Living An US Army Commune

So I was working on the van last night, since I couldn't sleep, and was thinking of somethings that happened in the Army. One thing that stuck with me and was bouncing around the beat up skull that night/morning was this time when I help to organize a libertarian (closer to being anarchist) commune in the tent that about 10 of us shared, and one person lived with us.

Most of the time everyone, but 1 or 2 people in our tent, would go on patrol that could last from 12 to 20 hours or even longer. At the beginning we were sleeping on the green army cots, better then the ground but far from a mattress. One day we got a 20 ft. conex filled with these cheap wooden bunk beds and mattresses. We all stacked up the bunk bed kits in the corners of every tent and each of us through 2 mattresses each of our cots, that night was a lot better sleep.

The bunk bed kits set in the corner of our tent for about a week or two. Then on a day that I and one other person didn't go on patrol we decided to helped each other put together our buck beds. After realizing we built the 2nd bunk faster then the 1st bunk, we thought maybe we could get a third one done faster. By the end of the day we had all the bunks in our tent built and help the one or two people from the other tents build their bunks (we would have made old Eli Whitney and Henry Ford proud with our assembly line ability). In our tent we set a buck next to a cot and through the mattresses on to he bunks. We also set most of the buck so one long side was against a wall of the tent, creating a large center area.

While this action by itself did not admittedly lead to the brief "tent commune" it did get the ball started. But things like when we cleaned up 2 coaches, acquired a large empty wire spool, and got a good size hookah. Which lead to our 'smoke and talks' before bed, this lead to people reaching out and helping each other with things like laundry, or make sure that a plate of food was grabbed from the mess tent (while the food would be cold by the time any one eat it).

This then lead to the thing that may have sealed the deal on our common bond in the tent. We paid a contractor who was leaving $10 for a microwave oven. Then later lead us to plan and run night time operations on the food storage buildings and conexs. We should have wrote up debriefs for every night we conducted one of these. Cause how many acquisitors do you know set up sand-tables, assign a team to scout out then look out and if need be make a distraction, use military grade night vision, and at the end celebrate over acquiring a 25 lb box of chicken nuggets.

But sadly when I went on R&R and came back the crappy tent was gone and we where all consolidated down to a tent that had been insulated with foam and a uniformed plywood sleeping cubes were built and no one was talking everyone was hiding out in their cube with headphones on.