How could a friend tear-gas you senseless?
You've gotta be cruel to be kind in the right measure
Perfecting Equilibrium Volume Three, Issue 37
Oh, I can't take another heartache
Though you say you're my friend
I'm at my wits' end
You say your love is bona fide
But that don't coincide
With the things that you do
And when I ask you to be nice, you say
You've gotta be cruel to be kind in the right measure
Cruel to be kind, it's a very good sign
Cruel to be kind means that I love you, baby
(You've gotta be cruel)
You've gotta be cruel to be kind
Well, I do my best to understand, dear
But you still mystify
And I want to know why
I pick myself up off the ground
To have you knock me back down
Again and again
And when I ask you to explain, you say
You've gotta be cruel to be kind in the right measure
Cruel to be kind, it's a very good sign
Cruel to be kind means that I love you, baby
(You've gotta be cruel)
You've gotta be cruel to be kind
The Sunday Reader, March 30, 2025
I don’t remember most of my time in the gas chamber. We were at ease in a loose formation early on a sunny August day in the Kentucky hills of Fort Knox. Periodically a dozen of us would be marched into the concrete bunker complex by our drill sergeants.
We’d been in full kit for weeks: Battle Dress Uniforms, ‘cruit boots, gas masks, web belts, M-16s…
No ammo, natch.
So SS;DD: Same…Stuff, Different Day. (OK, soldiers don’t say stuff.) We’d road marched there hours before it opened, then stood around waiting while no one explained what was going on. Then the drills began breaking off squads – about a dozen soldiers – walking them through the gas mask fitting procedure, checking everyone, then marching them into the bunkers.
If you want to understand the military mindset – if you want to understand Doolittle’s Raiders – then you all you need to understand is the gas chamber. You have to be able to order something horrific. To prevent something even more horrible. And if you get the order, you have to go.
It was a lesson that was about to be burned into our lungs on a Kentucky summer day.
We weren’t concerned that the squads didn’t come back out. Fort Knox in those days was a sprawling complex mostly left over from World War II. We slept in the same barracks and trained in the same facilities you can see in the movie Stripes, which came out the year before I was there. (Yes, we ran that same obstacle course.) Shout I’m a lean, mean fighting machine and the nearest drill made you do pushups until he got tired.)
So we weren’t concerned that we couldn’t see our squads coming out of the bunkers.
We should have been.
Eventually it was our turn, and they marched us into the bunker. The drill sergeants stood us in formation at attention and had each of us recite our name, rank and serial number, one at a time. Which is not a lot of fun wearing a gas mask. We were convinced that they were leftover from the Korean War, along with the C-Rats filled with mystery meat we ate on maneuvers. (What IS that? No idea. Well put more Tabasco on it; that’ll kill it.) They were sweaty and slimy and stuck to your face and smelled of the tang of the hundreds of ‘cruits who’d worn them before you.
Nasty.
So we were glad to take them off, despite the bunker being filled with a cloud of some sort of white mist, and once again recite our name, rank and serial number, one at a time.
The cloud turned out to be CS Riot Gas. And if you didn’t clearly sound off with name, rank and serial number – if, say, that litany paused while you puked your guts out – you had to start again. Till all of us were done.
I’d been a lifeguard, and like most swimmers could hold my breath for quite a while. So I got through my recitation in one try, and then…
I have no idea. The next thing I remember I was holding a tree in the field behind the bunkers, shaking, and mostly finished puking. Though my breath still sounded like a tin lizzy; it was days before I could breathe normally. I was bleeding freely from at least three gouges and cuts, and I’d done something horrid to my hand.
How did I get those injuries? I have no idea.
But the real indicator of how rough it was that day was that the field was covered with soldiers, moaning and sobbing, uniforms filthy, lying in the dirt. And not one drill sergeant got us organized.
Indeed, the drills were spookily quite for the rest of the day.
How could anyone in good conscience do that to recruits? I was the old man of the group at 22; almost everyone else was 18.
How could they do that to us?
Easy. They cared about us enough to do that hard things necessary to protect us from something much, much worse.
The Army learned this the hard way. Gas masks are hot and nasty and make it hard to breathe. (At least the ones we used back in the day.) Gas on open battlefields is difficult to impossible to see. So during World War I’s gas attacks soldiers panicked trying to breathe through gas masks and took them off.
And died. Horribly. The Germans used chlorine gas, which reacts with fluid in your lungs to form hydrochloric acid.
In your lungs.
So the Army needed to develop a training regime that would keep soldiers from removing their gas masks no matter how panicked they got.
Enter the basic training gas chamber filled with riot gas.
And it worked. None of us ever again were tempted to remove a suffocating gas mask until the All Clear was sounded. And even then, we hesitated, until drill sergeants started screaming TODAY!!!
There’s a scene in the movie Full Metal Jacket where the recruits first meet their drill sergeant. The original actor who played the drill sergeant was eventually replaced by the expert brought in as a coach for the roll. R. Lee Ermey had been a US Marine drill sergeant and spent more than a year in South Vietnam during the war.
The film makers were so taken with Ermey’s coaching – especially the wildly inventive and colorful insults he hurled at the “recruits – that they just put him in the roll and let him cut loose. So the scene you see in the movie is not from any script. It's Ermey, spewing vile insults, beating and humiliating recruits headed to the Vietnam War.
Surely that hadn’t happened in real life.
Trying – and failing – to prevent something worse.
The military needed warm bodies for the war, and had cut the training period to 8 weeks. The war was unpopular; failing recruits out was not an option, and would have been seen by the failures as a reward. So the drill sergeants did what they could with what they had. And failed in their own eyes.
When he and the rest of the drill sergeants went to eat, Ermey said, The first thing on our agenda when we got into that mess hall was to head right for that table because Stars and Stripes newspapers were there and we would go right to the back page and the obituaries from Vietnam, and you'd read down and if any of your guys were on there it was painful. Very painful. The thing that's going through my mind is are all the other privates able to hear me?
If you want to understand the military mindset – if you want to understand Doolittle’s Raiders – then you need to understand the gas chamber. And you need to ask yourself: Could you order recruits into the CS gas chambers so they would survive a possible future gas attack? Could you order Doolittle’s Raiders to fly B-25 bombers off an aircraft carrier – which had never been done – on a raid more than twice as long as any previous air attack? It was pretty much a suicide mission. Could you order them to go? Could you go if given the order?
And if you cannot order hundreds of airmen to their likely death…
How many thousands more die at Midway, on Guadalcanal and Iwo Jima?
If you cannot give the order, who wins the war in the Pacific?
To this day I don’t know if his story was true, or a true story from someone he’d served with, or just something he’d made up to steer me where I needed to go.
I know it doesn’t matter. And I know it worked.
Every ‘cruit remembers his drill sergeant’s name for the rest of his life. I remember mine, but I shan’t share it here.
Every recruit is convinced his drill is crazy and out to kill him. The latter isn’t true; way too much paperwork.
But I had proof positive my drill was crazy. He used to tell us that the Infantry motto was First Into the fight; Last Out.
And then he did it.
Our company had four platoons: each had a drill sergeant and two assistants. No matter what the captain in charge of the company ordered, it ended up with 3rd Platoon First In, and Last Out.
So if we were marching in order 7 miles to the rifle range that day in full kit with rucksacks and M-16s, 1st Platoon would lead the way. Then 2nd platoon would swing off. 3rd Platoon was next, with 100 soldiers ahead of us.
No matter. 3rd Platoon ran, in Army boots down paved roads, in full kit, holding our M-16s out in front of us.
We always arrived first. After a long day learning to shoot our M-16s like soldiers – or throw grenades or fire M-60 chain-fed machine guns or blow stuff up with claymore mines or whatever fun was on the day’s schedule – we’d police the area and set things right long after the other platoons were gone.
Then we ran, and beat them back to the barracks.
One of the more useful skills the Army taught me was how to fall asleep instantly anywhere, anytime. It’s an important military skill if you think about it; there are no time outs or scheduled hours or days off during a war. If there’s fighting, you fight, no matter the time of day or night or if you’re exhausted. When the fighting stops, you need sleep, no matter the time of day or night or how you feel. There’s no telling whether the next fight is 5 days or 5 minutes, so you sleep while you can.
The Army teaches you this by exhausting you physically and mentally, day and night, and giving you odd downtimes to recover.
Recruits were never left alone. One of the platoon’s three drill sergeants was with us 24/7. Overnight while most of the platoon slept one of the drills slept on cot in the little guard house next to our barracks. And one lucky recruit got to stay up all night on guard duty to wake the drill if anything happened.
It was exhausting. It was also a chance to actually talk to your drill sergeant. So I asked him: Why? Why work so hard? Why work us so hard? Why not do what every other drill sergeant was doing with their recruits?
After all, we were all clerks and jerks – Army slang for soldiers with non-combat jobs. After basic I was off to the Defense Information School to be an Army journalist. I would only be throwing grenades if things had gone very, very wrong.
But the enemy always gets a vote.
By then I’d learned to read uniform insignia. He had a right shoulder unit patch, which meant he’d been in a combat theater. And the combat infantry badge, which meant he’d been down in the muck. And a special forces tab, which meant he was a certified badass.
Here's why, he said. He told me he’d been upcountry on a mission, finished up, and come back to the rear for some R&R.
But the enemy always gets a vote. Vietnam was a war without established lines, so battles could break out anywhere. And one broke out on that base.
My sergeant fought, of course, and he tried to organize those rear echelon soldiers.
They didn’t know how to hold their rifles, he said to me, shaking his head.
And so they died.
Eventually reinforcements arrived and drove off the enemy. And I swore, College Boy – his nickname for me because I’d joined the Army after a couple of years of college – I swore if I got the chance I would make sure every clerk and cook and baker and accountant knew how to shoot their rifle.
To this day I don’t know if his story was true, or a true story from someone he’d served with, or just something he’d made up to steer me where I needed to go. I know it doesn’t matter. I know it worked.
And I know that College Boy, who’d grown up without guns, buckled down and qualified expert on grenades and sharpshooter on the M-16, and passing on claymores and machine guns and light antitank rockets.
I know that College Boy is still grateful to this very day. Oh, and in case it isn’t clear:
The gas chamber was a great lesson. And I’m never, ever, ever doing that again.