Purple Rain

Continuing the story from Purple Rain #5...

For my entire time at my military school up until that point, I had tried to obey every order. It was the way I was brought up, really. No matter how inane, no matter how futile the order was, I viewed it as an obligation that I had to achieve. All problems I had with what my superior said I would keep to myself.

Three and a half years of repressed anger and frustration finally surfaced itself when the scrawny wing commander told me to drop for explaining why I was in front of the corps in only my boxers.

A little history on the wing commander. For the whole year and the year before, he artfully tried to aviod having to do anything difficult. He tried every trick in the book to aviod having to talk with people that would resist his orders. If there was something wrong, he'd always yell at the people least likely to talk back at him. Put bluntly, the guy was a coward. As a result, I always got the short end of the stick when something was wrong. Many officers below me and above me associated with my squadron had stopped caring about how things turned out and stopped trying to control the cadets. I was one of the few still caring, but alone I couldn't try to straighten up a squadron used to getting away with breaking the rules due to officer complacency. But the wing commander would always target me for chewing me out and punishments while the complacent officers got rewards and bonuses. It wasn't that he personally hated me, but rather because I wouldn't argue with a superior while the complacent officers would. The wing commander's attempt to aviod hearing any complaints left him a shameful coward. On that day of the fire drill, I finally stopped my period of being silent over this injustice.

Immediatly after he told me to drop, I immediatly, almost reflexivly, shouted, "Fuck you!" Everybody gasped and became silent. I had just let out a bit of what I was feeling, and I couldn't go back. Once I realized I was at the point of no return, I let my anger comsume me. "I'm tired of this crap!" I raged, "You just don't want to hear it do you?!" I spit at the ground in disgust, can began shouting various obscenities. As I shouted, my arms were twiching with anger; I was using every once of self control left to stop the situation from turning violent. But then, I heard laughing. I whiped around and saw the entire corps.

The reaction was quite varied. Some were chearing me on; after all, the wing commander had been a dick to many other than me. Others looked afraid, scared of what might happen if I turned violent. But many others were laughing, for after all, they were witnessing a boxer-clad officer go crazy in front of everybody. But I noticed one of laughers out of all: my direct superior officer.

Some more history on this guy. As his direct insubordinate, I was the one who usually carried out his orders. However, like the wing commander, the guy was a total coward, but in a different way. You see, he wanted to have his cake and eat it too. He wanted the squadron to be ruled with an iron fist, but didn't want to be the officer leading the wildly unpopular punishments. Worse yet, he didn't want others to associate him with his orders. So it was me who had to lead the various inane punishments for things that were outside the squadron's control. As a result, I became unpopular to many in my squadron. A week before the fire drill incident, I found out an interesting little tidbit about the situation in my squadron; my superior was just chummy with the rest of the squadron. You see, he had been telling the members behind my back that I was the one behind the punishments and that I had been begging him to do the wildly unpopular and stupid punishments. A bit peeved, I went into his room to report what I had found out. You want to know what he did?

He ordered me not to tell anybody in the squadron.

He explained his befuddling order by saying, and I quote, "A squadron that doesn't like its vice can survive. A squadron that hates its commander is doomed." Realizing that his words weren't very comforting, he then praised me for taking the "difficult, but essential" role in the squadron.

A personal crash test dummy?

Back to the fire drill, when I saw my superior laughing, I didn't really care about his silence order. I glared at him, and shouted, slowly but loudly, "Funny... isn't... it?! You want to know what is funny?!" Turning to the confused squadron, I told them exactly who was behind the long PT sessions in the night. I bid my superior farewell with "Now you get to take the shit I've been taking!", then ran off, in my boxers back to the dorm. As I got farther and farther away, my rage was subsiding. And rising in its place was shame and guilt. It was building slowly but strongly as I reviewed the events over in my head. The whole school now saw me enraged, in my boxers, and screaming like a mad man. The pain was becoming too much to bear, so I immediatly went to bed, hoping that a good nights sleep would ease the pain.

It didn't. And the next morning I had woken up to my direct superior knocking on my door.

(I'll detail the aftermath in a later post)