Land of the Free

I was new to the military when I found myself sharing a hotel room with another member of my unit. It was December and I swore into the military only a few months earlier. So I knew nothing about being in the armed services. I wasn’t even sure how to put on my uniform.

Although he was more than 10 years younger than me, John had been in the military for a couple of years and had attended officer training a year earlier, so I looked to him for guidance with respect to customs and courtesies. He was friendly enough, although at times he struck me as a little strange. But he was always pleasant and approachable. And when a snowstorm closed the highways and stranded many people on or around base, I invited John to stay with me in my hotel room. He gratefully took my up on my offer.

The heat was cranking in our room, and I was sitting on my bed in my boxer shorts and t-shirt, getting ready to eat my sandwich and watch a hockey game.

John stood by the bed next to me, obsessively fiddling with his military bag and fussing with his uniform. He was talking at me about the military this and the military that – the honor of this and the honor of that – his constant droning about America and its status as the greatest country in the world drowning out the pre-game commentary. He talked at me about his Christianity and offered to introduce me to the ways of Jesus, while ignoring my statement that I was a Catholic. He threw around out-of-context cliches like “Love the sinner, not the sin” and “God doesn’t give us more than we can handle.” Over the years I’ve learned to ignore a lot of this talk. What I had a hard time ignoring was his attire. While I was relatively modest in my boxer shorts and t-shirt, John was disarmingly comfortable in his tighty-whities…and only his tighty whities.

Which weren’t so “tighty” anymore. Or whitey.

And his comfort in strutting around and intermittently bending over wearing nothing but a loosely-fitting flimsy adult cloth diaper was matched by my discomfort in seeing him like that.

I shrugged it off and picked up my overstuffed sandwich with both hands, some of the filling pouring out and spilling onto the bed between my legs as I prepared to take a bite - just as the first notes of our National Anthem began to play on the television.

From a bent over position John dropped everything and shot up to stand bolt upright, whirling around and facing the television at attention, his chest puffed out and his arms thrust purposefully at his sides. In nothing but his underwear.

Surprised, I froze with my dinner poised inches from my open mouth. My eyes glanced furtively around the room looking for an answer to the question “What the fuck is going on?”

Oh, there were other questions as well. Like “Am I supposed to get up and stand at attention too?”

And - “Is this something we are supposed to do? Stand at attention to the National Anthem no matter where we are?”

I realized as I sat cross-legged and immobile while holding a sandwich in front of my face, that I knew very little about the basically naked gung-ho American standing rigidly to my left whom I invited to share a room in the dead of winter.

And I asked myself “Have I made a terrible mistake?”

When the National Anthem stopped playing and the crowd erupted in obligatory patriotic cheering, John turned to me, dropped into what I now recognize as parade rest, and resumed his conversation as if nothing happened.

Trying to ignore the weirdness of it all I took a hesitating bite of my sandwich as John relaxed even further and turned his efforts towards his bag, all the while talking about Jesus and America with his back turned and his butt in my face.

“Cleanliness is next to godliness” I heard him say as I wiped some mustard off my pillow and licked it off my finger.