the cast

I have so many other subjects swirling in my head that I would like to write about right now, but that is going to have to wait. I actually wanted to talk about this yesterday but I started in on a rant, and kinda took off. When we first got to Kuwait, I had just watched the movie "step brothers". In the movie there is a scene where will Ferrell meets his step brother for the first time and. In typical a typical will Ferrell manor both men try to be cool but end up acting like 12 year olds when they introduce themselves. The conversation went something like "My name is dale, but you have to call me Dragon". "Fine, you have to call me... Nighthawk". As a joke, my roomate "Doc" and I went to the sew shop and got name tapes made up: "dragon", and Nighthawk. Needless to say this kinda stuck as our call signs, and next thing you know everyone wants a cool "hollywood" call sign.

This entry is really meant to introduce you to the other members of pale horse platoon. However, I'm not going to put anyone's real name up here for a couple of reasons. Number one, anonymity is key. I don't really want to put anyone's name on this blog because i don't want to implicate anyone else if Jones ever finds this blog. I will go down for this alone. Number two: we already have nicknames for everyone in the platoon, so I don't have to make any of them up. Number three: nick names are more memorable, and funny.

As for me, I have several nicknames. The most frequent of them all is "scooter". It's something that I've had since my last deployment. Someone botched my last name and pronounced it VanScooten, and it eventually evolved into scooter or scoot for short. Other nicknames that I've aquired are Dragon as I stated above, and "The Commish" as in commissioner. This is due to the fact that I like to stick to the rules when playing football, and allegedly come up with new and unheard of rules as the game goes on. It's not my fault that other's in my platoon don't know the sport as well as me and never heard of some of those rules. Anyways enough about me. On my truck crew we've got quite a cast of characters. Our platoon medic, and my roomate will simply be known as "doc" for obvious reasons. He was also known as "nighthawk" at one point but that has fallen by the way side. Then we have my driver: Xerxes. His nickname comes from 300 where the character of the same name had like 30 piercings on his face. The only difference here is that my driver has that many piercings not on his face, but on his genitals. Ouch. After Xerxes you have my platoon sergeant "stugotz". Apparently that means "up yours" in Italian. I'll give you one guess as to what nationality is... The last member of my truck crew goes by several nicknames as well. The one we initially came up with was "blade" because of how he resemble's Wesly Snipes when he wears Oaklies. The other nickname we have for him is "Darkness" it's pretty much from the Chappelle show episode with Rick James. I'll give you a guess as to why we call him that.

Onto the next truck crew. Oz takes the wheel for this truck. His nickname comes from a 10 day training excersize in which he barely got out of the driver's seat. He was the "man behind the curtain". The great oz. haha.

Next there is Super Torch. A long time friend of mine from back when I first joined the guard. He is the squad leader for 1st squad. His Super Torch is something that he came up with to describe the super hardcore army fags. For some reason we couldn't come up with a decent nickname for him, so we just decided to call him Torch as a joke and it stuck.

The vehicle commander for this truck is Blackout. A man who defines the word narcolepsy. He doesn't take naps, he takes comas.

Then you have the silver fox. The Lt. of our platoon. Aptly named for his hair color.

Then you have the combat unit or C squared, not really sure why he has that name.

Marc Antony-takes after the character from the show rome.

Next on the list is Casselhoff. Add hoff to the end of his name and it rymes with the name of the guy from night rider.

This is turning out to be really long so I'm just going to list the names of the people from 2nd squad. You have Fattie, Oscar the grouch, Vinnie, the russian, Super Nova, ODB (old dirty bastard) and Chuckbaca. I don't really have time to go into the significance of these nicknames now, but i will fit it in somehow with future post's. So take this as a... TO BE CONTINUED...