My wife made a thing to stick her makeup onto that sits on
the bathroom counter. The back of if is
a metal sign or picture thing with a frame around it. Then she glued magnets to the different
containers of makeup so they will just stick to the picture backing thing. The picture on hers is an exaggerated pair of
red high heel shoes. Well, if the shoes
are not exaggerated they would be the most uncomfortable shoes in the whole
world, was my initial thought when I was looking at this one day.
Time passed and I get a chance to see this picture every
time I visit the restroom. It dawned on
me that women wear uncomfortable shoes in the trade off that the shoes make
them look hot. I arrogantly thought that
men wouldn’t wear uncomfortable shoes for how they made us look. Later it dawned on me that we are dumber
still. We wear uncomfortable shoes that
hurt our feet because we are told to, so we will all match, so we all at least
have a pair of boots.
More frozen, rotted, blistered, and tortured feet have come
out these boots than have ever came out of a set of high heeled shoes. I remembered marching with socks hanging out
the back of our packs so they could dry out so we could wear them again later
in order to help our feet. (You never
see that in the war movies.) I remember
getting blisters, and sores on my feet not to mention having to powder the
boots heavily to cure the raging case of athletes foot I had which was eating
the areas between my toes. You probably
don’t get that problem with open toed pumps.
High heeled shoes can’t be worn everywhere, yet that was the idea behind
the combat boot was a boot you could wear anywhere anytime.
There are variations of boots as there are with high heeled
shoes, the ones with the heavy capped toe area, commonly referred to as jump
boots, because that’s what the paratroopers supposedly wore. The ones I wore had three straps one across
the toe area you never adjusted, one across the ankle area you would undo, and
a long strap which wound around the boot.
Tankers generally would hang out in their tanks in their socks or with a
clean pair of boots which were kept in the tank. The dirty muddy boots where stuck into the
metal rail that ran across the top edge of the turret. Just like the floors in the Army barracks you
would never desecrate them with mud unless maybe you were in actual combat.
It seemed silly at first until the first time you had to scrub
out the inside of a tank from the bottom of the battery boxes to the ceiling,
cleaning every single nook and cranny until you felt confident enough to eat
off any surface in the tank. Not that
you ever would, because I am sure just about every every tank in the U.S. Army
has been shit in at least once.
That is
by far the worst practical joke to ever be perpetrated in the service. Because when someone sneaks into your tank
and shits on the floor in over 90 degree weather and then closes the hatches to
let it melt and fester until the tank crew finds it later. If you have ever had to clean up a mess like
that you would never do something like that.
Unless you found out who did it to you and it was a moral imperative to
get pay pack. Not that any horse play
like that would ever go on in our Army! Never.
