Shooting For Shackles

In the thread of me trying to put things up here that I keep trying to find - here's Shooting for Shackles. I'm always able to find the earlier version of this, but for some reason I can never find this version which is the later version that's been edited and is finished.


If you're wanting to publish this because of how awesome it is, feel free to contact me. Seriously, I would love to see this one published.

Shooting for Shackles

            With the last name Zahovich, the back seat on the bus is my home, just like the last place in a roll call. You’re not the first one through the gauntlet; you’re the last one through, and get to learn from everyone else’s mistakes.

            That afternoon on the back row of the bus I could see the nastiest gate I had ever seen. It was solid steel, fifteen feet high, just wide enough to fit the bus through, and had loops of razor wire circling around the top like masochistic halos.

            From the back of the bus I heard the hydraulic doors hiss open. Before any of us could stand up from our seats three uniformed men boarded the bus and started yelling. Stand up. Grab your gear. File out in order. Some didn’t listen and rushed out; which meant more yelling. Some forgot their gear, more yelling. A few froze in place from the sensory overload, more yelling. I sat in the back and waited.

            When it was my turn, the bus was cleared out, I grabbed my gear from the overhead bin, and down the aisle to the last spot waiting for me.

            Standing in front of us was a solitary officer with his chest puffed out. He dropped his hands behind his back and began pacing in front of our line starting with the A’s down to me, and then back again. “Good afternoon scum. We all know why you’re here. The draft is open and your country needs you in our war. It is my job to take you from scum to soldiers. Here, you follow orders. Do I make myself clear?”

            The row of us tried to answer. Yes, yah, and mmmhm made their way out of our mouths. The drill sergeant continued yelling. “When addressing a drill sergeant you end all sentences with drill sergeant. Do I make myself clear?”

            We were a bit more organized and chanted out, “Yes, drill sergeant!” At the very end of the line I mumbled under my breath, “Gotcha.”

            “I didn’t hear you!”

            The line shouted, “Yes, drill sergeant!” with my voice stretching out past the crowd, “10-4.”

            “Let’s see if you scum can really follow orders.” The drill sergeant walked us through a song and dance routine of introducing ourselves to him. One step forward with your right foot, stand at attention, say the magical words, introduce yourself, wait for a response, wait for the salute back to you, and step back to line with your left foot. “Do you scum need me to make it any easier for you?”

            “No, drill sergeant!” came out of the line from A to Y with the muffled, “Well, if you’re offering I wouldn’t say no,” poking out from the Z.

            “Let’s begin.” As my luck with naming always stands, he walked to the other end of the line and started with the A’s. We learned that the first mistake got yelling and the demand to start again from the top. Every mistake after got more yelling and a cumulative five push-up punishment. The first guy, cursed with an A last name, worked his way up to fifty pushups, eleven mistakes, before he got it all right. The next handful of guys progressively made fewer mistakes. Some started to act annoyed by people that couldn’t do forty pushups without stopping, but it made sense. You take a college student that spends their life in a library, who gets exercise from by walking from the accounting lab to the computer lab, and there’s no hope for them to do more than twenty consecutive pushups.

            The drill sergeant worked his way to Young. I didn’t want to worry about what was going on next to me so I stood there passing the time by trying to do my exponent tables. It was something that I learned back in high school to think about anything else besides what was going on. I made it through my first and second powers list, and was started on thirds. Third is: 1, 8, 27, 64, 125 . . . when it was my turn.

            I stepped forward with my right foot, making sure not to slouch, and held out my hand to shake the drill sergeant’s. I was never one for strict formalities.

            “What are you doing scum?”

            “Where I come from we shake hands when introducing ourselves. Normally, this is the point where we shake.”

            “Are you retarded, scum? You are to address me as sergeant!”

            I took my hand back because I took the wild guess that he wasn’t going to shake it. “No.”

            “If you don’t want the next month of your life to be a living hell, you have to call me drill sergeant.”

            “Actually, according to the Bill of Rights, I don’t. Freedom of speech and what not, ya’ know?”

            The drill sergeant took a step towards me. “Drop and give me ten.”

            “No, thank you.”

            “That’ll give you another ten. Twenty! Now!”

            “No.”

            “Each time you say that it’s another ten!”

            “Keep up then. No. No way. No how. Not now. Non. Nej. Nein. Not a Snowball’s chance. Absolutely not. Hell no. Oh, hell no. I’d prefer not to. Blow me. Bug off. Wait for it. . . almost there. . . no.”

            The drill sergeant folded his arms back behind him and started pacing the line, away from me and up to the A’s. “This scum wants to be funny. Time to teach you that one of you affects the rest.” He pivoted back towards me when he hit the top of the row. “That means that the rest of you get to do his pushups for him. If my count is right, you each get to do 180.” The sergeant made his stop at me and glared at me. “Drop and give me 180!”

            “No.”

            “190!”

            “Let me get this straight.” I said smiling at the realization of the power I had just gained. “I say no, and the rest of them get punished?”

            “Exactly.”

            “Awesome.” I took a deep breath and made it through twenty-six no’s. “That’d be an extra 260 pushups. Actually . . .” I pulled out four more no’s. “Let’s make it an even 500.”

            I took a step off of the line towards the drill sergeant and stood next to him, facing the group of guys trying to pump their bodies off of the ground. I leaned over to him and whispered, “Can we just assume that form here on out, I’m going to say no?”

            “You will drop and give me fifty now, plus the extra 500 you made the rest of your company do, or else I will make sure you don’t eat a thing for the next twenty four hours.”

            “I ate a big breakfast.”

            He shoved his face a hair’s width away from touching me. He didn’t yell, he knew that wouldn’t make me do anything so he talked. “Drop. Now.”

            I moved my face forward the extra millimeter, and put our noses together. I could feel the muscles in his face tense up through his nose. I always had the bad habit of trying to push things just a little bit further than they should be taken. I took a deep breath, filling my entire chest with air. “Sir, no sir!”