Any one here ever have a really cool nickname, or a really bad one?
Worst moniker I ever got tagged with was pinned on me by a Navy instructor. First day of instruction, he drops me down and asks me my name while I’m pushing out 20. “Seaman Apprentice Rinkavage, instructor!” I belt out.
“Seaman WHO?! RIMPAC? Seaman Apprentice Rim Package- what?! Dink Package?!” This routine goes on for about an eternity while I continue struggling with the push-ups, then he recovers me, and gives me the following instruction. "Here’s what you’re going to do. See the rest of the class sitting over there waiting for you with that other instructor? You’re going to run over there and report into the instructor like this: ‘My name is Seaman Apprentice Dink Package, and I am THE BIGGEST, BADDEST MAN IN THIS CLASS!’
And I did, of course, and for the next few months of my life, that was my name.
Now, thankfully, I have a much cooler nickname. My son Roger went through a stage about a year ago pretending to be various animals. I’d come home and say, Hi, Rog!" and he’d tell me he wasn’t Roger, he was a tree monkey. For a week we’d have to address him as tree monkey, or he wouldn’t answer. Then he’d pick another animal, and so on. The whole family went to the pool one day, so he decides he’s a fish, and I can be a shark. And I don’t know why, but Shark stuck. I’m not “dad” or “daddy,” just Shark now. My younger son isn’t even going to realize I was ever daddy- all he’s ever heard is Shark.
I can see it now, going through the store and Vitus says to his little boy, “look ya little tree monkey, you need to behave” as all the other people in the store think wow he calls his kid a tree monkey. Just me or are there some dangerous racial overtones in that one?
Repressed memories keep me from recalling all the bad stuff that got thrown at me in basic training. One event does stand out though. Near the end of B.T. in lovely Cornwallis N.S, one of the bigger guys in the platoon decided he was going to push around a smaller guy. I…umm…intervined shall we say, and in the process of trying to break up two 18 year old adrenaline crazed and very focused individuals, our Marching team leader cracked two ribs resulting in the loss of the Drill competition. Many names and insults were hurled at that point. Funny enough, not from the guy who was getting picked on or the guy who tried to break it up.
Wow, haven’t thought of that in years. Like I said…repressed memories. Thanks for dredging them up you…you!
One of the funniest and also most violent exchanges I’ve ever seen was in bootcamp. We had a large redneck from the deep south who decided that all black people (he used a different word that started with ‘n’) need to get an ass kicking. He chose on of the smallest guys; this guy happened to be a junior olympics boxer to hit that big dumb redneck four or five times before he hit the ground. We had to turn the showers on in the head to wash the blood down. Ignorance and violence rarely lead to a good outcome.
Well oddly enough, I had wrestled in the Canada Games and he was a boxer. Yeah, the outcome wasn’t pretty. I ran into the guy who’s ribs we broke a couple of years after that and we had a good laugh, but the boxer, he was on the same base when I was in the Airborne and I kept hearing ugly rumours. He was just psycho. Oh well. I think “Redneck” would be a fairly apt description of this guy too.
I figure the only thing that kept me from getting the boot out of the army right away was the fact that I was sticking up for a very small guy. At the time, all Canadian recruits went through an 11 week basic training course in Nova Scotia so you could be in a platoon with with clerks, cooks, infantry, etc…afterward you were sent to your advanced schools.
