Bad Medicine

by Terry Ledgard

  Together, myself and the legion wrought pure mischief on all things socially acceptable, skipping class to swim at the beach, climbing the steep walls of the local quarry (which was frowned upon in the strictest legal sense), talking about all the cool chicks that we never stood a chance with and regularly practising alcohol consumption of the underaged variety at whatever party happened to be raging on any particular weekend. Music was always the gang’s favourite pastime, though. Limp Bizkit, Korn, Nelly, Blink-182, 2Pac – all the shit the cool kids were listening to back then.

  Happily, though, while adolescent academia was strictly outlawed, an amnesty had been declared on sport in the province of teenage awesomeness. So that’s the aspect of my life that I focused on. Athletics, basketball, football (not soccer but the enjoyable variant of footy: Aussie Rules) and especially volleyball kept me busy over the years that followed.

  My school ran a volleyball elective class that I absolutely loved – let’s face it, volleyball is a fuck-tonne more fun than science and maths. I found myself representing the South of Oz in the Australian Volleyball National Junior Championships U/21 side in 2001. I was only seventeen at the time, which is not testament to my superior volleyball talent but indicative of my astounding deficiencies. Having attended the state try-outs (and despite possessing a freakish ‘second best in the entire country’ vertical leap), my abysmal coordination prohibited me from making the U/19 team proper. So I was given the choice to be a bench-warmer for the U/19s, where I’d enjoy precisely zero game time, or a starting player for the rag-tag U/21s, who were struggling for numbers. I joined the U/21s.

  Up until this point in life, I’d been happy to rest on my laurels, feeling comfortable within my abilities. Trying out for the state squad was the first time I really put myself out there and risked failing at something. Although I didn’t accomplish my main goal, I got a very cool consolation prize in playing for the U/21s, which turned out to be much more valuable in the long run. This moment set the tone for later life; I was less afraid of failure because I’d learnt that even if I didn’t reach my goal, I was still light years ahead of where I would’ve been if I didn’t try at all. But it was a double-edged sword – I’d also just settled for second best, which would become an unwelcome pattern down the track.

  Fast-forward to the championships, and our team of U/21 misfits was written off as the easy-beats from day one. We weren’t expected to win a single set, let alone a match. But then the strangest thing happened. Harbouring zero expectations, we pulled together perfectly to become greater than the sum of the team’s parts. We started winning. Playing against Australian Olympic volleyball players, we started winning! We sucked something fierce, so it must have been infuriating for the opposition to lose to us.

  By week’s end, we found ourselves playing in the semi-final match. Un-fucking-believable. The South Australian Volleyball sports psychologist, Isaac, gathered our group in a secluded conference room of the stadium for a pre-game gee-up session. After a so-so motivational speech, he played Metallica’s ‘Nothing Else Matters’ through the room’s speaker system. The seductive siren of the Metallica ballad tapped into a rich vein of inspiration. We were ready to eviscerate our opposition, and defile their slain corpses for the win. Isaac knew his stuff.

  We marched through the long corridor to the awaiting arena, electric excitement leaking from every pore. When the starting whistle blew, we unleashed the motherfucking fury – jumping higher, hitting harder and scrambling faster than anyone would have thought humanly possible. By game’s end, against overwhelming odds, we’d somehow managed to grind out a dogged victory. We’d made it to the gold-medal match and were assured of at least a silver medal! Man hugs all round – we celebrated on the court like we’d just won the lotto.

  But, never happy with indulging dreamers, fate dealt us a sucker punch straight to the gonads during the gold-medal match. We were systematically taken apart by our classy Victorian opponents. Utterly deflated by such a humiliating defeat, we lined up and shook the opposition’s hands at the end of the match.

  SPORTSMANSHIP

  We are all taught at a very early age to be humble in victory and gracious in defeat, playing for the spirit of the game and the game’s own sake. These are the virtues that underpin sportsmanship, the values to which we should all aspire. The very idea of sportsmanship is designed to prevent the underlying competitive nature of sporting conflict bursting up through the surface as slanging matches and all-out brawls.

  In reality, however, sportsmanship is smiling politely, shaking hands and superficially complimenting those smug, victorious bastards while secretly trying to make them spontaneously combust with your mind.

  A few months after the volleyball tournament, I landed my very first steady girlfriend. I’d been a quiet achiever in the lady department; I didn’t exactly have the swagger like Jagger but I was no Poindexter either, so I was doing okay. And my first girlfriend was intensely hot: blonde, petite, caked with make-up and kind of ditzy. She wasn’t actually ditzy: this was the era of Britney Spears and Jessica Simpson, when pretending to be a bimbo was considered cool. Adolescent heaven.

  After a month of French-kissing and light groping, the girlfriend and I, along with the rest of the gang, decided that the secluded beach of Point Lowly was the perfect Friday-night retreat from prying parental eyes. And so, having reached the sandy shores of paradise, my girlfriend and I went for a stroll along the beach, hand in hand, away from the others, and settled into the soft sand dunes. We started making out, passion reaching a crescendo as an erotic romance began to unfold.

  This is it. I’m losing my virginity. I’m finally going to be a Man!

  Fumbling with the pesky double snap-hook, I managed to unclip my girlfriend’s bra, releasing her supple breasts into the cool sea breeze. The G-string slid down her smooth legs with a soft, sexy whimper.

  No glove, no love – that’s the safe-sex gospel.

  CONDOMS

  Originally made from lamb intestines in the 1800s, the twenty-first-century condom is a thin latex membrane with an elastic ring that is placed over the erect penis to prevent the male ejaculate from escaping into the female vagina during sexual intercourse. Condoms are ninety-nine per cent effective in preventing unwanted pregnancies and sexually transmitted diseases.

  Condoms live in the wallets of overly optimistic adolescent boys, where they become dry and brittle as they slowly exceed their use-by date.

  Condom was now fitted and confidence sky high. The soft, squishy goodness that is sex overwhelmed the senses. We exhaled together in the throes of ecstasy, rhythmic breathing completely in sync, smell of sex filling the air, hips gyrating . . .

  Wait. What? Uh-oh.

  I stared down in horror at the tip-end of my erect penis. The dry, blown-out prophylactic looked like a crudely peeled banana. Aaaargh! This is not happening right now.

  I apologised profusely to my incredibly gorgeous better-half and raced back across the beach, like the motherfucking wind. I reached the gang on the other side faster than the speed of embarrassment. ‘Dude! Please tell me one of you lads has a franger? Dear God, please have a spare dinger,’ I pleaded with my buddies.

  But they didn’t.

  The beach seemed to stretch for an eternity on the long walk back to my now fully clothed vixen. The moment was lost. And as I slowly trudged towards her, head down and shoulders slumped, I couldn’t help but feel that I’d somehow been cheated by the universe. I’d scored a perfect one hundred per cent on my Year 10 sex ed. exam. I’d seen American Pie. Judging by my curriculum vitae, I was overqualified for the missionary position. Yet, I’d been defeated by the so-called foolproof condom.

  Embarrassed. Incompetent. Inadequate. So this is what being a Man feels like.

  While the final few moments of high school were chapping my ass harsher than a Ryobi orbital sander, I knew that I seriously needed a life plan. With my older brother now serving time in the prison of Adelaide, convicted of being
a geek at the nerdy school of all things computers, I guessed that my folks’ funds were running dry. So, in a selfless ‘I’ll jump on that grenade’ moment, I decided that the parentals didn’t need the financial stress of supporting my ass through whatever shenanigans were in store for my young ‘adult’ life. I use the word ‘adult’ in the loosest possible sense. Encouraged by the exaggerated cool stories I’d heard from the army recruiter at a local career fair, I became fixated on the notion of joining the army.

  Some people join the army because they feel it’s their calling; others because they want to serve their country. Not me. I make major life decisions faster than Flash Gordon can save the damsel in distress. My decision to join the army happened within two days. Learning was boring, the army seemed exciting, and chicks dig guys in uniform. Boom – decision made.

  So I signed up in 2002 at the age of eighteen – it was time to stop pretending and become a Man. With all things said and done, I’d escaped puberty relatively unscathed. Bleach-blonde tips, a scattering of acne and an earring were the only visible battle scars from my War on Adolescence.

  2

  BABY MEDIC

  Jeez, can you please try to be more of a clichéd fuckwit? I silently mused to myself as the gang of army recruits were beasted off the boot-camp bus by the fake-angered platoon sergeant.

  The sergeant was spouting lines from the movie Full Metal Jacket, which is an essential cinematic masterpiece for any aspiring soldier. Screaming at the top of their lungs, the sergeant and his cronies patrolled the aisle of the bus, fully cuntifying any recruits foolish enough to throw them an errant glance. I was a timid civilian, unruffled on the surface but wondering what the hell I’d just got myself into underneath. I’d found myself at Kapooka, circa February 2002. It was the first hurdle to full army service, where recruits were belt-fed basic soldiering skills such as weapons handling, field craft, drill, navigation and discipline, and psychologically conditioned to be a subservient little soldier boy (which would later turn out to be a vital, life-saving skill on the battlefield, so I can’t complain about subservience too much).

  Boot camp was a real culture shock for me. Within a few weeks, I went from a slovenly teenage dirtbag with clothes and crap strewn all over my bedroom to being able to bounce a coin off my immaculately taut boot-camp bedsheets, which I could make to perfection in under a minute. I’d stand in the hallway – sheets draped over my left shoulder, blanket over my right – and await orders from the instructors during our morning routine. Discipline at boot camp was very simple: they say – you do. If they don’t say – don’t do. But there were still guys who managed to fuck it up. There was one dude across the hallway who would continuously scratch his nuts while we were supposed to be standing at attention. As a result, the instructors focused their harassment on our end of the line.

  One time, one of the corporals patrolling the hallway cocked his leg and let out a grotesque fart that came from the deepest, darkest regions of his intestines. He was only metres away, but we weren’t allowed to flinch, gag or move. The corporal got right into the crotch-scratcher’s face. ‘Do you smell that, recruit? That’s my shit particles entering your nostrils. Take it. Take it like I’m your daddy,’ the corporal said as he wafted the stench away from his ass.

  Snickering broke out in the hallway.

  ‘What, you think this is funny?’ The corporal pretended to be serious. ‘There’s nothing funny about dysentery. All you unhygienic fuckers can drop down and do twenty push-ups,’ he beasted.

  After the push-ups, we all stood up.

  ‘Still think it’s funny?’ the corporal asked.

  Someone from down the hallway got ballsy. ‘It just smells like man sex to me, corporal.’

  The entire hallway lost their shit, doubling over in laughter. The corporal raced up and down the line, red faced, trying to identify the offender. But we recruits closed rank and didn’t spill the beans.

  The farting corporal took it on himself to teach us a lesson over the incident, instigating extra physical-training (PT) sessions and longer hours, but we all kept taunting him when he couldn’t see who was taking the piss.

  Due to the boot-camp instructors’ constant berating and punishments, my language began a rapid metamorphosis. Guns became known as rifles, shoes became known as GP boots, shower time became known as rape risk (joking), people became known as corporals, and the subhuman species that I belonged to became known as recruits (not joking). During the boot-camp process, I was constantly reminded that each platoon of thirty people was a cross-section of Australia’s youth. And what an unsettling notion that turned out to be. While three other normal dudes (including myself) were trying to sleep in our bunks, a fourth guy – one fucked-up unit – masturbated incessantly while talking on his contraband phone. Even more disturbingly, he would talk to his bayonet under the blanket in the tiny hours of the morning. I’m happy to say that the Masturbating Maniac was soon relegated to the ‘window-licking squad’, one step away from full military discharge, and banished from the room where I slept at night.

  Recruits who ‘psych out’ during boot camp are a well-documented phenomenon, captured in the hundreds of different war movies circulating in popular culture. In contrast to the movies, though, my experience wasn’t all doom and gloom. On one fine day, my platoon was doing the high-wire confidence course and I had a character-revealing moment, of sorts. As I sat and watched twenty-odd recruits unsuccessfully attempt to cross the ten-metre-high, non-stabilised bridge, all of them losing their balance and swan-diving over the side like lemmings, I pondered how I was going to tackle this obstacle. Speed was the key, I decided. When my turn came, I legged it, almost grabbing my safety rope for stability along the way, but making it to the other side.

  ‘Recruit Ledgard, you better get your ass back across that bridge, except this time how’s about not grabbing your fucking safety line,’ bellowed my section commander.

  Despite his shameless French, he was right. I’d screwed the pooch. Fair call.

  I breathed deeply, gathering my composure. Like a tiger, or something of comparable awesomeness, I Jumping-Jack-Flashed it straight back to where I’d started, each step jerking the bridge violently in the opposite direction and threatening to throw me off. But I made it back to the other side.

  ‘Well, thank fuck for that. You can follow an order,’ barked my section commander. ‘Now, get your ass back over the other side and finish the obstacle.’

  Oh, man! Okay, screw this dude. Here we go.

  I breathed deeply again, steeling my nerves. Bang. I was off, and I made it to the other side. Again. For the third time, I’d done what twenty before me hadn’t.

  In your face, fucker.

  And, for the record, only one other bloke made it across the obstacle that day. The instructors tried to play top dog by completing the obstacle themselves but ended up looking like a pack of bungee jumpers. The other dude who made it across was former French Foreign fucking Legion. This fills me with joy.

  ‘Well done, Ledgard,’ my section commander commented as I passed by.

  I was bewildered and didn’t know what to say, so I stuttered some incomprehensible response. Positive reinforcement: what a fantastically foreign idea!

  I’d been going through the motions at boot camp. Nothing seemed unachievable, so I was happy to just coast through the training and get a so-so pass mark. But my section commander’s positive reinforcement gave me the incentive to try harder. It showed me that extra effort would actually be rewarded. That was the moment I decided I no longer wanted to merely get along at boot camp; I was actually going to try from that point onwards.

  But, a weird thing about the army that I noticed early on was they had a knack for taking the fun out of activities that you’d really enjoy in a different environment. Obstacle courses, target practice and PT were all subject to strictly imposed rules and traditions that stripped away any joy and made them a chore. Even socialising was tainted by the army effect. Army-or
ganised social events were steeped in a framework of cultural traditions designed to foster mateship, but these events always felt contrived; it was a struggle to let your hair down and have fun in that setting, constantly worrying about breaking some obscure, unwritten rule. So, in a strange way, by trying to forcefully instil mateship, the army stricture got in the way of letting mateship unfold naturally.

  But by far the biggest problem I had at boot camp was the army’s approach to learning: by the numbers. I was accustomed to being given a rough idea of what I needed to do and then left to figure out how to do it, but army directives were extremely precise and repetitive. So I had to learn how the army wanted me to learn before I could learn the skills that they were trying to teach. It took me a few weeks of trial and error to figure it out. Suffice it to say, I made very simple tasks look extremely difficult. I was a cluster-fuck.

  After six long weeks of boot-camp beasting, my platoon was only a few short days from graduation, and from being sent to our respective specialised training courses. I’d joined the army as a rifleman (a grunt), but my platoon sergeant sat us would-be grunts down in a closed-door session and levelled with us. In a rare and genuine moment, he dropped his hard-ass facade and admitted that, as a seasoned grunt of fifteen years who was now contemplating civvy street, he had not a single Real World qualification to his name. The sergeant strongly recommended doing a trade with transferable skills to make the transition to civilian life easier.