Brachylogia (brach-y-lo’-gi-a): The absence of conjunctions between single words. Compare asyndeton. The effect of brachylogia is a broken, hurried delivery.
“Pow! Pow! Pow!“ I shot my next door neighbor for maybe the fiftieth time. I’d point my finger like a gun and let him have it. He would play along and fall groaning on the grass. I had just gotten out of the Army, so there was a connection to shooting my neighbor. My unit was “Special Garbage Operations.” We would parachute into vacant battlefields and pick up the garbage—everything from MRE wrappers to 155mm shell cases, bloody bandages and empty vodka bottles. We were extracted from the battle field by helicopter, under fire. I had a Walther PPK that I fired into the air and out the door when we took off from the LZ. I think I shot a couple of bad guys while I was over there. What a pain in the ass.
The Mess Hall is what gave me non-combat related PTSD. The “Chef” was named Mickey Picone. We’d all oink when we lined up for chow—we ate pig slop every night. We would joke that on Mondays we’d have shit on a shingle, then on Tuesday, puke on a bedpan. The rest of the week we’d spend recovering from the shits. That was no joke. After his bed was set on fire four times, Mickey was reassigned. He was replaced by Tootsie Trinker. She was touted as the “Mess Hall Rambo.” If you didn’t eat what she cooked, she would have 2 MPs take you behind the mess hall and kick your ass. It was part of her “Ne Leftovers Left Behind” policy. It was bullshit, bullshit, bullshit.
I decided to get to know her and hook up, and weasel out of “No Leftovers Left Behind.” It was a wild ride. She made me her food taster. I was let in the mess hall before everybody else to taste the food and Tootsie too. It was awful—like having sex with Thanksgiving turkey, but I thought there would be an eventual pay off somehow. There wasn’t. My buddies all started hating me. When we went on missions they would try to wind my suspension lines around my neck, but I fought them off before I jumped. Eventually, they buried me up to my neck on a battlefield in MRE wrappers. They fired their 9mms into the dirt around me. I would cry. They would laugh. I told our company commander, Captain Springy, and he laughed and told me to get the fu*ck out of his office. He said “Any more of this shit and they’ll find you with a tank track across your face.”
I was discharged from the Army with a less than honorable discharge. I have all my benefits, but I have the finger shooting problem as a residue of my service. I’ll never shake it. Ironically, Captain Sprngy lives next door and plays shooter with me. This is the most amazing stroke of luck that I could possibly imagine. I can’t figure it out. Maybe he works for the VA.
Definitions courtesy of “Silva Rhetoricae” (rhetoric.byu.edu.
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