Neanderpundit

that I was 18 again and had knees. For some ungodly reason, I was sandboarding. I came up to the edge of a sand halfpipe the size of a canyon and dropped in. I ran back and forth thinking, I’m gonna hate this, because I’m gonna fuck up my knees, just as I got them back. Anyway, I apparently knew what I was doing because I rode that board like it grew on the soles of my feet- and when I got to the end of the run I slid sideways into the back of a C-130 that was just running up for takeoff. As we left the ground a hot pink WRX STI being driven by Ken Burns shot out past me and landed on the end of the airstrip, tires scorching off layers of rubber.

A squared away airman handed me a chute and helped me strap into it, and after a brief nap I woke up being handed a grip and getting pushed out of the plane.

I came down amid a group of Quonset huts, pulled the chute into as neat a pile as I could muster, then took the duffel and my sandboard (which I still had for some reason) and walked into the nearest hut. To my left, the latrine was busy as grunts prepped for their day, and I was astonished to see big dogs using the crappers right alongside them.

“Jesus that’s a big dog” I said and was startled to hear the dog in question say “No bad words” and glare at me with ice grey eyes. “Watch your language- this is a latrine, not your mom’s bedroom” said a guy with the ears and scars of a MMA fighter, and I turned and bumped into the DI, who motioned me into his office.

He explained to me that while this unit wasn’t secret it was not well known. The dogs I saw had been modified, genetically. They would live about forty years, with about the front five being training and the last five retirement/training new dogs. They had been given some medium and long term memory that “Normal” dogs don’t get. They could speak five hundred words or so; the army had trained them about two hundred and they had made more than three hundred up themselves.

Dogs had been part of military for a very long time, he said, but these dogs were trained with a group of recruits and stayed with them. No recruit ever left his dog and no dog ever left the five men he was trained with. After they did their twelve years service, they could all retire- the dogs got full pensions and the guys usually got pretty good jobs, and in the thirty years of the program not one group of ‘Retirees” had ever chosen to live more than one house away from their dog. Some even bought cul-de-sacs and made their own “Gated” communities with the dogs having their own “Homes”.

“Twenty eight years ago this was a program that was, as far as the US .mil was concerned, a failure” said the sergeant. “they felt like the guys were getting too attached to the dogs and something bad would be the result”.
He paused as a dog opened the door, saluted (I can’t even describe how that worked but take it for granted, it was both very serious and hilarious at once) and pulled a leather bag off it’s shoulders and placed it on the Sergeants desk, then turned and left.

“We sent a team in to a village to extract some VIP’s who had been held hostage, and one of the villagers managed to sneak in and poison their dog’s food. When the guys realized this they went into the village. They each carry 7 30 round magazines, and we found 1048 casualties, each of which had a bullet in it’s throat. In most the bullet had pierced the esophagus and separated the spinal cord at c4. No, it’s not a surprise to us that the guys can shoot that well, but it was something of an eye opener that they could be that brutal. Most of those casualties were awake and aware of bleeding into their own lungs and drowning. That’s when we realized what an amazing fighting group we had created, and the program went full ahead.”

I started to ask what the hell I was doing there, but the alarm woke me up just as we were getting to the good parts. Here’s the weird thing: When the alarm went off, all the dogs started howling.

With apologies to Rob Halford and Mike Judge

Took the Beagle for about a 1 mile stroll around the neighborhood this evening, in the ongoing effort to get us both a bit more exercise.

of course the dog chose the one house where there were people watching us out the front window to take a shit.

And then took off after a squirrel, which caused the leash hand to be jammed hard into a rusty mailbox.
So I’m limping and bleeding and carrying a walmart bag of poop down the street being dragged by an excitable beagle.

Still, I found a $20 on the ground where a big pile of snow had melted, so it wasn’t a complete loss.