Category: Rats!

Another little joke about Shultz dining hall, which I understand is soon to close. How sad. I will never forget that wonderful eatery. The fine dining, the friendly service, the delightful decor…

Wait. We’re talking about Shultz? Sorry, I was waxing poetic about Macadoo’s. Or maybe Bogen’s. No, most likely the Mill Mountain Coffee Shop. No idea which of those is still around and kicking.

But about this week’s cartoon. Yeah, I think there may have been the occasional complaint that us cadets were allowed to carry weapons on campus. I shake my head over this one. Our weapons were limited to the sabers carried by senior cadets for formal occasions and the Skipper, the canon a crew of cadets would fire at home football games every time the Hokies scored a touch down. Again, the year before I joined the VTCC, Tech was caught in a recruiting scandal and wasn’t allowed to recruit for four years after, so I don’t recall hearing the Skipper fired all that often.

More deadly than any cadet corps saber would have been the spoons at Shultz dining hall. They were like the spoons you see in prison movies (think “The Shawshank Redemption”). A lot of the edges had been filed down over the years by so many grinding teeth, they were sharp enough to cut through concrete. Sadly though, not sharp enough to cut through the food served at Shultz.

Although I can’t say the food was really all that bad. I mean, I have had worse. Hell, I was in the Army Reserves for 11 years. You know I’ve had worse.

And no, I will not talk about my own failed experiments in cooking at this point in time.

Enjoy the cartoon, and think fondly on dear old Shultz.

I did not salute the UPS guy.

I did, however, salute a gunny sergeant, and got in so much trouble for it I still cringe at the memory. For the non-military, you do not salute NCOs (i.e. sergeants, corporals, privates, etc.). You’re only supposed to salute officers. However, we cadets were also expected to salute cadet officers, those cadets in their senior year who were not yet commissioned in the military, and thus had no military experience or actual legal rank or authority. I’m still figuring that one out.

Being an officer is an interesting position to be in. I was commissioned in 1991, went to Officer Basic Course at Ft. Eustis 91-92 (transportation OBC is the longest OBC there is, I think, lasting around 5 months), and joined my first drill unit (I was an Army Reservist) sometime later in 1992. I missed going to Kuwait with my unit by a year, although I was stationed at Fort Bragg for Cadet Troop Leadership Training the day Iraq invaded Kuwait. I started CTLT shadowing a 2nd lieutenant to learn what it’s really like to be a platoon leader in the Army and half-way through became a gopher for the unit, running errands to get dental records, wills and powers of attorney finished, plus making sure family care plans were completed so that all the members of the unit I was temporarily assigned to were prepared to go to war. It was quite an eye-opener, being on post during those few weeks. Very hectic, very scary, very confusing.

But back to my first Reserves unit. My unit was a large truck company fresh back from running convoys in Desert Storm and there I was, a brand-spanking new lieutenant who was so new I “squeaked when I walked,” or so said my company commander at the time. I was assigned to be platoon leader and taken to meet my platoon sergeant, a man old enough to be my father who had spent more years in service than I had even been alive. After a quick introduction, I was told to take charge of the platoon and get them to work. In other words, I was supposed to give orders to my old-enough-to-be-my-dad platoon sergeant, tell him what to do with the troops, where to send them, when they had to be there, etc.

Now I know some current VTCC cadets are reading these cartoons. Do you guys have any idea how stupid it feels to be told to give orders to someone who obviously knows waaaaaaaaaay more about the military than you do? No? You’ll find out if you graduate and get your commission. I felt pretty dumb that day giving orders to my platoon sergeant. Fortunately, he was a very patient man, and very easy to work with, and very good at his job. Just as fortunately, I knew I needed to listen to him as much as possible because as a new lieutenant, my capacity for fucking things up was pretty high.

Any way, the moral of the story is, watch who you salute, but be aware that many of the people you’re not supposed to salute are the ones with the most experience and the most knowledge. Respect those people, regardless of your own rank.

No joke. Freshmen cadets were not allowed to use the stairs to exit Shultz dining hall. We always came down into the dining hall via the stairs, after being marched in through the front doors. But when it came time to leave, we could only exit through the back doors. This forced all the rats to take the long way back to the cadet dorms, and it was always a race to see who would get there first – the rats or the upper classmen. Rats weren’t allowed to run unless we were in our gym clothes, but we sure as hell learned how to walk very, very fast.

On those rare days when the rats decided we didn’t feel like going the long way (and when there weren’t enough upper classmen around to stop us), we would rush en mass up the stairs, running over some poor upper classman in the process. I can only recall doing this once as a rat, and we got into trouble for it, but as I recall we ran over our cadet first sergeant so it was worth it.

Other fun insanity that took place in Shultz dining hall. If an upper classman was sitting at the table, we had to ask him or her permission to sit (and we had to be sure to ask the highest ranking upper classman by name and rank, or we’d get in trouble). Also, rats had to wear bibs to every meal. Each company’s rats were expected to buy baby bibs, decorate them, and put them on when we sat down at the table. If you didn’t have your bib, you were in trouble, and so was every other rat sitting with you (that’s the way it always was – if one rat was in trouble, all rats were in trouble).

Another thing, we had to eat sitting at attention. This was usually only during breakfast and dinner, when the entire company marched to the dining hall together after formation. I hated sitting at attention to eat. It meant I had to stare straight ahead at some other rat, who was staring straight back at me. It was extremely hard not to burst out laughing sometimes because the whole damn affair was so stupid, and because some of my male buds looked pretty funny with their heads shaved.

I also recall that the rats in our company (Hotel Company, for anyone who’s interested) had to come up with a company song, and we had to sing it, standing on our chairs in the dining hall. I think I still remember that song too.

H Company was marching just the other day!
And we saw First Sergeant Phillips, we had something to say!
We said “Hey First Sergeant Phillips, man what’s up with you!”
And here is what First Sergeant started to do!

He said,
“Beat! Your face! Beat, beat your face!”
(Uh-huh!)
“Beat! Your face! Beat, beat your face!”
(Uh-huh!)

Or something like that. First Sergeant Phillips was actually Cadet First Sergeant Phillips, a man who was dedicated to making our lives a living hell. He was very good at his job. The phrase “Beat your face!” means “Get down in the push up position and crank out push ups until I say stop!” It was something Cadet First Sergeant Phillips said quite frequently.

I don’t know if the rats all still eat at Shultz dining hall, or if they still have to wear bibs or stand on their chairs to sing songs, but that’s what we had to do waaaaaaay back when.

And this week’s cartoon pretty much sums up everything in the previous seven episodes – uncomfortable uniforms, mandatory football game attendance, required show of spirit, and bad haircuts all around. Plus evil upper classmen having fun at the rats’ expense.

But it was all good. I recall the above incident actually happening, though I can’t say if I was a rat at the time or an upper classmen. I just know it happened, and it struck me as funny.

I do believe this is the last of the 2×2 format comics. I know I’ve said that before, and then continued uploading more 2×2 comics. I have no idea why I went with 2 panels across by 2 rows down. Where on earth did I get the idea for that format? It certainly looked like nothing I ever saw in a newspaper. I have no idea how the Collegiate Times worked around my idiotic formatting choice, but they did, and they never sent me any nasty-grams about it, so I am forever grateful to them for that. They were very patient with me, and mercifully criticism-free to a newbie comic artist.

What really puzzles me is the format and quality of the cartoons that follow. You’ll see what I mean next week. I know that the 2×2 cartoons were the first ones I drew and the first ones that ran in the CT. After that, I have a hard time establishing what order the cartoons ran in. I spent an evening or two sorting through all the strips I had, and was able to sort them into Year 01, Year 02, etc. But I can’t necessarily say I got them in the correct order beyond that. I do know that the artwork suddenly started to look a lot better, probably because I found a different pen to ink with and because I got better at erasing my pencil lines. But for some reason, I never seemed to stick with the same kind of pen or paper for too long. You’ll see examples of what I mean as we get further along.

In the meantime, I hope you enjoyed this week’s episode. Next week, we get more into the day-to-day details of life as a rat!

Ah, football. How I hated that sport.

The Virginia Tech Cadet Corps was required to attend every home football game when I was a cadet. I’m sure they still are. The year I became a freshman at Tech was the year after the university had been involved in some sort of recruiting scandal, and as a result they were forbidden to recruit for the next four years. Or something like that. Remember, I didn’t really care for the game so I wasn’t paying attention to the details.

But even I had to notice that the Hokies lost more games than they won that year… And the year after that… And the year after that… And that was a problem for me and every other freshman cadet who came along. You see, we were required to cheer for our team, and if the Hokies didn’t win, it was because we didn’t cheer hard enough! Yes, folks, this was the kind of logic I was dealing with in college. And whenever the Hokies lost a football game, we rats lost privileges like weekend pass. No weekend pass meant we didn’t get to go anywhere but the dining hall and the toilet that weekend, and let me tell you, that kind of sucked.

What also sucked was the uniforms we had to wear to the game. The one I’ve drawn here is the dark blue blouse with the white ducks. The blouse is that heavy hips to neck thing, made out of wool. The white ducks are the pants we were wearing. The blouse sucked because in the fall, the weather could go anywhere from freezing to “OMFG! I’m dying of heat prostration here!” And the blouse wasn’t really adequate clothing for either end of that spectrum. Plus it had a really stiff collar that chaffed like nobody’s business. The white ducks were bad because they had to be pressed and starched just so, and because they got dirty if you even so much as looked at them. Seriously. I’d put my pants on and before I got out to formation, they’d go from white to grey. I got into a lot of trouble for that, let me tell ya.

The cup chain incident really did happen, by the way. One of the ways we rats could show spirit was by collecting the plastic cups everyone got their drinks in and stacking them into a chain that ran up and down the stadium. We never had enough cups so we always had to beg the civilian students for them. Well, one time the civilians got a little too enthusiastic with the giving and the next thing you know, the stadium pretty much exploded with plastic cups. They were coming at us from every which way, and a lot of them still had soda in them. We got into a little bit of trouble for that one.

I’ve been getting feedback from some former cadets of the good ol’ VTCC. Thank you all for the kind comments. I hope you are all enjoying the cartoons. I got plenty of ’em!

Amazing! We’re all the way up to episode 06! That’s mainly of interest to me because this was the last cartoon I did in the 2×2 panel format. After that, I switched to a regular 1×4 set up, which you’ll see next week.

The above incident actually happened to me my freshmen year. You might remember last week that I mentioned rats were required to speak up to all upper classmen in the hall and identify them correctly by name and rank without looking at them. That got old fast, so we tried to make our lives easier on ourselves by staying the hell out of the hallways. When we had to leave, we always listened at the door to see if we could figure out who was out there. One day, we stood at one side of the door listening, but couldn’t hear anybody. That’s because the upper classmen were on the other side of the door trying to figure out if we were in the room or not. I can’t recall why they wanted to know if we were in, but we sure surprised the hell out of them when we came rushing out the door all of a sudden, thinking the coast was clear. As I recall, everyone was too startled to worry about speaking up, and my roommate and I got out of the hallway without having to say much beyond, “Good morning Sir! Good morning Ma’am!”

Someone commented to me a couple of weeks ago that they couldn’t understand why I put up with all the crap I had to deal with being a rat in the VTCC. They thought it was depressing that I lived through that kind of hell for so long. To be honest, it was not my idea to join the VTCC. My dad insisted I had to at least try for an ROTC scholarship, or he wouldn’t pay for school. At that point in my life, I didn’t know what I wanted to do. I only knew that college seemed like the next step to take, and I wasn’t ready to strike out on my own. So after lots of screaming and arguing, I agreed to put in for the scholarship. When I didn’t get it, I was relieved. Then I got accepted to Virginia Tech and Dad found out they had a full-time cadet corps, so he insisted I join that and try for the scholarship again next year. More screaming and arguing ensued, but again, I had no better plan for my life so Dad won that argument.

In hindsight, I have to admit Dad was right. I had no idea what I wanted to do after school. I picked both my major and my college at random. I don’t know why I wasn’t better prepared coming out of high school, but that’s how it was. Dad’s motivation for the ROTC scholarship was partly financial and partly patriotic. He truly believes that everybody should give something back to their country, and I believe it as well, though I think I would enjoyed doing that through some sort of volunteer service as opposed to military service. Peace Corp might have been cool. But again, I was too scattered at that point and didn’t have a plan.

I still didn’t have a plan for my life by the time I graduated, beyond staying as close to my boyfriend/future husband as possible. In fact, I didn’t get a plan until 3 days after my oldest daughter was born, which was also the day before my 34th birthday. Imagine going through the first 34 years of your life having no fricking clue what you want to do. That was me. But thanks to Dad and his insistence that I go into the military, I did acquire a lot of discipline, plenty of skills, and enough career experience that I could do any job I happened to come across. And I came across a lot of jobs that I didn’t particularly like but that I could do, and do well, thanks to my time as a cadet and officer in the Army Reserves. And so things always turned okay for me, more or less.

Today I know what I want to do, and I do it. And I still use that discipline I learned the hard way as a cadet. And when things don’t go right, or I have set backs, it doesn’t really bother me too much because I know I’ve been through lousy times before. It didn’t kill me back then, and it won’t kill me now. So to that person who thought my life as a cadet was miserable and depressing, all I can say is, “Hallelujah! I’m a better person for it!”

The above scenario actually happened to one of my buds, Valerie, and it was frikkin’ hilarious when it happened. It may not make sense to any of you civilians, so let me explain.

New cadets/rats were not allowed to walk in the hallways of the cadet dormitories, which were Rasch and Brodie Hall back then (they’re probably still Rasch and Brodie Hall, but I don’t keep up with this things, and I know they’ve been other dorms in the past and why am I going on about this now?). Anyway, rats weren’t allowed to walk in the hallways. We had to drag. Dragging is a fast-paced march, done at the very side of the hallway, up against the right-side wall. New cadets marched quickly, in single file, right shoulders scraping the wall until they came to a point where they had to turn. Then they did a 90 degree turn in the appropriate direction and kept going. If a new cadet ran into any obstacle in the hallway, like say one of those giant rectangular trashcans that were spaced about every 15 yards along the way, then the new cadet had to do those 90 degree turns all the way around the obstacle to get back to the right-side wall. If you were with a group of other rats, you all dragged together in single file to make a rat train. If you were on your own, you dragged on your own, and you hugged that damned right-side wall every step of the way. The only time a rat got to walk in the hallways was when he or she was on mail duty and needed to be able to look at the doors to deliver the mail.

Oh, and did I mention that while dragging, rats were not allowed to look around? Eyes had to stay straight ahead. You couldn’t look at anyone else in the hallway, even if that person was directly in front of you. That would be gazing, and gazing was bad. People got demerits and got dropped for push-ups and suffered all sorts of nastiness that upper classmen liked to visit upon rats if gazing occurred. So all the rats marched around the dorms like… well, rats in a maze, with blinders on.

Oh, and did I also mention that we had to speak up to everyone in the hallway and greet them by rank and last name? See, that’s what’s going on in the cartoon above. That particular rat has been caught dragging out in the hallway, and has spoken up but has not addressed the upper classman in question by rank and name! Honest to god, we were expected to know who was in the hallway just by the sound of their shoes and whatever other blurry details we could sneak a peek at through our peripheral vision. Sounds impossible, yes? And yet somehow we did it.

And just to make things even more interesting, because you know this wasn’t interesting enough, all new cadets could only leave the dorm through one doorway. And that doorway was at the exact opposite end of the building from where the female cadets were rooming.

So imagine this. It’s 8AM. I have a class on the far side of the campus in 20 minutes. I’ve got my shirt tuck done, my shoes polished and my books packed. I grab my hat (also called a cover in military parlance), fling open the door to my room and rush out into the hall. After three paces, I hit the far wall pop a right turn of precisely 90 degrees and start to drag. Every fucking upper classman on that floor is out in the hallway – heading to class, ironing uniform shirts, burning popcorn in the microwave oven, or taking a trip to the head (another military term meaning toilet). And as I’m dragging along the hallway, I hear their footsteps, catch a glimpse of their silhouettes, and say good morning to everyone of them by name and rank all the way through the whole damned building. I can’t look at anyone or just plain walk until I hit the door to the outside and then I can relax, just a little.

That was my life, every day for I can’t remember how many months. Crazy, ain’t it?

Allow me to explain a few things about the VTCC uniform. The uniform for the Virginia Tech Corps of Cadets consisted of grey wool-poly blend pants, a belt, and a shirt. The shirt was either white short sleeves in the fall and spring, or grey short or long sleeves in the winter. I think the white shirt was just polyester something or other, while the grey shirt was that same lovely wool-poly blend that smelled like dying sheep when it rained and the uniform got wet.

The belt was either a nice thick black leather belt with a heavy metal buckle featuring the VTCC crest (for upper classmen) or a white belt cut from some sort of cheap cloth strap with a simple brass buckle threaded onto it. The white belts were a bitch. The fabric strip was tough, but pretty thin, so the belts tended to curl and roll at the top and bottom edges, instead of staying straight like the upper classmen demanded they be. They also had a tendency to slide out of the buckle during the course of the day, and if your belt was cut too short, you could pop the buckle at the worst possible moment and get busted for being out of uniform. Plus the damn things yellowed badly, so the rats had to keep going back to the tailor shop to get new belts when the old ones got too… well, ratty.

But the worst thing about the uniform was a little something called a shirt tuck. This was a method of torture designed to make the uniform shirt as tight and wrinkle-free as possible on the wearer. It involved a lot of wrestling and gymnastics to hold the shirt taut while slipping on the pants and then buckling the belt very tight to hold the shirt in place. Remember too, if you were a rat wearing a white belt, and the belt was cut too short, a good shirt tuck risked you popping off that stupid buckle.

I and my fellow female buds (a bud was a fellow rat, any fellow rat, but usually referred to someone in the company you were assigned to) were taught the proper method of performing a shirt tuck by one of the upper classmen. After gathering us together in a dorm room, a sophomore cadet had us unbuckle our uniform pants, pull them down to our knees, then unbutton our shirts to the last button and throw them off the shoulders.

I should mention here that our instructor was male. I have no idea why a guy was teaching this to a bunch of women. Given the amount of clothing we all had to undo and rearrange to get the shirt tuck done right, it was the sort of thing I thought the Corps would ask a female to teach to other females, but for some reason we had a male sophomore herd us all into one room to show us how to perform the shirt tuck.

However, this was not a big deal. The VTCC had a serious policy in place about fraternization; that is, the co-mingling of upper classmen and rats, especially between female and male cadets. To make sure nothing hinkey was going on, any time an upper classmen and a rat were in a dorm room together, the lock on door was thrown to prevent the door from shutting entirely.

So anyway, we six female rats were in a dorm room with a male sophomore and everybody, including the male sophomore, had their pants down around their knees and their shirts half off. The door was pushed to, but not closed thanks to the thrown lock. After much eye rolling and long-winded exhortations by said male sophomore that he had absolutely no sexual interest in us what-so-ever (and I believe this; I think he despised us as much as we despised him, and that mutual loathing would have pretty killed any thought at a budding sexual romance deader than a doornail)… Anyway, after his little speech, the sophomore cadet told us to reach between our legs and grab the back tail of our shirts and pull it to the front. Then with our free hand, we had to pull up and buckle our pants. Once the pants and belt had secured the shirt in place around our middles, we were told to pull the sleeves back up over our shoulders and button up the shirt. With our belts so tight they cut off the blood flow to our lower halves and the back tail of the shirt pulled around to the front, you know what pulling on and buttoning that shirt did.

It gave us all one huge frikkin’ wedgie from hell.

But the fun didn’t stop there. It wasn’t enough to have the shirt pulled tight from top to bottom. It also had to be wrinkle-free around the waist. So the sophomore cadet showed us a coat hanger that had been bent and twisted into an L-shape. This was called a runner, and he took the runner and slipped it inside the back waistband of his pants and used it to smooth the wrinkles in the back of the shirt, pushing all the excess fabric into two neat little folds at either side of the waist. Voila! Wrinkle-free shirt!

Except that the male sophomore didn’t have boobs, and a shirt tuck doesn’t exactly work the same on women as it does on men.

It took me many weeks of practice and several demerits for failing uniform inspection before I finally managed to achieve a perfect wrinkle-free shirt tuck. And I did it by yanking the back tale of my shirt so far up the front between my legs, I could have diapered myself. But when I pulled on and buckled my pants, and tugged on and buttoned my shirt, and then ran the wrinkles out of the whole damn thing, I did achieve the perfect shirt tuck. I had also managed to squash my boobs flatter than a pair of pancakes, but as long as I passed uniform inspection in the morning, who gave a crud? Now my only worry was to not bend at the waist during any point in the day, because if I did, I would pop my belt buckle for sure and probably put someone’s eye out. And earn a lot of demerits in the process.