Broke Dick
on High Testosterone Training
In Basic Training there were these dudes we called broke dick. These were guys who got there and then decided they didn’t want to be soldiers. They didn’t like the Army or the fighting they foresaw in their uncertain futures. They didn’t like Fort Sill itself, or the bombs falling in the far parts of the base that rattled the floors of our small shoes, and they certainly didn’t like the spit-shined drill sergeants with their demanding demeanor, their curses and catch phrases. Some guys missed their girlfriends. Some guys missed their mommas or their boys back home.
Whatever the reason, they just wanted out, so they faked an injury. One guy said he had a bad back. One guy claimed he tore his ACL. Another had sprained his big toe and that kept him from training.
Most of them dropped the act once they realised they wouldn’t be allowed to leave, but a few of them continued the charade. They thought by faking an injury they would get to go home, but the military doesn’t let its men out that easily.
For weeks the broke dicks did details: they mowed the grass around the barracks and picked up trash. They worked in the kitchens or had to clean outhouses in the field. During morning PT they monitored street-crossings and during chow they served mashed potatoes before washing all the pots and pans.
Every day they got stuck doing shitty details instead of training with the rest of us, and every night we’d talk about the broke dicks. We’d get in from twelve hours on the rifle range and someone would say the broke dicks had been on bullet duty that day. While we were at the gas chamber the broke dicks were scrubbing shit pots at training sites. While we were digging foxholes in the Oklahoma dirt, they were peeling potatoes in the steam-clanking kitchen.
But we knew the broke dicks were there by their own design, so we didn’t have much sympathy for them, young as we were. The rest of us had signed up to be soldiers, not peel fucking potatoes, and already we had been molded so. We were awake before reveille and still up hours after retreat. We didn’t sleep with our rifles but we cleaned them constantly, and by Week Three we were lean, mean, fighting machines, attuned to bullets and bombs, as the best soldiers were.
By contrast, broke dicks weren’t soldiers. They didn’t want to be soldiers. They didn’t want to fight against our enemies, foreign or domestic, so we named them broke dick, because in the masculine world of the military, a man is defined by his dick and the work he does. A man who can’t perform is a broke dick, and we called them that. Broke dick when we passed them picking up trash on the side of the road. Broke dick when we sat beside them in the chow hall and broke dick when we saw them gathering for roadside detail under the hot Oklahoma sun.
We called them broke dick all damn day. Broke dick in the morning and broke dick at night, which reminds me once again how your fellow men can make you believe anything, if they’re scared enough. For example, when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait just weeks before we graduated Basic and the buildup to Desert Storm began, we were still saying the ones who didn’t want to fight were the broken ones.
That last line resonates long after the essay's over. Thank you, again, Paul.
Great, timely (Hegseth's weird mandate) piece. Love the enthymematic last line (my favorite way to end an essay). I've recently done a ton of research into my mom's "crying wolf" episodes to escape her severe off grid life w/ my stepdad, and I learned some harrowing stuff about historical wartime "malingerers" -- what you call the "broke dick" bunch. Accd. to the NIH: malingering is "the willful deception or significant overstatement of physical or mental symptoms to obtain external incentives."
Anyway, some of the things Civil War soldiers would do is shove turkey hearts up their ass to resemble piles (hemmoroids), or swallowing tobacco to cause nausea and vomiting, putting belladonna in the eyes to dilate pupils and blur vision... and say you say, the doctors would then make the "cure" worse in all sorts of horrid ways.
As for my mom, she feigned illness by secretly dehydrating herself, causing dizziness and falling, resulting in a "pampering" stay in the hospital.