My brother recently posted his thoughts on ROTC. I was actually a cadet officer in my fourth year of high school (and a cadet officer candidate — as member of the Cadet Officer Candidate Corps, or COCC — in my third year).

I could write about this longer, but the fact of the matter is: I hated every minute of it (COCC, Citizens’ Army Training, and Citizens’ Military Training) and still think it was an absolute waste of my time. I joined probably because I was insecure and wanted some affirmation (or to exercise some authority), and I can now assert that my time would have been better spent reading books or playing computer games or listening to music. Or something.

Almost every day of my junior year I would have to greet every cadet officer with a “Sir, good morning, Sir!” or a “Sir, good afternoon, Sir!” I was made to do push-ups every day (either in public or on the urine-slick bathroom floor), I cleaned the commandant’s office, I drank chili pepper-infused water, I ate lunch underneath a table, I had to wear a dress, and I was regularly called “stupid,” “maggot,” “faggot” — all the happy, daily indignities that one had to suffer for the sake of “military discipline” (“the state of subordination under a military command,” involving “the ready subordination of the individual for the good of the group,” or something like that — we had to memorize paragraphs and paragraphs of military handbook stuff as well). Okay, so I was pretty darn fit as well, having to do the dreaded Army dozen regularly. And I had to wear a long-sleeved shirt and tie every Friday — and a buzz cut and black leather shoes the rest of the time — but that was about it. (Thank God physical contact was phased out before I joined, otherwise my ass would have been paddled, that’s for sure.) And to Cecille, the woman who was directly in command: we hated you, we loved you, but it was all Stockholm syndrome at that point.

I was miserable, as you can imagine, but I was determined to finish and not be called a quitter. I finally did finish the year-long program, at some point, learning all about rifle drills and how to assemble and disassemble rifles and whatnot, but there was no heavenly moment of catharsis — all I remember was one of my batchmates, Johnny, weeping, snot running out of his nose, vowing to make his subordinates-to-be suffer like he had done. That, I think, said it all. It was really nothing but a glorified Filipino college fraternity, with the initiates subject to the petty whims of the older “brods,” except that we didn’t drink or lose our virginities to hookers.

A couple more of my batchmates ended up joining the Philippine Military Academy and were shipped out straight to Mindanao. Christopher returned to Los Banos in a coffin. Randolph had an illustrious career at the Academy — and this is simply totally hearsay (although Randolph, if you’re reading this somewhere out there, alive or dead, I don’t give a fuck what you think) — electrocuting POW’s testicles (or it may have been pledges’ testicles, I can’t remember which) with such high voltage that he would blow fuses all throughout the barracks.

But I digress. Being a cadet officer in my fourth year gained me nothing; Randolph gleefully assigned every thug in my year to Military Police, and assigned me as the MP head. All I got for this was lotsa yuks behind my back (and to my face) and a dousing in a steel drum full of stagnant rainwater for my efforts.

By the time I got to college I was already pissed off at the military, and the prospect of compulsory military training (for men only) every single Saturday for two more years was disheartening — especially since I’d heard it all before. And so it went: the endless marching and rifle drills, the pointless lectures on military history and discipline, being yelled at by company leaders who called us “goddamn shitheads” so that we could learn to respect them — all for the service of the nation and eventual battle with the Muslims in the South and the Commies… well, everywhere (more about this some other time, as my involvement in the school paper got me deeper into the left). Some folks who tried to duck out — this poor Jehovah’s Witness, a couple of male models who couldn’t get a buzz cut — ended up not being able to graduate until they got their units.

At some point I wrote a rather critical opinion piece on the military college requirement in the UPLB Perspective, and was later pulled out of my platoon one Saturday for an audience with the commandant at the grandstand. (My friend Edwin was waiting and merely corrected my use of “khaki” — it was “fatigue” — but I understood what my being singled out meant.)

To this day I can’t think of a more profound waste of time in every possible way.

Popularity: 1% [?]

Okay, now it’s sounding more interesting. This album comes pretty much out of left field — it’s noisy, all right, but it seems philosophically closer to AMM-like improv. The disjunctions between the sound ideas remind one of a Nurse With Wound album — done in one take! There’s a toilet flushing, there’s random squelches and squalls, more cutlery-shaking, and so on. But the last 15 minutes are spent on a totally self-indulgent guitar solo (or rather, prepared guitar solo) which does not really go anywhere.

Popularity: 1% [?]

A little better, but this also works on the electric-hum-in-one-channel and whatever-else-in-another principle, which isn’t very interesting. At one point there’s plinky-plonky guitar, at another it sounds as if he recorded himself leaving his keyboard, walking to the kitchen, and rummaging a drawer (presumably to look for the same spoon he used in OM Electrique. All for 46 minutes! I can’t even remember anymore whether this is the one where he blows raspberries…

Popularity: 1% [?]

This does not bode very well for the rest of the Merzbox — though like John Zorn‘s Early Recordings album, the point was to release really early stuff (here, from 1979).

In any case, it’s not uninteresting, but it’s still not the Merzbow I know and love. This is fairly minimalist. The first 40 minutes are of this hum and what sounds like Masami Akita beating on a pipe with a spoon. Yes, 40 minutes — there are little changes in rhythm (not that there was really any) and there is some squelchy stuff every now and then, but all in all the title track (parts one and two) is pretty intense in its single-mindedness. (The other tracks features more drone and a poorly-executed drum solo — the sound, really, of someone who knows how to play drums but is in this case trying to sound haphazard about it.)

It’s the hum that is the most telling, and shows the noise in his future: it’s not a nice, om-like, Lull drone, nor even an Alan Lamb electrical hum, but it’s a deep, grinding, slightly metallic buzz that makes your teeth hurt. At any moment you almost expect William Bennett to yell “My cock’s on fire!”

Popularity: 1% [?]

I’m feeling, like, all inspired and stuff and thought I’d single out Sgt. Mark Redmond and Sgt. Eric Schrumpf as soldiers who need our support. You the man!

As the New York Times wrote:

Like many soldiers here… Sergeant Redmond said he did not expect the Iraqis to resist so doggedly.

“I expected a lot more people to surrender,” he said. “From all the reports we got, I thought they would all capitulate.”

In the three days that followed, they did not, and he fired every weapon on his Humvee, including a 50-caliber machine gun, his M-4 rifle and a grenade launcher ? everything except the shoulder-fired antitank missile. Many of the Iraqis, he said, attacked headlong into the cutting fire of tanks and Bradley fighting vehicles.

“I wouldn’t call it bravery,” he said. “I’d call it stupidity. We value a soldier’s life so much more than they do. I mean, an AK-47 isn’t going to do nothing against a Bradley. I’d love to know what Saddam is telling his people.”

Maybe Saddam is telling his people to defend their homeland from invasion… but wait! We have to support the troops!

Dude, I am totally not voting you off the island!

And here’s Sgt. Schrumpf — totally my kind of guy!

“We had a great day,” Sergeant Schrumpf said. “We killed a lot of people.”

Awright! Man, what else kind of support do you need?

And here’s Sgt. Schrumpf again:

…in the heat of a firefight… when the calculus often warps, a shot not taken in one set of circumstances may suddenly present itself as a life-or-death necessity.

“We dropped a few civilians,” Sergeant Schrumpf said, “but what do you do?”

To illustrate, the sergeant offered a pair of examples from earlier in the week.

“There was one Iraqi soldier, and 25 women and children,” he said, “I didn’t take the shot.”

But more than once, Sergeant Schrumpf said, he faced a different choice: one Iraqi soldier standing among two or three civilians. He recalled one such incident, in which he and other men in his unit opened fire. He recalled watching one of the women standing near the Iraqi soldier go down.

“I’m sorry,” the sergeant said. “But the chick was in the way.”

Blam! Move over, woman!

Sgt. Schrumpf, I am so totally buying you a cold beer when you get back!

Popularity: 1% [?]