"On Vacation"

Papa, on vacation, 1972

“A-a-aye, I’m on vacation

Every single day cause I love my occupation…” Dirty Heads

How many folks go off to work everyday, lunch pail in hand, with a smile on their faces? How many employed people actually enjoy their work? Conversely, how many people, do you suppose, hate their jobs with a passion, and if it weren’t for the rent, they’d chuck it all and go fishing?

More of the latter than the former, I fear, though I have nothing other than a gut feeling to back it up. By gut feeling I mean, as I go through the check-out line, or am served in my favorite restaurant, it’s pretty easy to see from attitude and body language, how happy-or otherwise-people are with their jobs.

I used to emphasize to my middle school students that money was not the most important component to being employed. It’s all about the clock, I suggested, and why you look at it. As my father used to intone, "Let us be happy in our work." As a teacher, I fought the clock because there was never enough time in the day (or an individual class period), to get everything done.

In five of my six careers, time has always flashed by because I was too busy to have time to look and see what time it was. Let’s face it: Checking the clock is not to see what time it is, but rather, how much time is left before you get to leave. Not much of a life.

Playing touch-football down in Baja,
California, 1975ish...

The one career I had where the time dragged was Uncle Sugar’s all-expenses-paid military merry-go-round, where I worked in a personnel service company. My job was to file stuff, lots of stuff, so I had to know the alphabet real good. 

In the beginning, I handled about twelve-and-a-half percent of South Korea’s 50,000 troops, in terms of getting them home from The Land of the Morning Calm. Not too long after I arrived, I suggested to the nice colonel, that I take over the filing for all 50,000 soldiers, and leave the grunt work to the rest of the crew. All I did was handle all the records…

Getting these troops home did not apply if you were a lifer; then you were reassigned, somewhere StateSide. The 199th Personnel Service Company was second only to Finance, in Korea, in terms of status, and we wore our insignias proudly.

I used my lofty position exactly once, in my sixteen months overseas, to weasel out of a sticky wicket. I was already out of the office and in Project Transition, which loosely translated, meant I worked on officers’ cars under the guise of being trained to be an auto mechanic.

I let discipline get a little lax, as hard as that is to believe, and I let my beard relocate, from a clean-shaven Specialist IV, to a red-bearded savage, over a five-week period of time. With only days remaining before I caught a red-tail homeward, ** I was accosted by the most “stract” MP I had ever seen, while I was dressed in civvies.

The author of Mark's Work, 1977,
on vacation...

Long story short, as he was writing out the citation which would have resulted in an Article-15, and would have immediately yanked my records from the about-to-ETS, to the world-of-hurt file, I asked him one simple question:

“Sergeant Smith (probably not his real name), where would you like to be reassigned, when you leave this Vacation Paradise?” I asked the question innocently enough, holding his gaze meaningfully in mine, with an iron grip.

I mean, how hard was it to look up this by-the-book clown’s records, since he wore his insignia on his shoulder, and his name over his shirt pocket, to find out where he called home. How hard was it to make sure he ended up on the opposite side of the country, in a pit like Fort Polk, Louisiana, or the granddaddy of them all, as far as fear tactics, Fort Hood, Texas?

Not hard at all, though Ft. Hood was a scary thought for a California lad.

He remained in character for one more, brief moment, retorting, “I know you’re in the 199th,” flashing my ID, “and that doesn’t worry me one bit. You’ll be long gone before I leave.”

I let fly my best chortle, glancing almost shyly at him, in obvious amusement. “No doubt, Sarge, no doubt.” I added a few chuckles and allowed a snicker or two escape. As if I did not have any brothers remaining in Korea, after I made my break.

He got it, before I even finished my little act, and closed up his neat metal file-folder. “Fine,” was all he said.

I wasn’t quite finished though. “May I have that document, please? The one you were just filling out?” I smiled benevolently at him as he reopened and tore out the ticket, both copies and the carbon too. I would still have it today, except that I tore it up myself right on the spot, and threw it in the nearest garbage can.

True story.

Noel, Papa and Matt, on the trip to La Paz, 1972.

I hated my time in the service because it was not my choice to be there in the first place. I was drafted. I have never worked anywhere since, that I did not want to, including my current profession as farmer. Maybe it’s because of the many hats I have to wear, but it’s more about that clock, and how there is never enough time.

“My life may be crazy

My lack of the lazy has let me do shit that I love on the daily

Daily, daily

Get to do this shit I love upon the daily

Daily, daily

Everybody go and live your daydreams up… 

If you don’t like your life, then you should go and change it…”

https://video.search.yahoo.com/yhs/search?fr=sfp&hsimp=yhs-001&hspart=rotz&p=I%27m+on+Vacation+Dirty+heads#id=1&vid=b17c1be2cbed7f66e42efd593e141e2e&action=click

** Unlike today, when a red-tail designates a bird of prey seen frequently here on the mountain, a red-tail was a freedom flight “back to the world.”