Happy Birthday to Me

Above: Will spent five birthdays straight stuck in some wretched desert. Even still, two stood out among
the best ever. Below: An aircraft like this one was both home and office for months on end back in the day.

Of all the sundry holidays that so liberally populate the modern Gregorian calendar none is so superfluous as the birthday. For children it’s an excuse for unbridled greed and materialism. For those of us above a certain age it’s an inevitable and undesirable reminder of our own mortality. If you have to miss one holiday, pick your birthday.

When I was a soldier, we always said the calendar was arbitrary. Christmas was whenever dad was home. Christmas represents the greatest thing ever to happen to humankind; the calendar date, not so much.

Those are indeed some rarefied platitudes. However, after five years straight wherein Uncle Sam had me spending my February birthday in some wretched desert I was suffering from a mighty case of self-inflicted melancholia. As I sat alone in a smelly tent shivering in the cold, a surprisingly common occurrence in deserts in my not insubstantial experience, I wallowed in self-pity there was not a soul within several thousand miles who knew it was my birthday.

The Brotherhood

My piteous reverie was interrupted by a cacophony most discordant. The familiar yet tortured strains of the Happy Birthday Song came wafting across the forlorn sand. Just then the tent flap flew open and in walked three remarkably disheveled apparitions. This grating rendition bore little evidence to the more familiar melodious sort.

In walked Rus, Chris and Mike — my combat crew. We were close, as are all filthy guys grown accustomed to corporate institutionalized hardship. Rus carried in his grimy mitts a genuine Hostess Zinger festooned with a comparably genuine conflagrating birthday candle.
We had been languishing in this forsaken locale for quite some while and there wasn’t an option of jogging down to the mini-mart for a resupply of pogey bait. This Zinger, in this austere setting, was itself a most precious thing.

The guys grinned as they deposited the hallowed confection atop my rucksack along with a postcard sporting the grinning visage of a half-naked woman. The racy postcard was also not the sort of thing one tripped over in such rugged spaces. I remain to this day vexed as to how they came by these two remarkable items.

I discreetly wiped away a tear and thanked my buddies genuinely. I blew out the candle, produced my survival knife, and cut the Zinger into fourths so we could all enjoy it equally. I later covertly binned the postcard. Despite the genuine affection it represented it seemed manifestly unwise to roll back home after so long away to have my bride discover such a bawdy trinket. With more than half a century on my own personal Hobbs meter, however, this birthday stands out among them all as the best ever.

Bubbles

Moms. Wow. God sure knew what He was doing when He made those. I was off someplace saving the world thousands of miles from family and home, sleep-deprived, frazzled, foul-smelling and grouchy. It was yet another birthday spent someplace I’d sooner not be.
Mail call is a holy thing to soldiers in the field. In the days before Skype and ubiquitous data links back to the World, good old-fashioned mail was the lifeline back to things soft, warm and sweet-smelling. This day I had a package. My dour comportment perked at the prospects.

The box was of modest dimensions and externally unremarkable. I took the small parcel to a quiet place so as to explore it with the reverence it warranted. I loosened its bonds with the blade on my Gerber and peered expectantly within.

A mother’s love is a powerful, beautiful, unshakable, holy thing. It can also manifest in some surprising ways.

Inside there was a scrap of soft white cloth carefully folded around a 3×5 card. I gingerly unwrapped the cloth and held it aloft to find a spanking new Mr. Bubble T-shirt. My fingers quivered as I hefted the thing.

Nowadays you can get a Mr. Bubble T-shirt on Amazon for a 10 spot. Back then, however, the only way to obtain the genuine article was to use up enough Mr. Bubble bath soap to acquire the requisite number of proof-of-purchase seals and send off for a copy via mail order. Ordering a Mr. Bubble T-shirt required some serious planning and a great deal of personal hygiene.

I retrieved the card and read it by the dying desert light. Scrawled across the front in my mother’s beautiful familiar script it read simply, “I know you’ve always wanted one. Love, Mom.”

Subscribe To American Handgunner