Officer Stereotypes: "You'll Shoot Your Eye Out"

This begins what will be a multi-part miniseries on the stereotypes that make the complex officer corps of the United States Army. Who really knows how many parts this series will have? It's only limited by my observational skills, the actual number of applicable stereotypes, and bandwidth.

"You'll Shoot Your Eye Out"

"Kid, you don't want a BB gun, you want an M1A2 SEP Main Battle Tank. Trust me."

At some point in your Army career, likely 2 or 3 minutes into it in fact, you will likely encounter this officer. Much like Santa Claus in A Christmas Story, this officer enjoys ruining perfectly sound fun with ridiculous assertions. In college, I learned about various types of logic. Inductive, deductive; though I would struggle to accurately describe these on an academic test I vividly recall the logical fallacies. Logical fallacies are all around us. Advertising agencies, middle school children, and politicians make frequent use of the straw man, the ad hominum, and my personal favorite: the slippery slope. The slippery slope fallacy occurs when an individual begins with X event, chains together a number of events that could possibly happen as a result of X, then asserts that all events will happen if indeed X does transpire.

WHAMMY! I just distracted you with another logical fallacy!!

Trust me, this will all make logical sense. The officer mentioned above will ambush you. Likely you will be missing a minute piece of a 12 page packing list, or be sporting a tab that isn't quite authorized. Ten minutes of discussion later (and I use the term discussion very lightly) the outcome of said action or inaction has meandered it's way into causing a Communist take-over of America.

For example. At one point, my platoon was given "RECON" tabs. In days of yore, scouts could wear RECON tabs as a sign of distinction (in ancient days the number of scalps dangling from your saddle implied distinction...but I digress). Flash forward to more recent times and I, along with several members of my platoon, are wearing said RECON tabs on a patrol in hostile, enemy infiltrated territory. A senior officer spots me and poses an innocuous question: where did you get those RECON tabs? To which I honestly replied. The resulting "discussion" hit all the basics such as "bad leadership," "lack of discipline," etc etc. But then we took a sharp right turn to slippery slope town: as a result of my RECON-tab wearing brashness, my soldiers were going to stampede into the PX buying every badge, tab, and unit crest that they could get their hands on. My eyes glazed for a moment and when I came-to we were still "discussing" how my soldiers were going to sack Baghdad lock, stock, and two smoking Bradley M242 25MM barrels.

The men of the 101st Airborne wore this version. Tom Hanks told them they could wear it.

Really?

Did my wearing of an unauthorized tab break the dusty regulations entombed in AR 670-1? Yes.

Is it possible that I was hurting good order and discipline by condoning the wear of an unauthorized decoration? Maybe.

Is my platoon going to look like a Delta Force garrison inspection tomorrow? No. C'mon man.

It seems that with these officers, not wearing gloves can lead to the moon falling out of orbit. No eye pro? Do you like causing the fall of Western civilization? I see you decided not to wear your PT belt, I guess we know who to blame when the Zombie apocalypse is upon us.

Keeping it real means tell me I'm not doing the right thing. We don't need to buttress arguments with silly exaggerations that aren't even remotely true. So let's all be logical.