Once upon a time, before I started my academic career at *Redacted* University, I was a soldier in the U.S. Army. I joined when I was 17 right out of high school and got my mom to sign the papers so I could enlist as a minor and everything. Fast forward, I graduated from basic training, and infantry school and was reporting to my first duty station feeling invincible. I reported in at around 9 in the morning and proceeded to get my balls hazed off the whole day which is a story for another time. At this point, it is around 8 pm I have been assigned my barracks room and decided to take a nap having been exhausted from the mass amounts of physical exercise and the aforementioned hazing I had to endure that day.
At around 10 pm I awake to a pounding on my door, I open it and my team leader (My boss) who is this roided out, angry, Cambodian dude with 4 combat deployments, standing with 4 of the other senior guys and says to me “If you don’t help us fight our rival unit I’m going to fight you.” We walk outside and the scene that is laid out before me is something I will remember till the day I die. Around 400 of our nation’s finest just brawling, and I mean BRAWLING in this tiny little field in the middle of one of the biggest military bases in the country. I take two steps out the door and onto this field, win my first fight, then his buddy who just happens to be this 6’5 roided out Samoan guy who loosely resembles the rock, who months later would become one of my best friends in the world walks over to me and knocks me the f*ck out. I come to probably a few minutes later and see just a sea of red and blue police sirens coming around the airfield to break it up.
Everybody immediately stops fighting each other and chooses to fight the poor military policemen charged with breaking up this testosterone, alcohol, snow, and steroid-fueled brawl between two of the most famous combat units in our military, if not the world. I mean it was something out of a movie, soldiers were stealing police service pistols, batons, and riot shields. At one point I see the same Samoan dude who knocked me out, being hit with 5 different tasers from 5 different cops at once still standing upright and slowly advancing towards these poor souls with taser prongs sticking out of him still. Eventually, this whole thing fizzles out when our commanders get called in along with the Sergeant Major. To this day that military police unit is missing those pistols, tasers, riot shields, and batons.
