Simple America

A couple folks are still missing in action. I moved to WordPress and a permanent home. Here is the new Simple America.

Well I guess I have a travelling Jones. After looking at L B and May put up such beautiful new blogs I could not sit back and watch. Yes I have jumped up on the WordPress band wagon. This required that I pick up a domain name. The best part is that I will not have to change my links again. My blog has found a permanent home at the simple america. Please bear with me and I promise you will not have to change your link again. Honestly I was not considering WordPress this time last week. But I'm glad I did it now.

Well it has been an exciting couple of days with this vote. I had a lot of new visitors and I want to thank all of your for arriving. Want to thank May for the tips she gave me in changing from Simple American to Simple America. Her advice also helped in avoiding a couple of skins that would not have been as easy to read. Need to thank my son for being my official photographer. He took all of the pictures except for A. He had a hard time shooting E and F because he was laughing so hard. A was a self portrait. But you folks are interested in which photo recieved the most votes: Well here is the final tally: A 1 vote B 3 votes C 10 votes D 16 votes E 17 votes F 9 votes I had one blogger abstain. 2 bloggers made a double vote so I had to disqualify them. Though both of them were looking at a choice of E or F so it would not have changed the result. The winner is E. Hope you don't get tired of me sticking my tongue out at you. Because it will be there a while. At least until June. Just a comment. Have you visited L B or May's new blog. After seeing what those two did I may jump on the Word Press bandwagon. There may be more changes. One note about this blog. There are two types of comment engines available. The top line with the date is blogger and it requires word verification. I also have haloscan available on the lower line. That requires nothing but your name and email, but you only need to enter that on your first visit. A lot of you already have this set up from the old blog. Enough talk. No more delays. Lets start the next year of bloggin. I really enjoyed the last year with you all.

Well I have a new look now. Don't think I will stick with this too long. But I had been using the other for the whole year. Needed a change.

Okay folks. It is time for a little democracy in Simple America. I am going to give everyone the Opportunity to vote for my next profile picture out of the following six photographs. Everyone has one vote. The time of the elections starts with this blog posting. The election polls will be left open for 48 hours. My vote will only be cast in the case of a tie breaker. Here are the photos. They are identified by a letter besides each picture: A) Cheesey Smile B) Nice Smile C) Suave D) Thoughtful E)Ready For 69 F) Digging For Natural Resources

Damn I felt embarrassed and scared. I would have to go to sick call. Sick call meant I would need a sick call slip signed by Sergeant Hillbilly. He would want to know what ailed me and I could not lie to him if I wanted to. It meant he would inform the other sergeants and pretty soon everyone on the project would know. This information would make it back to Arizona as well. Soldiers like nothing better than to harass their peers. You would walk by your fellow soldiers and they would give you applause, because you have “the clap.” Someone would remark, “Did you turn off the faucet.” And the response would be, “Oh no. That’s just Blakemore drippin’.” This is the kind of stuff I would listen to for the next couple of weeks. But the first thing I had to get the “Silver Bullet.” That is the name GIs affectionately gave to the shot that cured the clap. Usually, this was penicillin, but I am allergic to that so I received another antibiotic. Some might have suggested holding off. Wait until I returned to the states and see a private doc. But I had no idea how many months I would remain in Korea. I recalled someone actually pulled the pipes out of the urinal when I was Germany. They ignored the burning until the pain became so incredible that they yanked the metal water pipes out of their sockets. I had no desire to feel that kind of pain when I could just get shot and go on with my life. To some extent getting the clap was like a badge of the ville. The other worry was that the clap might have brought along an acquainted ailment. GIs talked about a form of venereal disease (VD) that slowly ate your genitalia. Supposedly there was no cure. Whoever caught this was shipped off to an island to rot to death. I am betting now that the island was an urban myth. I don’t know about that type of VD though. I talked to the com center people to get the skinny on how sick call worked at Camp Humphreys. What time? Where to go? I slept on it, staying inside the base rather than go to the ville, since sick call’s hours were early morning. Went to the mess hall and had breakfast with Jam. After breakfast I looked for Sergeant Hillbilly in the com center. He was easy to find as he was a loud fellow. He loved to hear his voice own voice. Hillbilly had a wife and a bunch of kids back in Huachuca. Sarge also had a yobo in the ville and he talked about marrying her. I don’t know if he did or did not. He yakked about his lover to a group of guys as I approached, “Well I woke and she got up too. I’m still laying there and she got on her knees looking for something on the floor. So I got yobo’s ass all in my face. So I smelled her pussy. And it smelled good. Then I licked it. And her pussy tasted good. So I figured while I was there I better fuck it good too.” They laughed at the result of the tale. Looking at all these guys listening to his story I wondered if any of them had gone to the ville yet. Why listen to his story? Go to the ville and make your own. But I had bigger things to take care of and I got Sergeant Hillbilly’s attention. I handed him a sick slip to sign. “What’s this, Specialist Blakemore,” he asked? “I need to go to sick call Sarge.” “What’s wrong with you? Got the clap,” he spoke with such a tone I knew he did not question my ailment. “Yep Sarge. I got a leaky faucet.” “What in the hell you want to go and get the clap for?” Then he guffawed a barrage of laughter while signing my slip. Well at least I did not have to wait for my ailment to hit the grapevine. He blabbed it out in front of anyone and everyone that was there. So I did not have to wait long to hear the jokes as I left to catch the bus for main post. Sick call at most Army bases is a part of the hurry up and wait system. The whole Army is based on the idea of getting someplace early and then waiting. I arrived at sick call around 8:15, turned in my sick call slip and I was considered almost too late to be accepted. I sat in a chair and read my book. Every now and then a soldier might nod off where they sat and an orderly would order them to wake up.

Most of the people in the room looked at me with great suspicion. That’s the way GIs are. These guys could care less what ailment I carried. There problem involved their inability to recognize my unit patch. Everyone in the Army is assigned to a unit. As part of the CEI battalion I was in USACC (United States Army Communication Command) and we had a crest (Don’t remember what the crest looks like) for identifying the battalion. Since I came from Ft. Huachuca and I worked inside the remote part of the base none of these guys had seen my patch and crest before. GIs are very territorial and suspicious of strangers. The first thought when meeting a stranger is trying to determine if he might be CID (Criminal Investigation Division, the CSI of the Army) or from the inspector general’s office. Strangers have only one purpose, to fuck with the status quo and make extra details (chores) for a unit. They could see from my rank that I was not likely to do these things. But they had to consider who I worked for and where they might be and what they might do based on what I saw and said. I read my book while feeling all of that negative energy flow in the room. Really I do not blame them for feeling that way. I would have done the same in their shoes and not thought twice about it. An hour went by and they called my name. I walked over to the orderly. I handed him my medical records which I had in my possession since I was TDY (temporary duty). He took my temperature without asking me anything. Time passed as the mercury settled on no fever. He jotted down the temperature on the medical notes. “So what seems to be the problem,” he asked. “I got VD.” “Okay. What makes your think that?” “My piss burns and my dick drips.” “Sounds like gonerhea.” “Feels like hell,” I remarked. He kind of snickered at my comment and waved me back to the seats. I went back to my book. Another hour passed and they called me again. They actually called several of us and we left the waiting area and went into a back room of the clinic. Once we entered the room, a medic lined us up, nice and neat. There was a long table and our line was on the one end and parallel to its longer side. On the opposite end of the table was a female captain. A young cute brunette. She arranged microscope slides and other implements on the table. A pile of medical records also lay in a neat heap. Once she had everything set up she called us forward, one at a time. The captain or the medic would have their patient display their penis. Then they would take a cotton swab secured to a metal stick and insert it inside the penis for a sample. Then they would wipe the swab on the microscope slide, label it and set it in a rack where it awaited to be sent to a laboratory. With the slide secured then you would pull down your pants enough to get the “silver bullet” and then they would write your medical profile. The profile restricted you to Camp Humphreys and ordered you to drink no alcohol for two weeks. There may have been a few other restrictions but those were the ones that hurt me. Once they gave you the profile, the captain would sign off on your sick call slip and you could return. Quite an assembly line and it could go quite smoothly. But it did not. I waited next in line, when the next GI went up to the Captain. She ordered him to take out his penis, as she stood there ready to swab. “I’m not going to let a woman touch me,” he told the Captain. “Soldier I am ordering you to take out your penis,” she demanded. And me stuck having to listen to this prude. I’m thinking the whole time, who gave you the clap, man. If you had been so adamant about not having a woman grab your dick then you would not be here now. But I kept that thought in my head. If anything I would have a good tale for lunch and the fellas might forget my predicament. They kept going round and round. I’m waiting for the Captain to call in the MPs to hold him down. But the medic came over and swabbed him. I don’t know if the Captain reported him or not, but she certainly could have. Then my turn arrived and I was more than happy to get this over and done with. For the record the swab hurts like hell, but it’s not the most painful thing I have ever experienced. I got my “silver bullet”, my profile, my signed sick call slip, and then I had to argue over taking my records back. Fortunately, when I produced my TDY orders they relented and allowed me leave with my records. Once I was done at the clinic I did not head straight back to the com center. They failed to time stamp my sick call slip, so I do what soldiers do when they have some slack on the leash. I goofed off. Goofing off meant going to the PX and buying some essentials, cigarettes and junk food. Then I went to the book store and browsed a bit. I returned to the base in the base as soon as it got to be lunchtime. I dropped off my purchases and went to the com center. Sergeant Hillbilly was not around, but Sergeant DH was there. “You back from sick call,” he asked? His voice grated at me. If anyone could find a way to make the clap a worse experience he could. “I handed him my sick slip and profile.” “Blakemore if I catch you in the ville I am going to make sure you get an Article 15.” And with that he made the clap a worse experience. There was no way the Camp Humphreys MPs would know I should stay inside the base. I had TDY orders and they allowed me to leave as I pleased. Camp Humphrey personnel would require a signed pass to exit the base. But now I had this jerk looking for a chance to burn me. Some people get promoted to high rank and they are not happy unless they make their subordinates miserable. This really looked bad. No beer hurt a lot cause I liked to drink. I did real good at drinking. No woman, well I would never infect a woman knowingly. No ville, really killed me. I loved walking the streets and seeing the people. Though the one question that nagged in the back of my mind constantly was who gave me the clap. Did Suki get it from her air force boy. Or did the old yobo give it to Miss Lee. That’s a question that I have never answered to my satisfaction to this day.