Insight: 48 years and counting

By Ed Pierce
Managing Editor

Seems hard to believe that this week it will be 48 years since I completed my U.S. Air Force basic training at Lackland Air Force Base in Texas. Where has all the time gone?

Ed Pierce at Lackland Air Force Base during U.S.
Air For Basic Training in July 1977.
COURTESY PHOTO 

Members of our Flight 610 and Squadron 3723 arrived in San Antonio back in June 1977 for eight weeks of learning about what it meant to serve in the military. That first night, we gathered outside our dormitory waiting for everyone’s plane to land and to join us so we could begin training.

A friendly sergeant who waited outside with us called our group “Rainbows.” He said that term was derived from the fact we were all dressed in different colored clothing, like every shade of the rainbow.

Once everyone was there, another not so friendly sergeant joined us and told us we were going to play a game called “Pick ‘Em Up, Put Em Down” to get us accustomed to taking orders. For the next few hours, we lifted our suitcases upon his command and put them down when he instructed us to do so. It was boring and monotonous, but I adapted and avoided being screamed at for not following a command.

At the end of that drill, we were instructed to proceed into the dormitory and choose a cot. We slept head to toe, alternating positioning with each cot. The gruff training sergeant then told us we had five minutes to use the restroom, remove the whiskers from our faces, and pop into bed. That was an easy one for me as I was clean-shaven and at the age of 23, I couldn’t grow much of a beard or mustache at all. A frantic shaving rush ensued and by the next morning when I woke up and looked around the room, I saw many of my fellow trainees sporting significant shaving cuts and looking like they had gone through a hamburger grinder.

The person sleeping in the cot next to me was called out after the sergeant looked at his pillow and face. He had more than 40 deep facial hacks from his razor and his pillow resembled the underside of steak packaging at the supermarket. He told the training sergeant that he was frightened by his command to remove his whiskers, and we never saw him again as he was discharged for military incompatibility.

We marched as a group everywhere including to the barber shop to have our hair buzzed off, getting our first uniforms to wear or to the mess hall for breakfast, lunch and dinner. While being measured for a uniform, I was given pants two sizes too large but hesitated to complain out of fear that I could meet the same fate as what happened to the hamburger-faced trainee.

Rather than remain in the dorm on Sunday morning when we weren’t training, I joined many fellow flight members at church. Afterward several food trucks were in the parking lot, and you could unwind and just be yourself and socialize with your friends for a while there.

Our weekdays were spent marching around in 95-degree heat. On one occasion, the training sergeant noticed me at the back of a formation, and he pulled me aside. He told me that I better get in step or else I would face a “setback” or a return to day one of Basic Training. That was all it took for me to rapidly dedicate myself to always be in step during the three-mile marches.

In the classroom, we learned about the Uniform Code of Military Justice and basic hygiene principles, and what was expected of us as U.S. airmen. In the dormitory, we were shown how to make a bed using neat and sharp hospital corners. While demonstrating precisely what he wanted to see by showing us himself, the training sergeant yanked back the covers of a trainee’s bed to demonstrate but instead discovered a puddle of pee. That trainee was given a discharge for military incompatibility.

Each morning our dorm was inspected, and demerits were assigned for shoes under the beds not being aligned properly, messy lockers, filthy bars of soap, poorly made beds and uniforms not hung up the right way. Those demerits resulted in extra running drills for the entire flight or a smaller amount of time that we could use the telephone to call home after dinner once a week.

Eventually after weeks of racking up demerit after demerit, we came together and determined that we all needed to leave a bar of unused soap in our lockers. We instead all used a jug of liquid soap carefully hidden away in a shower vent. when we showered. A team of the best show aligners, best bed-makers, best locker arrangers, and best uniform hangers handled those tasks for everyone and there were no more demerits.

On Aug. 1, 1977, our training instructor bid us farewell and put us on a bus for tech school. My bus, bound for Sheppard Air Force Base in Wichita Falls, Texas, pulled out of the dorm parking lot and then suddenly stopped. A trainee had given the middle finger to the training instructor out the rear window as the bus was leaving. He was removed from the bus and given a “setback” and had to do the eight weeks of basic training all over again. <

Andy Young: No kangaroos, but plenty of Stachelschweins

By Andy Young

I love getting unusual postcards, which my niece knows. That’s why, while traveling in Europe recently, she took the time to send me one featuring a yellow sign declaring, “No Kangaroos in Austria,” with the very recognizable outline of the Australian marsupial in its center.

The card made me smile, but it also made me wonder: how many of the locals, the majority of whom speak German, actually get the joke? After all, 97 percent of Austrians speak German; it’s the mother tongue of 93 percent of them.

What, I wondered, is the German word for this animal that to my knowledge is native to only one continent on Earth, and one that’s a very long way from Europe? But then, “Kangaroo” seems like a pretty uncommon word. How different could it be in other languages?

Well, thanks to an online translator, I now know that känguru is German for Kangaroo. It’s kangourou in French, canguro in Spanish and Italian, kangur in Polish, kinghar in Arabic, kangoro in Farsi, kengúra in Icelandic, and kanguru in Turkish. It’s also two symbols in Chinese that neither my computer (nor The Windham Eagle’s, apparently) has on its keyboard, although the approximate pronunciation is, allegedly, Dàishǔ.

But for my money, the languages with the best word for “kangaroo” are, among others, Swahili, Samoan, Hmong, Dinka, and Jamaican Patois, all of which refer to what we English speakers call a kangaroo as a “kangaroo.”

Another animal most Austrians would likely see only in zoos is what the folks in Turkey call a zürafa. This long-necked creature is a girafe to the French, a jirafa to Spanish speakers, a giraffa in Italian, a giraf in Danish, and a sjiraff in Norwegian. It’s a shame most standard laptop keyboards lack the capability of composing in Vietnamese, Greek, or Hindi, because the term for Giraffe in each of those languages is a real mouthful.

Thankfully not every word system is so complicated when it comes to identifying the animal with nature’s longest neck. For example, in German and in Filipino, the word for giraffe is “giraffe.”

If life were truly just, only linguists from the region unusual animals are native to would have the right to name these creatures. That’s why fair-minded people should refer to what we currently call a panda as a Xióngmāo, which is what locals call the adorable, rotund bamboo-munchers that exist in the wild solely in the mountainous region of southwestern China.

But anglophones aren’t the only group arrogant enough to make up our own words for animals not native to where we live. The word “panda” literally translates to “panda” in, among other languages, Spanish, French, Dutch, German, Turkish, Danish, Kurdish, Hungarian, Portuguese, Romanian, Javanese, Japanese, and Susu, a tongue spoken in West Africa that’s one of the official languages of Guinea. Don’t use the word “Susu” in Indonesia, though. Its meaning there is different, and quite vulgar, apparently.

Common sense dictates that one should never startle a mofeta in Mexico, a mouffette in Quebec, a haisunäätä in Helsinki, or a skunk in Sweden, Germany, Samoa, and every English-speaking nation on the planet. Similarly, smart people know better than to pet an animal known as a yamārashi in Japanese, a dikobraz in Russian, a puerco espín in Spanish, a stachelschwein in German, a porc-épic in French, a kirpi in Uzbek and Azerbaijani, a pokio in Hawaiian, a porkopi in Papiamento, and a porcupine in English.

It’s too bad that porcupines live where my niece just visited, because I’ll bet “No Stachelschweins in Austria” postcards would sell like hotcakes in Vienna to tourists and locals alike! <