Andrew Cave

The US military, composed of five essential branches, is the best military in the world. The
Army is the biggest branch, with hundreds of different jobs, and apart from your special forces
operators, there is only one that engages in close quarters battle on the front lines. It is called the
Infantry. The infantryman is the reason America stands today in all her glory, the reason people
have every single one of their constitutional rights, and the reason children and young adults are
permitted to go to school today. Since 1776, at the birth of independence, they've stood ready to
defend this great nation, regardless of political powers currently at hand, personal beliefs, or their
own lives. Of the Infantry, there is a subsection of elite infantrymen, that are tasked with
arriving to the fight by means of jumping out of airplanes, strapped with heavy equipment,
machine guns, antitank cannons and indirect fire assets. They're Airborne Infantrymen, and they
are the watchdogs at the door that stand ready to kill whatever goes "bump" in the night.
For my ethnography paper, I'm going to dissect the standard Airborne Infantry
platoon, comprised of three line squads and one squad with heavy machine gun assets known as
weapons squad, totaling about 35-40 soldiers. There are too many movies out there showing
unrealistic battle scenes, with improper military uniforms, procedures, expectations, and war
scenarios. The "Hurtlocker," "Dear John," and "Stop Loss" are three of the worst movies I've
ever seen, and it's unfortunate that people take the military for what is depicted in these movies
and think it's a reality. There are a couple great movies out there that accurately depict the
Airborne Infantryman, such as Spielberg's series "Band of Brothers," and more realistic yet is a
documentary called "Restrepo." It's disheartening to hear what an ordinary civilian thinks about
the military based on the awful movies, and that's the point of my paper; to give an accurate

portrayal of the Airborne Infantry platoon by telling my experiences, and observing the savages
in their workplace environment, as well as interviewing soldiers across the ranks.
I arrived at my old company area. A uniform block of concrete buildings, once white
with brown trim, however they're now just a beige color with slightly darker doorways and
window borders. Standing strong since WWII, they hold the look of an ancient artifact that has
been hopelessly maintained over the last seven decades. Walking inside, there is a corridor type
feel, and an awful stench of black mold, which I later discover has been noticed, and is the main
reason the buildings were condemned four years prior, yet they still run daily operations out of
them. It is a corridor style building with a 150 foot hallway of tile floors, and a large open area
at one end with a weight bench and two conference rooms. There are offices lining the hallways,
all with a few soldiers in uniform within. Some offices can be heard laughing and cussing, some
screaming and cussing, and the rest just holding on normal conversations while using expletive
words as commas.
I went and sat down in the open area of the building, known as the common area. There
were soldiers everywhere with rifles, and machine guns, all working diligently with rags and
pipe cleaners to clean them. I discovered they had just returned from an eight-day field training
exercise. I took a few minutes and just sat and observed them in their natural habitat. There
were some soldiers yelling at others while they either did push-ups or stood still as a statue with
their hands folded behind their back, feet shoulder width apart. Specialist Brandon Roberts, who
has been with the unit for almost a year informed me that that body position is called "parade
rest" and must be assumed when speaking with anyone that is a Sergeant or above in rank. He
also informed me that the soldiers were cleaning their rifles, and then had to have them inspected
by their team leader, and if the team leader found any dirt or carbon on a "clean weapon," they

were forced to do one hundred pushups before they resumed cleaning their weapons. There is a
rank structure among the men, and from Private to Specialist, they take all orders from
Sergeants. Sergeants take their orders from Staff Sergeants, who take orders from Sergeant First
Class's, and up and up respectively.
SPC Roberts told me "The hardest part for me assimilating into this platoon is to know
when to mess around, and when not to. I'm constantly snapping into different standing positions
to talk to certain people, and I usually get in trouble for smiling." I asked Sergeant Velasquez
why the lower enlisted soldiers had to do it, and he responded: "It's really just discipline, man.
Gotta show these dumbasses who is in charge, and try to keep them from doing stupid shit." If
an enlisted soldier passes within ten paces of a commissioned officer, he must salute, and the
officer must return the salute: Right hand, thumb and fingers extended and joined with the tip on
the index finger touching the corner of his eyebrow, palm down, tilted just enough to hide the
palm, upper arm parallel with the marching surface. This goes for an officer of any rank, and the
officers do it to each other among their own rank structure.
I spoke with SPC Roberts and SGT Velasquez for about an hour, and they had quite
entertaining stories. In an effort to paraphrase the lifestyle of the culture of the Infantry
Paratrooper, imagine an entire community of pissed off 18-22 year olds suffering from mild shell
shock from war and a chip on the shoulder. They cover their problems with alcohol and have
large amounts of disposable income from recent deployments, and a severe lack of parental
supervision. They seem to drink enough during a "pre-game" to kill three pirates, and have a
severe lack of respect for their livers, while ultimately treating life like a grain of salt. They use
the word "fuck" as a comma, or possibly as a duct tape because they left their big words in
school, but they get their point across nonetheless.

On a serious note with these soldiers and their goals of every day operations, I learned
from SGT Velasquez that they do the redundant, rhetoric dog and pony show to instill discipline
in the young soldiers. Both of the soldiers I interviewed told me that their overall goal was to
become better as an individual so they could better support the team, and ultimately improve the
effectiveness and efficiency as a team, squad and platoon.
Only one percent of the U.S. population serves in the Army. Of that number, one out of
twenty-two volunteers to be in combat arms, and of those twenty-two volunteers, less than one
percent are qualified Airborne Infantrymen. This separates them on so many levels from the
ordinary civilian, living through things that don't make it in the movies. I went into a company
of these select Airborne Infantrymen to find out what made them different from every day
civilians. Though much of it was too broad to accurately describe, I feel I depicted it in such a
way to offer a snap shot of what goes on. These guys are different from the "run of the mill"
teenagers you come across. They're professional, yet swear every other word. They're clean cut,
yet get dirtier and bloodier than one could stomach. They're a special breed; men that jump out
of airplanes into a hail of gun fire because some guy told them to, and hell, all their buddies are
doing it.

Works Cited
Swales, John. "The Concept of a Discourse Community." Genre Analysis: English in Academic
and workplace settings. Boston: Cambridge UP, 1990. 21-32. Print.
Sergeant Velasquez, Juan. Personal Interview. 15 November 2014

Specialist Roberts, Brandon. Personal Interview. 15 November 2014