entry, it couldn’t make back its money, or its entire point was glossed over by a fickle crowd of gamers wanting the engagement they were used to. However, I’m not ascribing blame for looking these games over. For all the reviews and peeks I make on this blog, I can treasure my favorite pieces of media and lament that some of them don’t have as much audience love, but I still appreciate that they were given something of a green light and a chance to shine when they did, and no matter what happens to these games decades down the line, they’re all worth to committing to memory no matter what.

Military Movies Before and After Joining the Army

Tiberius1 Comment

The changes you notice when you’re in those boots too

By now, regular viewers know that I’m currently in the U.S. Army, but if you’re just joining us: Hello, I run an entertainment-based blog during my free time in the Army. I do what I can to not make it my personality, and sometimes I’ll update you if it interferes with this blog (especially deployments and whatnot); occasionally, I add insight in my experiences in training whenever I see the military in media and the military shows up a handful of times in media.

Not the few times where they’re a side piece to the main event, but when they are the main event, and within the military and veteran communities, because of how we’re trained, the issues that fly over the heads of those who never served are all too obvious to those who have. I don’t normally go out of my way to hunt down military movies to watch; the most recent movie I saw was a touching love story about a man with a metallic skeleton traveling across the multiverse with his dumbest friend because they’re both too dangerous to be left alive.

All things considered, Deadpool is a menace to existence. Can’t wait to see him do it again with the web slinger.

Of the military movies I did see in recent memory were Black Hawk Down, Saving Private Ryan, and Full Metal Jacket, and I’ll go over them one by one based on what I know now that I’m in the Army. I’ve seen others, but these are the ones I can remember vividly.

Released in 2001, Black Hawk Down is a retelling of an actual event that happened to U.S. Soldiers overseas. For context, Somalia has a lot of the problems that were present in Afghanistan at least in the lead up to the Taliban’s first takeover in 1996. Post-colonialism was an opportunity for Cold War politicking and with Somalia and Ethiopia barking at each other, the U.S. and Soviets got involved. Glossing over the latter half of the Cold War in the Horn of Africa, the regimes changed, Somalia’s communist government was overthrown by an anticommunist government that was just as ruthless as the last and the most infamous man at the helm was warlord, Mohamed Farrah Aidid.

In the middle of the Somali Civil War which began at the end of the Cold War (no one can agree on a starting year, just that it’s still going on), one of the warlords Mohamed Farrah Aidid made a name for himself when those loyal to him attacked Pakistani military personnel in June 1993, followed by attacks on UN peacekeepers, prompting an American retaliation on his lieutenants. Aidid spat back by deliberately targeting American troops in the area, and the Clinton administration was done playing games, sending in Special Forces Group Delta and spearheading Operation Gothic Serpent with the sole purpose of bringing him to justice for crimes against humanity.

This was easier said than done and probably foreshadows the logistical issues of the later War on Terror which the Somali Civil War folded into down the line: who’s the enemy? The inciting incident that kept Delta Force in Mogadishu overnight in October 1993 was the downing of a pair of Black Hawk attack choppers. U.S. soldiers never leave a fallen comrade behind, so a garrison was tasked with finding the downed soldiers and bringing them home broken or in a box. It may be a trope these days, but we do take care of our own.

To put it mildly, U.S. soldiers were lost in a horror show even Satan would reject. Aidid’s paramilitary, the Somali National Alliance, wasn’t exactly a uniformed entity. The movie depicts them as dressed casually albeit adorned with military gear over their everyday attire, and scenes like this would come back to bite U.S. forces in the ass in the Middle East, especially in Iraq in the early years and after during the ISIS years.

The movie focuses mainly on the U.S. Army and its special forces contingents, but the reality was that more troops from other services (Navy SEALs and Air Force Parajumpers) were also involved. Those who survived the initial crash were trapped in the downed chopper, desperately awaiting help from other U.S. forces while the Somali population barreled down on them. Of the two Delta Force operators killed that day, Sergeants First Class Gary Gordon and Randy Shughart were the two who were given posthumous Medals of Honor. As for the rest of U.S. forces, the situation forced them to retreat with their fallen comrades in tow. Photos exist of what was done to the bodies afterward, but I’m not comfortable showing it. Just know that it was grizzly.

From what I’ve heard of people who’s family members served, those who were sent to Somalia would 9 out of 10 times rather be deployed literally anywhere else. Even Vietnam vets of the time, would rather fight the Viet Cong and NVA again than take their chances with Aidid’s forces again. Normally, I’d question the validity of these statements, but there’s enough evidence from retired servicemembers who were there to pretty much write it off as a living nightmare. Somalia is still a grave danger to residents and guests alike, but U.S. Special Forces are training Somali military units so that’s a silver lining.

Channel: Warographics

The thing about the movie that stood out to me the most was a moment when Nelson and Twombly were left behind to cover for their unit while they headed to the crash site. Some time later, Yurek returns and presumably following their training, Twombly and Nelson fired until they realize it was another soldier. Yurek asks why they’re pulling security for a single deserted street corner where the two reveal that they were left there, assured that the rest of the unit would return shortly and that they have no radio or other means of communication because it was unnecessary.

Shortsighted orders are not unheard of at all in the military–in fact, it happens a lot. Military-based subreddits have members past and present sharing stories of commanders and senior enlisted leaders lying to themselves about the worst orders sent from the top down. Often they’re in a humorous light, but in the case of this scene in Black Hawk Down, a soldier stranded with no means of getting aid is above and beyond a blue falcon moment. Even if the unit didn’t know how long that rescue mission would take, leaving with just one radio would’ve been far better than deeming it unnecessary.

Overall, I can’t dispute the numbers. Critics liked it, audiences liked it, servicemembers talk about it, I liked it; inaccuracies exist about the finer details of the involved units, but isn’t enough to turn you off from the movie. It’s one of the good war movies. Give it a watch if you haven’t already.

Next is: Saving Private Ryan.

A classic 1998 war film about a platoon-sized element sent on a mission to find a sole survivor whose three other brothers perished at Normandy and send him home. Fun fact: when the movie debuted, it ignited a flurry of calls to the PTSD hotline because the Omaha landing scene triggered PTSD in veterans young and old.

The characters within this film are all fictional, but director Steven Spielberg relied on real-life accounts of families being drafted into World War II and losing brothers along the way. One such family whose sons were sent to Europe in the 1940s was that of the Niland brothers from Tonawanda, New York. Journalist Stephen Ambrose wrote of stories like those of the Niland brothers, and it wasn’t uncommon at the time for entire families of soldiers to get sent to combat. In World War I, for instance, Ike Sims, a former slave from Georgia, fathered 11 sons, all of whom died in combat.

The little details I noticed in Saving Private Ryan were numerous but the ones that stood out to me was when Corporal Reiben called attention for Captain Miller while in garrison, with Miller responding “as you were.” This is the rule for whenever an officer enters or exits a room. The troops stand at the position of attention and render a salute accompanied by the greeting of the day. The officer returns the salute and replies, “carry on,” to let the troops return to their previous activities.

Speaking of officers, while I’m not one, the rule of thumb that I know of with officers is that once they reach the rank of Major (Lieutenant Commander in the Navy and Coast Guard), they stop leading troops on the frontlines and work as battalion support, unless otherwise directed by higher-ups. I don’t know if that’s true, so don’t quote me on that. I just noticed that during the movie, more field-level officers are dressed in service uniforms than in combat/field uniforms. The exception is the lieutenant colonel who updates Miller on the situation and what he needs to do next, i.e. the plot of the movie.

There’s always praise to go around in a Spielberg flick, no matter how it turns out and while I did love this movie, there are criticisms or comments to make about it. It might be because of Spielberg’s professional background (with Schindler’s List under his belt), his religious upbringing, or the general portrayal of World War II as a black-and-white war, or all of these, but Saving Private Ryan can be viewed as a typical “saving the world” movie. Not that that’s a bad thing, but the reality on the ground was more complicated than western contemporary sources would have us believe. The Nazis had set up conscript battalions of nonethnic Germans in most of their occupied territories, feeding them the same old nationalistic manure to get them into the meat grinder. This was far more prevalent on the Eastern Front where there were more opponents of the Soviets than the Nazis until the war crimes were committed by both swastika and hammer and sickle standard-bearers, though I think Spielberg acknowledged this. It’s not an overall World War II film about stopping Hitler; it’s about a soldier who survived when his brothers gave their lives and is eventually sent back home.

Don’t let that discourage you from watching it if you haven’t already. You’re bound to have done so; Matt Damon aging five decades is a timeless meme for when you’re feeling old.

I put the template instead of an actual meme because I come across this one daily. Put your own spin on it; bonus points if it’s dark.

Lastly, is the movie that was supposed to decry war and the military, but ironically inspired more young men to sign up.

The most striking of this movie is that the character who would fill the role of Senior Drill Instructor Hartman wasn’t supposed to be R. Lee Ermey, but someone essentially coached by him. But looking at the final product, Ermey put the hat on once again and delivered a performance that’s been inspiring real and fictional servicemembers to this day. I’m pretty sure one of the senior drill sergeants from my basic at Fort Leonard Wood was in some way inspired by Ermey’s performance.

The first half is Marine Corps Boot Camp, and the second half is the characters in South Vietnam. The Marines are there own branch, and I don’t know what chicanery they get up to in boot camp, but it’s an extra month of training. Maybe if I find a Marine, I can ask, but I’m looking in from the outside for now. Being a Vietnam War-era film, it’s quite nuanced in some of the characters, the most famously nuanced character being Private Leonard Lawrence, i.e. Gomer Pyle. Knowing Better said it best when he said that Hollywood influences the military more than the other way around. Gomer Pyle was a satirical TV show from the 1960s, so every character in the film knows who DI Hartman is talking about, compared to my company at basic who might not know the origins of Gomer Pyle, U.S.M.C…. or funnily enough, Yogi Bear.

It’s a long story. Look up the “Yogi Bear is dead” marching cadence for context.

Other Hollywood characters regularly referenced in the movie is Mickey Mouse. Three little circles printing infinite money that Venezuela and Zimbabwe could’ve used when s[dial tone]t got flipped turned upside down.

For Leonard “Gomer Pyle” Lawrence, he’s a character who reflects a controversial policy launched by Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara. Dubbed Project 100,000 or derisively as McNamara’s Morons or Misfits or Folly, the goal of the project was to bring the active duty troop number across the military from five to six figures in an effort to turn the tides of the war in the U.S.’s favor. This meant an aggressive draft that targeted the most disadvantaged in America, most notably those who would’ve suffered physically and/or mentally from training alone, let alone a combat deployment to South Vietnam. These ranged from the nearly mentally retarded to the high school dropouts to the literal illiterates with a 4th grade education.

Pvt. Pyle fits the category of McNamara’s Misfit to a T. He’s quite slow mentally, is about 150 pounds of chewed bubblegum, can barely understand the simplest of instructions until the entire platoon starts paying for his f[Attention!]k ups, and overall brings the platoon down, largely by accident. He struggles, yes, but he does try his best until he suffers a mental breakdown that leads to the death of both Hartman and himself in a murder-suicide.

The movie then cuts to Pvt.’s Cowboy and Joker in Vietnam, but in reality, an investigation would’ve been conducted. Different time or no, it’s not different enough where the service’s law enforcement agency wouldn’t investigate the death of both a drill instructor and a recruit. The predecessor to the modern Naval Criminal Investigative Service (then-called the Naval Investigative Service) would’ve questioned everyone about the incident and possibly divvied up the blame based on hazing. None of those Marines would’ve been sent to Vietnam. If charged and convicted of hazing, that’s turning in the olive greens in favor of prison denim or civilian clothing with barriers to re-entry. That, or barrier to promotion depending on how a JAG officer would like to see things. It does get the McNamara’s Folly part right that mass conscription of those deemed unfit would get mixed results at best. A lesson we swiftly forgot when it came time for the 2007 Iraq War troop surge if accounts from troops of the time are to be believed.

But whatever, Kubrick never served, he just directed the movie. The war part of the war film is something I don’t have experience with and–god-willing–it stays like that, but much of the film is essentially a repetition of the central “war is bad” message seen in insert work of art here. Even Saving Private Ryan is an antiwar movie with three out of four brothers going back in one piece.

I kinda pulled my punches selecting these movies for assessment only because I was sparing myself the disappointment that would come with other war/military movies that would get the military egregiously wrong. Sooner or later, I’ll bite the bullet and bring out the worst military movie I’ll have seen by then. Of the worst, The Hurt Locker is regularly decried and maligned by the veteran community.

I think I’ll watch it to see for myself.

My First Blog Deserves to be Forgotten

TiberiusLeave a comment

Granted, I’ve grown since, but still

A while ago before stepping off for my new adventures in the Army, I mentioned briefly that I had a blog on Google’s Blogger that ran continuously from February to August of 2021 until a break due to that first attempt at Army life. The summary I made in that little speedrun was that it was crap and should be forgotten at all costs, but in a show of reverse psychology, it’s got me going back to it if only for the sake of this post, and then it’ll be forgotten forever more like the Macarena from the 1990s.

Channel: LosDelRioVEVO

Feeling your age yet, gramps? Well, move aside, we’re peers now.

The origins of the blog were born from a time of both desperation and interest. I had graduated during the emotionally charged year of 2020, a.k.a. the Second Long Hot Summer (after 1967’s many race riots), a.k.a. The Pandemic/COVID-19 Era, a.k.a.; I’ll stop with the references now, I don’t wanna remember that year either.

I may have mentioned it before, but during that year right after I graduated from college and some change during the protests or riots depending on who you were talking to, I decided to phone up an Army National Guard recruiter. Here’s one of the first problems I ran into here: the waiting. Being in the Army now, I understand the concept of “Hurry Up and Wait,” but a civilian attempting to understand the concept with no other point of reference would be left watching and waiting for something amazing to happen.

For reasons that make sense only to recruiters and journalists who focus on the military, the reason for the wait time — at least for recruiting — has to deal with bureaucracy. A bunch of moving parts are considered before a candidate is moved onto the next step, and yes this does include fitness and health. Decades ago, you could be very physically fit with the body of the next super-soldier but unable to join because you had asthma at five. The standards have been reduced since at least 2004 in that specific case, but asthma and other life-altering maladies do require a waiver… which was what kept me from signing the paper and shipping out the same day.

My medical history was far from perfect, but then again, so were a lot of people going into support roles in the Army. Also, before this, there were loads of (now outdated, but still relevant) statistics on obesity rates in the U.S., so how different was I from the average potential recruit?

Still, I was determined to at least try for the Guard that year, but with all that was going on, including my city refusing to let anyone go outside save for emergencies, and there was no chance in hell I was gonna get into the National Guard that year. I didn’t even have faith in my pulmonary functions test until my doctor rang me up and said it was positive.

And I was ecstatic! The one malady that kept me down all my life had been defeated! But by this point I was so disappointed in the recruiting that I tried looking at getting a work in my college major: writing and literature. Impossible? Or just very difficult? Well, up until that point I was so tunnel-visioned that when it came to writing, my original goal of getting published blinded me to other possibilities, both in becoming a published author and wherever else writers could flex their skills.

The difference between traditional or even self-publishing was the barrier to entry. More experienced writers can give me different stories based on their own experience, but being a poor kid with a lot of dreams, the route of manuscript to editor to agent to publisher was more a matter of money than time. I could definitely wait on this; it took me ten years to get the damn thing published. Side note: if you’re wondering why I didn’t like waiting for the recruiter, but had more patience for the manuscript it was because I was more involved with the manuscript considering I was writing it while the National Guard recruiter was more a luck of the draw. I was dying to beat the odds on this one. Part of the reason I wanted to go NG before throwing all my chips in active was to use the cash there to fund this hobby and eventually use the benefits for a VA home loan. Biased opinion or not, I firmly believe a two-bedroom, one bathroom apartment is not where a family should be raised.

That excursion with the NG recruiter lasted from August to November of 2020. Between the last correspondence with the guy and the beginning of the first blog, I contemplated learning new skills with the Job Corps, but I blew them off for a bunch of personal reasons, the biggest one being my immediate area. The nicest way I can put it is that there are swaths of the Bronx that remind me of these important lessons from The Boondocks.

Channel: BOKC headhuncho901_

Parodical or not, where I grew up, very few people turned into responsible adults. There were only three things a black or Hispanic (or in my case, both) kid could see in their future: basketball, rap, or drug dealing, a secret fourth outcome, all of these combined. And I wanted more options. The Army would mean saying goodbye to my family to potentially defend the nation from terrorists and/or near-peer adversaries, but I just saw an excuse to see more of the world that I was missing. Remember, poor kid who wants to see the world, but won’t be able to without money for bus, plane, or train tickets.

Writing, on the other hand, was a much slower process that would have me hone my skills for better results, but there’d still be pitfalls all the same. And I’d be ready for what those could look like. That said, more research and patience to know what to expect and possible steps would’ve helped me plenty. Writing is a passion of mine, as these past blogs show. The bull crap I grew up seeing was really tired and really overdone with all these new people showing up in sports and music. Allow me to be the boomer and say that the classics beat these new folks any day.

Tear me off this hill all you want, I’ll never recant this statement!

So yeah, I was concerned about potentially sharing a workspace and probably a dormitory with a bunch of kids who essentially thought the same, spoke the same, and all that. I went to school with people like that; some diversity of thought would be a huge breath of fresh air at least.

I still had my friends from before, but we were all drifting apart over time. Hell, my best friend is a father now, which essentially makes me an uncle. Writing wouldn’t net me any new friends, but it would put some money in my bank account so that I could travel and make friends the old fashioned way.

Or so I thought. Just like this blog, the old one was supposed to be primarily entertainment, but with a larger focus on anime and video games. Somewhere along the way, my time on YouTube bled into the blog posts and s[horse neighing]t went wild. Going off the rails and everything. I’ve been careful to keep my political opinions to myself, but on that other one, it was like watching someone go mad with cabin fever. And this was 2021. We had the vaccine by that point. Maybe the maturity wasn’t there yet. I was only 22 then and at least in this blog, I put some kind of research into my topics instead of just bashing my head on the keyboard like a somehow more inept Invader Zim.

A few months later, I went all in on active duty. I’d spent the last year of high school till that point convincing my mom that the military was a smart decision for me personally, but she had her reasons for imploring me to explore different options, not all of them related to my health. I graduated high school in 2016 at the age of 17. In the U.S. at least, if you’re out of school by 17 and you want to join the military, you need parental consent and my mom was in zero rush to see me in a military uniform at that point. We were also still seeing active combat deployments to Afghanistan and potentially becoming a statistic was completely off the table for her. So it was off to community college for me.

Fast-forward to 2021, and we’re set to leave Afghanistan and transition into a peace-time Army and my mother finally tells me that if I want to I can go active duty Army, so I did. The time between talking with the recruiter literally down the street from me and shipping out was about 3.5 months, enough time for me to scramble my incoherent thoughts in a piss poor blog. I’ve linked to that blog right before I shipped out in January for basic training, but to save you all the trouble, it’s right here again.

Once again, I’d like y’all to be nice. The first attempt is almost always the worst attempt. It’s not like Einstein was born with a brain that big and heavy. Then I started this blog in 2023 after being told by another recruiter that based on my previous performance at Fort Jackson, I wouldn’t have another chance in the Army. But again, my tunnel vision, or rather my determination, kept me from quitting just yet. I’d keep looking for ways to beat the odds.

It still took some doing and a year of mostly sitting at the computer and occasionally jogging wasn’t worth anything. Literally. My folks were wondering why I wouldn’t get even a retail job and my excuse was that even though experience is different from anecdotes, too many retail worker horror stories kept me from taking that plunge. I was desperate for work too, but not that desperate.

A third recruiter bailed on me, leading me to find a remote one on Reddit (beating the odds once again), and in between then and now 2023 was just me filling up this blog with better though still imperfect content. I know I said that I’d like that first blog to be forgotten for good, but as an archive of how I used to think and feel about XYZ, it’s good to have something to remind me of how not to do something. Yay!

I know it’s a month divisible by 2, but this time I wanna try something different. No recommendation this time, but next time I want to see if I can make biweekly recommendations at least until June to get everything back on track. My notes from before still have old dates written on them and they’re pretty much invalid. Once that’s cleared up, then I’m good to give you another YouTuber to eye. Gonna step out into the wider world next time.

Comeback, Kinda

TiberiusLeave a comment

Did you miss me?

Howdy, audience! I come to you from my advanced individual training location at Fort Eisenhower, previously known as Fort Gordon with a few announcements, first for what I’ve been doing, how the schedule might work for now, and what may or may not be in my future. But first, a brief.

I’ve been open before about my previous enlistment in the Army during the Summer 2021 cycle, getting injured and getting out and fighting tooth and nail to come back and finish and get what I enlisted for: benefits and a future. Well, I’m pleased to report that I had completed my Army basic training for the Winter 2024 cycle. Knowing I’d have no time or means to continue writing/blogging, I kept a notebook to use as a personal journal of mine as a supplement for the blogging. I might not reproduce those writings here since there’s a lot that’s either not suitable for the blog both language- and content-wise, but I do want to provide a summary of my time at BCT.

We don’t use that pattern for the uniforms anymore, by the way. The photo is supposed to be from 2006, but considering those uniforms were the universal wear by January 2008, I’m a bit curious why there isn’t a mix of the old and then-new uniforms.

Anyway, I found out the day of ship-out that I was going to the second worst BCT location for training: Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri.

Credit: Military.com

Before I continue, I just wanna say f[gunshots]k that place. I hope the Army doesn’t send me back over there for any reason at all.

I checked into 43rd Adjutant General Battalion, a reception unit for all incoming trainees, waiting to be assigned to my training unit elsewhere. Those of you who are older or have relatives who’ve served before, you might remember old cattle trucks being used to ferry trainees everywhere. Yes, they’re still in use, but in my experience, they were converted and fitted with seating, so if you wanted to hear about how we were all sardined into a giant cattle truck going across the bumpiest roads, sorry to disappoint you in that aspect.

The day we were taken to our training unit, it started to snow, or technically sleet on us. We were called one-by-one by the company first sergeant to our respective training platoons to grab our civilian stuff that we stuck in these black duffel bags at reception and form up in the freezing cold. In case you don’t know, the heart of the Midwest gets cold, dry air especially in the wintertime. Being out in -10 degree weather in thin physical fitness uniforms was not a fun experience. Neither was being on a sidewalk that froze overnight.

For the cadre, drill sergeants often come in a variety of different flavors and styles. I was part of 2nd Platoon (MAD DOGS!) and we lucked out by having some of the most softspoken drill sergeants in the company. Most people’s idea of a drill sergeant/instructor comes from movies like Full Metal Jacket, Jarhead, or the Army scenes in Forrest Gump, and it’s not like there aren’t drills who try to behave in the ways of Gunnery Sergeant Hartman or D.I. Fitch, but to get pedantic, they were part of a different branch – the Marines – and are representative of different times in the military’s history. But for all intents and purposes, military instructors aren’t allowed to put their hands on trainees except in the case of an instruction. For instance, if you’re called on to demonstrate a certain firing position, the instructor needs to ask for consent before repositioning your hands or arms. This is to avoid accusations of inappropriate behavior between a trainer and trainee and to maintain strict professionalism in a training environment, i.e. no abuse of power, no hazing, all that stuff.

For punishments, it was the standard repetition of a specific exercise. Half-right face (45 degree turn), front leaning rest position, move (get ready to do X number of pushups). And yes, even our whispering drill sergeants did this either to just the platoon or the whole company.

After getting chaptered out in September 2021, I thought I was off their records until I got back in and everything restarted from scratch, but I learned at the last minute that this never happened and I was given an automatic promotion from private first class with a paygrade of E-3 to specialist with a paygrade of E-4. I can’t explain how this is since I don’t know how and it likely wouldn’t be a good idea to do so. All I know is that I’ve been a member of the E-4 Mafia for about a month and never even realized until I graduated.

Credit: Military-Ranks.org

After this rank, if I have the points necessary, I’ll have to go to a promotion board at my unit wherever that is since I’m still in training.

The first week of training was getting more gear issued to us: a ruck sack, a fighting load carrier with a family of buckles and pouches, helmets, an extra duffel bag, and some winter weather gear that would’ve been nice to have when it snowed on us during the week of MLK day. Call me bitter, but just because we were shivering together doesn’t necessarily mean we had to. Yeah, we’ve adjusted to the cold, but if the summer has overheating precautions then the winter also had hypothermia precautions.

After we got our gear, training went forward as usual. Introductions to the preparatory exercises, learning the chains of command, basic medical and comms classes, especially during the field training exercises, all the fun stuff. Of course, not everything went the way we wanted it all to. The weather did get in the way at times, and on good days where I and my battle buddies (read: fellow trainees) were doing the right thing, someone else was off doing the wrong thing and at least in the beginning we paid for it. As training progresses, the punishments become individualized and you stop having to push because Pvt. Pyle wanted a jelly doughnut from the chow hall.

Credit: Full Metal Jacket (1987), Warner Bros. YT: mercurio0100

For the training exercises, there’s three: the Hammer which lasts one day and one night; the Anvil for two days and one night; and the Forge for three days and two nights. The best, if not necessarily accurate way to describe these exercises and BCT most of the time is living for two months as an infantryman, which I say is inaccurate because U.S. Army Infantry (along with other combat-oriented military occupational specialties or MOSs) go through a longer and more rigorous training course called One Station Unit Training. BCT and AIT are separate locations either at a different base or elsewhere on the same base. One Station Unit Training or OSUT is BCT and AIT back-to-back.

In between all of this is what the morning physical training or PT is for: the Army Combat Fitness Test or ACFT. A six-course event covering all the things a Soldier, MOS notwithstanding, could do in the event of a combat deployment. Timed strength and endurance tests for the body and the spirit. The first one I did yielded an awful score because it was raining and there was no opportunity to rest in between events. Thankfully, it was better the second time and my goal to improve actually showed itself. Starting off with a 25.5 minute two-mile and ending with a 19.5 minute two-mile was a hell of an improvement, I’ll tell you that.

Towards the end of basic training, I had a singular mantra pushing me forward: the Anvil, the ACFT, the Forge. Two FTXs and a fitness test. I was in no hurry to stay in goddamn Missouri for any longer than I had to. That’s not to say I’m turn off from the state. If/when I get the chance, I’ll use my leave to frolic around St. Louis or KCMO one day. I definitely wanna use that time to explore East Texas after meeting a few battle buddies from that area. And also because Texas hearts military folk.

Whether a good section of my life will be in this state is another story. I know now that my MOS may put me in either Killeen or El Paso and based on the reputations of the installations there (Fort Hood/Cavazos for the former, Fort Bliss for the latter), I’ve gotta find some good, safe entertainment outside of Armying and soldiering all day.

When all the graduation requirements are finished, the last few days were dedicated to cleaning and returning equipment, getting our U.S. Army shoulder patches as a symbol that we graduated, a Warrior’s meal of the drill sergeants’ discretion complete with skits, and then Family Day and Graduation rehearsal. Family Day is pretty much what it sounds like: trainees hang out with their families all day until around 7PM, then it’s back to the company for the night. Same thing for graduation, but the uniform is different. While the graduates wear their combat uniform and black berets on Family Day, on Graduation Day it’s the green service uniform, AKA the pinks and greens. These bad boys:

Credit: Army Times, U.S. Army

Obviously, the uniforms look snazzier with evidence of experience on your chest. Having grown up seeing soldiers wear the older dress blue uniforms, learning that they were bringing back the WWII-era uniforms a few years ago had me scratching my head. I have theories, but again, someone smarter and more experienced than me has a clearer, if not necessarily better, explanation.

The last day with all our returnables return, we were up ’til at least 1 in the morning scrubbing our bunks and the barracks. Leave times for our AITs varied by MOS. Mine was one of the first, so we ate our MREs and hopped on a bus from Lost in the Woods, Misery to Fort Gordon/Eisenhower, Georgia. A 12.5 hour bus ride from the chem school to the signal school. I’m not kidding.

Reception at Fort Eisenhower was a lot faster considering we were already in the system. As of writing, I’m taking my classes for my MOS and the classes are expected to end by late July.

With all that out of the way, will I be able to go back to my regularly scheduled blogs? Probably… Keep in mind the military trains you to expect surprises all around, some benign, some major, and you don’t even need to be a stone’s throw away from a combat zone for something to happen. Even in training not everything goes to schedule, but that’s life sometimes. Everything I wrote about so far isn’t exactly a secret, though I’m still encouraged to practice operational security so obviously no secrets are going to be scared. General stuff, yes, but anything that could threaten security will never be shared, even after I get out.

I’m still in a training environment, I just have more freedoms from when I was in basic. If I’m able, I’ll try to get back to business as usual every Saturday, assuming no funny business comes my way. If not, then get ready for periodic posts and updates. I’ve been away from the media and I have a lot of catching up to do after duty hours and dinner chow. Speaking of media surprises:

I found out at the end of basic that Toriyama passed away. While I have a list of desired topics to talk about or expand upon since my last post, I feel I should dedicate the next one to one of animanga’s most legendary manga artists. His worked shaped mine and other people’s childhoods after all.