Monday Memories: Army Days

I thought I’d share a rather funny RP-related anecdote from my Army days.

In 1994 or so, I was stationed at Ft. Polk, LA. As an Airborne Infantryman, I had been assigned to the OPFOR for the Joint Readiness Training Center that had just relocated from Arkansas. It had been a couple of years since I had had the chance to game, and honestly, the bug was starting to leave me.

Then one day I was in the back of a Hummer being brought back in from The Box (what we called the training area where we played wargames every month), when a conversation with one of the newer guys turned to D&D. Dave and I had chatted briefly about it before, but we kept quiet because we knew that there was a guy in our platoon who played, but not in the way we played. Unfortunately, that guy was driving the Hummer at the time.

While the vehicle was moving down the gravel road, the noise was loud enough from the tires, and the open air of the back of the truck, that he couldn’t hear our conversation. So, we gleefully talked about all manner of D&D stuff, focusing mainly on Dragonlance, and our desire to get together and play.

However, whenever the driver had to come to a stop, the noise died down, and we would instantly just stop talking. Only to start right back up when the vehicle started moving again. This went on for the entire half-hour drive back to the base, much to the amusement of the other guys in the truck with us.

We ended up playing a lot of AD&D during the following months. We even got a couple of the guys who had overheard our conversation to join in. And we also managed to keep it all a secret from the one guy we wanted to avoid.