Sergeant Major's Command Show

This is Chapter 37 of Riley's new novel Army Stories Perfomance Script, which is still getting finishing touches applied for self-publication.
Free complete download of recent draft of said novel...
www.stoneriley.com/armystories

Sergeant Major's Command Show, as I'm calling it here, was not something done for U.S. Army Entertainment Service.

Instead, it was for my fellow Infantry Guys, Grunt battalion where I was a Medic. So if I had a film of that show that afternoon, I would distribute it on Peace Revolution Network, as a Training Film.

It became one of my WAR RESISTENCE HIJINX instantly, the finest of them. I was at down-stage, empty stage rather dusty, my legs dangling over the front cliff edge of the boards, in our battalion's everyday uniform of petty rank, talking, summing up a soul-saving ideal of beauty to my fellow grunts, who were in the theater seats. Summing up old-fashioned democracy politics. Putting it together extempore, for myself and them. Until I finished.

Astonishing opportunity!! Thank you, Battalion Sergeant Major, not-commissioned officer, U.S. Army, for arranging the surprise event!!

What a surprise when I showed up!! What the fik? WHAT THE FIK????? Twenty-minute walk down a hilly street and up another one, to our much-neglected theater's backstage door, per a note given to me, and a sergeant I know waiting there, to nod, and point me in the backstage door and up on stage, and there behold the waiting audience! Surprise!

What the fik???

Yes, it was a strange piece of theater that afternoon, as I may tell you. Incidentally, this is same time I got targeted for Mannheim Jail. This incident was obviously the final straw for some.

You see, our commissioned officers were in the theater seats as well, self-segregated in a section, all wearing thick-pressed starched-stiff civilian casual shirts as a very thin shellac of anonymity. I ignored them.

Then soon following this afternoon, a Military Police lieutenant, a commissioned officer, will move into our barracks undercover, to sneak around, and later he will be the only prosecution witness at a trial, where I'll get thirty days for speaking disrespectfully to him, the commissioned officer police agent. And mission accomplished… I have the transcript of the trial!!

As you have probably guessed, when I came stepping out on stage, somewhat before I was arrested, looking around at everyone, it became a pretty strange thing pretty quickly, our Sergeant Major's Command Show that afternoon. And I've seen a lot of strange things in theater. I haven't had a legitimate theater career at all.

Look,
:: I'll play harmonica a little for an audience, tiny imitation-Mozart nibbles, if they're quiet people,
:: and I have Irish-danced for a ticket-buying audience once, for three minutes, till help arrived,
:: and invented a King Arthur tale per William Blake, that brought an audience to their feet, and the roof split open by thunderous applause,
:: and there were three summers, at garden-party-like events, open to friends and their friends, when I have danced nude, dramatically naked, accoutered and painted, in fire-lit evening, enacting my old high school's Sacred Buffalo in ancient life,
:: decade when the Pagans had a nudist fashion.
:: Why not??? And always-always re-imagining Homer and the British Matter, and the Bard, and Blake, and Mad Dickinson, extempore art of the classic spoken word. Have you never done Clairvoyance from a stage?
:: Why not? And I tell them jokes too. I've got baby material, peek-a-boo with hats, kerchief puppets, and wiggling my ears, each ear independently.

Any of that can get peculiar.

But Sergeant Major's Command Show, as I'm calling it, that was top-shelf Thought-Provoking.

I could likely guess some inner workings in Battalion Headquarters, in the little corner offices, where they had a mimeograph machine that I tried experimenting with my first week there, headquarters machinations through which this strange event this theater afternoon had likely happened.

We were in U.S. Army Europe by the way, toy-tank infantry up behind the old stalemate line in Germany.

Inner workings about a hard question…

What to do with Screaming Anarchist??? He's out of control during wartime!!! Won't shut his fing mouth up!!! In a grunt battalion possibly a short airplane hop away from redeployment into Nam at any instant!!!!!! Screaming Anarchist is a bad influence on them!! But has got the shiny sheen of a decent field grunt medic on him!! Better not appear like messing up their field medical care!!!!! So what to do with Screaming Anarchist???????

This was U.S. Army undergoing revolution of the peasant masses. Screaming Anarchist was me, in this case of this particular battalion, but there were many more like me all across the U.S. Army world.

Meanwhile, in U.S. Army Viet Nam, there in the peasant revolution hot-war zone, in the U.S. Army Great Mutiny there, revolutionizing grunts, certainly influenced by the virtuous teachings of Malcolm X, were killing their own officers by dozens. In these killings the grunts were very credibly claiming urgent self-defense, to which a friend of mine can testify. Killing both the not-commissioned and commissioned officers, both sorts at proportionately rapid speed.

In the many decades since, I have devoted earnest study to that situation. I have just now, this morning, reached a Surprise Conclusion…

In that particular battalion, in that unlikely artsy moment on that stage that afternoon, one particular battalion, one particular moment of one particular hijink's development…

You, Sergeant Major, hello! Hello there, Sergeant Major, I am Screaming Anarchist. Remember me from the old days?

I still see you standing there, in the theater aisle, near front, and inviting me, me having just entered from left wing with astonishment scrawled all over me, you inviting me with few words to begin talking.

You retiring as I attempted strolling-casually-downstage, and you sat up in back, when I successfully parked myself on cliff's edge.

Greetings to you, Sergeant Major, not-commissioned officer, fellow soldier. Tell me one thing please, tell me this…

I think you knew that I and you were allies there that afternoon. Fellow-peasant-masses maybe, or fellow-honest-men perhaps, I think you somehow saw me as worthy friend.

Do not-commissioned officers, of all the armies, have a patron saint? Some saint to make of them an order with sacred duty? Is that what you saw in me? Ephemeral and reluctant corporal as I was.

Did these passions and actions I displayed, did they strike you as those of a proper junior-junior-junior officer?

On the ancient dancing ground were Honest Soldiers face the Mighty Murder Mill, that day I think that I discovered you beside me, Sergeant Major, and it don't much matter just exactly why.

Free complete download of recent draft of this novel...
www.stoneriley.com/armystories