Virginia, like much of the country, was recently hit with a cold spike that had many cigarettes dying half smoked on the front porch and whiskey serving as a cheaper alternative to high heating bills. However, as the weather reported the nightly lows dipping into the single digits, adding another blank to the bed seemed like a wise alternative to the previous nights inexplicable and cruel blanket theft.

Comfort Only a Soldier Could Love

Though I came to this decision earlier in the day, it was both dark and late by the time I pushed open the closet door and fished around the floor for the familiar feeling of wool. Like so many others in my generation, I have an extensive collection of military-issued materials littering my apartment, despite having received my honorable discharge over four years prior. There is a certain sense of practicality that is imbued through service, especially service during wartime. Call it a sense of spend-thrift, call it being a packrat, but a perfectly good blanket or duffle has a use, even if at the time it’s not obvious.

In the late hour I stripped back the comforter and heavy over-blanket from the bed, exposing the mess of thinly striped sheets below. With a practiced flip of my arms, an expanse of green wool shot out to cover those sheets. I paused. It didn’t matter that the dark olive drab would clash terribly with the pale beige or yellow of the sheets. It didn’t matter that Army-issue blankets are renowned for their scratchy demeanor. No, what gave me reason to pause was the hollow, black, san-serif US which was staring up at me.

In the very first day of basic training, you’re told to make your bed. Failure is expected, as you have yet to be taught how to do so. Later that day your bunks are all tossed, blankets and unfitted sheets, pillows which are purposefully uncomfortable, end up in chaotic rough messes. All the effort spent in a vain attempt to prove that you could make a bed is suddenly undone.

But, it’s to prove a point. Later that day you’re instructed on how Uncle Sam makes a bed. How to properly craft a hospital corner. How to situate a pillow. How to fashion a pillow cover out of a blanket. And what seemed to stick with everyone, why the US-side of the blanket always go down. Every drill Sergeant seems to tell the story differently, but the lesson is always the same. It’s US side down when the bed’s occupant is alive.

At the time, the stories of Vietnam still circulated readily amongst the Army. The image of showing up at a unit and replacing a fallen soldier, of having to turn over that blanket and hide the US side of the blanket, it struck a sense of mortality in the new privates there in the first day of Basic Training.

Apparently it struck a nerve in me too. I knew the blanket wouldn’t be seen. I knew that no one was going to assume that I’d fallen. But, without hesitation, I flipped the blanket over. I guess, with some things, you never do stop being a soldier.

In the end, I was warm.