Do you have a favorite author, television show, radio personality or whatever that you just love, love love, but who did something that really, really made you go what the fuck?
I have a love-hate relationship like that with my penis.
Naw, I’m kidding, I love my penis. He has never made me go WTF — except one time in my 20s when I was “experimenting,” and another time when I met this really hot girl in a bar and he failed to “raise to the occasion” after I finally got her home.
Both those situations were indeed, “What the fuck moments.”
Another thing I love is the U.S. Military. I love it so much I gave 20 years of my life in service to it and continue to “fight the good fight” in service to our brave Soldiers as a Department of the Army civilian*.
I also fell hopelessly in love with the Facebook page “U.S. Army WTF Moments.”
But like all things we love, you risk finding they’re not as perfect as you first thought.
If you’re familiar with that page or its blog, you might being going, “What the fuck,” yourself right now. You’d be saying WTF because you know that I’m basically a commie liberal who wants to mandate gay baby seal adoption with gun-banning U.N. reeducation camps. As shitty as that description of my political leanings is, it’s freakishly accurate. I’m pretty fucking liberal, and “U.S. Army WTF Moments” is loaded down with photos of Obama next to Hitler stealing guns from the hands of God-fearing Texans.
Liberal it’s not.
Seriously, it can be funny, and by funny I mean FUNNY.
But I am able to look past that stuff and appreciate the ever-present undercurrent of very, very funny stuff.
The site is run by a band of U.S. Soldiers and they comment and post mocking memes and pictures related to the military and its ways. The stupid signs in bathrooms about flushing, yes we have those. People with very funny names, yes, when your last name is always on display funny shit happens, and beer tanks (please click that link, it’s a no-shit beer tank. Go ahead. I’ll wait) which I think fully explains why I love, love, LOVE with capital letters, “U.S. Army’s WTF Moments.”
Until, in my estimation, they fucked up.
Cutting to the chase, and in an effort to not further bury the point of this fucking blog, one of the page’s administrators, Dave, decided to do something that I found appalling and which I don’t understand at all.
What they did felt a bit like watching your best friend butt rape a kitten.
“Hey, best friend, stop raping that kitten and also, why the fuck are you butt raping a kitten?”
Actually, it’s more complex than that. Butt raping a kitten is really pretty straight forward for all parties involved. The kitten is helpless and the rapist is a rapist.
What the administrator in question did was upload a screen capture of an alleged** U.S. Army Soldier broadcasting on a pornographic webcam site his use of a butt plug and a cock collar that delivers electrical shots to his testicles. He wasn’t only playing with himself for viewers, he was soliciting “donations” for “special requests.”
Well … I’ll just let Dave describe the details. He and I spoke via Skype last week.
(To be transparent — I’m a fan of Dave’s. I’ve been a fan of his work on “U.S. Army WTF Moments” for a while now. He gave me a “tone check” on the blog update about the potential cuts to tuition assistance a few weeks back, if that helps describe our relationship. Again I like Dave. I still do.)
Here are Dave’s words.
“Oh man, well, I was in our chat room and I’m about blitzed dude. I mean, I’m three sheets to the wind. And someone that frequents our site and the chat room said, ‘Dave you gotta look at this shit,’ and she throws up a link to a ‘Chaturbate’ room, and I’m like, what the fuck is this shit? I’d never heard of ‘Chaturbate’ before this. I clicked the link and made an account.”
The link had taken him to a webcam that at first showed an empty room. Dave said there were telltale signs that a Soldier lived there.
The paragraph to the left of this photo really needs a photo of a hot chick to “offset” the pain a lot of heterosexual readers are feeling right now. Also, in the smaller offset photo on the bottom right. See that shit? Is she picking her ass? I think she’s picking her ass. Who’s with me?
“There was (an Army) fleece, a rucksack and an assault pack. You could obviously tell this shit was a barracks room.The fucking door frames were metal … then he comes in butt-assed naked and I’m like ‘Oh God’. And then, the next thing I know, he sits down and puts this collar on his ball sack. It looked like a dog harness, but made for a cock. It shocked him,” Dave explained.
“Ah dude, it was like a train wreck after that. I was taking screen shot after screen shot.”
Dave, a 30-year-old non-commissioned officer in the U.S. Army National Guard, said he knew what he was seeing was wrong. This wasn’t a private citizen selling sex on cam to the general public, it was a Soldier doing it on post from his barracks room. The United States Code of Military Justice clearly prohibits this type of behavior. Debate those rules if you like, but if you’re in the military they are the rules you agreed to live by.
But Dave’s an NCO. Even if he’s not — hell, even if he’s a four-star general or a lowly private — he’s in the military and the person doing this on camera on the internet is a fellow Soldier. What, if anything, you do with this information is tricky no matter your rank because the subject is a comrade in arms.
Thankfully, Dave has the “no-balls rule.”
“The thing is that, when I first saw it I was like,’What unit is this guy in?’ Because one, its barracks and he’s obviously surrounded by U.S. Army-issue gear and equipment, performing sexual acts on himself on webcam with no age verification (on the site) and I’m looking at it and I’m like what the fuck? I’m just going to tell these Soldiers, ‘There’s this guy,’ ‘You don’t need to be doing this shit,’ blah blah blah. Then I got no ballsed*** into posting the picture,” Dave said.
This is where I think Dave became a fuck. Its where I wanted to ask Dave, “Fuck dude, what the fuck? You fucking fucked the fuck up, you fuck! I see your point that what’s happening is fucked, but you’re just fucking up the fuck. What the fuck?”
But when I got him on Skype I was a lot nicer because, again, I like Dave. He’s a smart fucking dude and I “kinda” got what he was doing. “Kinda” being a word that indicates I wasn’t fully on board.
To be clear to everyone reading this who is questioning where the fuck I stand on this matter — what Dave did, in my opinion, is completely fucked up. Put aside for a moment the U.S. Army’s Values, the Soldier’s Creed and even the NCO’s Creed. The freaky guy whose picture you plastered across your Facebook page was in-fact a fellow Solider, a fellow human being, and your inability to think through the potential harm that could arise from the decision to widely distribute a screen capture taken from a little-known webcam broadcast leaves me clawing around in a vain attempt to understand just what the fuck you were thinking.
Sure, I would never put anything up my ass and shock my balls on camera for money (because my wife would kick my ass and I’d only earn like $2 or something), but at the end of the day if you want to, more power to you.
Unless you’re a Soldier.
If you’re a Soldier, don’t fucking do it. It’s just that simple. You signed up for a job that dictates, “Here are the values we collectively agree to follow. You don’t have to like them, you don’t have to think they’re great, but you do have to abide by them.” And upon signing the dotted line, this fuck with a ball-shocking cock cuff, agreed NOT TO DO THAT.
But really, they post this kind of stuff. How can you stay mad at them?
But Dave, on the same level, is really, really a fucker too. I love him, and only a person who respects and admires you can say they love you like this. But I think he too failed as a Soldier, as an NCO and as a leader. None of that says he’s a bad person. It just says that he swung and missed.
With a following of more than 250,000 people on their FB page, and an untold number of readers at their blog, “U.S. Army WTF Moments” holds vast power in their hands. I’d ask that in the future, they’d seriously consider the course of their actions. Just honestly question what harm could come if the photo landed in the hands of his mother, sister, family or a homophobic platoon mate? I agree it should not be there in the first place, but they were the catalyst for some potentially disastrous fallout. What is he kills himself? Could they sleep well?
That picture has 187 likes, 47 shares and 674 comments, the majority of which are also critical of the decision to post it . Yet it still remains.
In other instances, “U.S. Army WTF Moments,” has blurred out the faces of soldiers in ate up uniforms, or posers pretending to be in the military, but in this instance, there’s no attempt to protect the guy’s identity. The only censoring of the photo is a white box covering the guy’s junk. Why not be as considerate to him as they were to the others?
I asked Dave why he decided to post it.
“If you’re going to prostitute in an Army barracks you deserve what you get,” Dave said, later adding. “Well I know it’s fucked up. During the surge (in Iraq) a lot of people came in that should not have been let in. I myself am one of them. I came in with five moral waivers. But the thing is, the difference between me and these other guys is, I am trying to do the right thing. They’re not. If making these less-than-stellar Soldiers as in your face as possible helps out the Army as a whole, screw it. I don’t see the bad in that.”
The no-balls rule needs a loophole. There are times that something can be above the no-balls rule. “If you don’t shoot your favorite pet you’ve got no balls,” is an example of when the no-balls rule can be safely ignored.
The decision to post that photo just smacked of being a bully, a shithead, and an asshole.
But then I remembered, it is called “U.S. Army WTF Moments”****.
* As many of you may, or may not, know I’m employed by the Department of the Army, Department of Defense or the U.S. Government. Nothing I say on this blog ever constitutes an official statement by the U.S. Army. The above are my words, expressing my opinion only and should not be construed as an official statement of any kind.
** The guy in the picture is an alleged soldier because we don’t know yet who he is. Dave believes he is, and that’s good enough for me. Even if he isn’t, the thought process regarding the decision to post it remains the same.
*** No-balls is when someone says, “Dave, kill a million puppies.” Dave says, “I will not kill a million puppies.” Someone comes back with, “Dave if you DON’T kill a million puppies, you have no balls.” Dave kills a million puppies.
**** Holy shit this is a lot of *! Yeah, I didn’t link to the photo in question. If you want to find it, it’s not that hard.
hadafewbeers 