Gallows Humor

How the Military Embraces Black Humor to Get Through All this Crap

Jokes, humor, and off-color stories are all integral to bonding, expressing trauma, and venting frustration.

The military is such a weird bird when it comes to humor, especially when it comes to its enlisted. You take people from all walks of life, economic status, cultures, etc., and throw them in together. They all have one sole purpose: being in the chain to kill people.  When you put such a wide range of folks together, one of the best ways to get them to learn from each other, trust each other, and work together is humor. And the more edgy, for better or worse, the better.

Help us kill people, BUT don't say anything that might offend someone because, you know, someone's fee fees might get hurt. It's a little complicated to square such a paradox, but war is a paradox.

I'm not ignorant. There is a time, place, and intent with humor. If my purpose is to make a coworker in the office feel like crap, and everyone laughs at their expense, that's just cruelty.   As with anything, there is a balance, and you have to curb and regulate people, or we just go overboard. People who are often bored or annoyed off their asses. But if any officer thinks that the environment their enlisted worked in didn't have things said and laughed at, that would make their mothers slap them; well, I just shake my head. Leadership's role is to mitigate it. It was our job as peons to try and get away with it.  You can try to regulate it--and leaders should be doing that-- but never think that off-brand humor isn't critical to the military because all of those things make us all different, bring us together, and bond all their differences.

Trust me, your grandpappy made plenty of off-color jokes in WWII. Your uncle said many things that would be "canceled" today in Vietnam. Why? Because it was critical to surviving the insanity of blowing someone's head off or having your buddy die in your arms.  Hell, the Spartans used sexual innuendo to describe stabbing someone to cope and desensitize themselves.  Cavemen tribes probably had a funny joke about killing someone from a different tribe, for God's sake.  Then they probably ate that person, so…Who knows.

If you want a modern-day example, there is no more perfect book/TV show than Generation Kill. In this tremendous seven-part series, the Marines go through combat and survive, partly aided by dark humor that would make your Momma blush.

During my last push to Iraq, I helped kill thousands of ISIS fighters. We also exploited anything found in the fighters' possession, including a finger and thumb. Once, we almost had a full head. Thankfully, we got them to understand we were joking and didn't want it. Or if those weren't available, we got what I called giblets: chunks of flesh. Take a guess at whose job it was to handle these things. This was a high-stakes, stressful job accomplished by a small group of people from all stripes, military branches, and walks of life (except that 2nd LT, who even our partners ignored).

So, when my coworker says my hair looks like I told the barber that I want to endorse police brutality (which is funny cause he was a police officer back home). I buy stock in tiki torches, and I retort that he should feel bad for committing brown-on-brown violence (he is Mexican). Is this wrong and unacceptable, considering we literally just struck and killed 7 people (and 4 goats, if being specific)? Depends on your perspective, I guess. For us, it's integral to get through each day out there.

The next day, for another example, someone stole our cooler outside. My Major yelled very politely at me because he's Canadian for putting a bag of DNA (7 people above, but 0 goats) in the refrigerator. So now I must carry this bag with my thumbs and fingers around for the next hour until I can take it to the handoff people. We are bored. We start oil checking (google it, on your own time) each other with the bag. We are letting out the enormity of what we accomplished. We are also bored. We may need therapy.

Once, we conducted an operation far from the forward operating base.  A young Iraqi soldier brought in some giblets via a white Toyota truck (if you know why I point that out, you know). Our goodies were in the duffel bag in the back, like some jacked-up Santa Claus. He refused to reach in, just kept shaking his head. Well, I don't have gloves, and I've made it a point to resist reaching into a bag of unknowns. For better or worse, I relent, carefully put my hand in, pull the evidence back, and go for something far heavier in a plastic bag.

I pull the clear plastic bag out of the duffel, and inside, lo and behold, is a goddamn right foot, neatly severed above the ankle. It was all that was viable to bring back to us. The rest of the body didn't exactly exist anymore. Now, I can't speak for every country, but Iraq doesn't use what we might call quality plastic bags. So, as I take the clod kicker in my hand, the 3-day-old melted fat, blood, and what I assume used to be ice cube water all trickle out and down my hand and arm. The odor, needless to say, is potent. The consistency that now coats me can be likened to OH HELL NO. FML. FUBAR. SNAFU.

I take the foot to where it needs to go and return to work. There is no time to change, shower, bathe in holy water, scrub myself with steel wool, or do anything else. 

As a side note, this happened on 20 June 2022. That was a Wednesday. Wednesday, I was at Storganoff night. My favorite dish. Stroganoff night, as you can imagine, was fucking ruined for me. Ask any person who has deployed in combat zones how critical it is to enjoy your favorite nights (wing night, taco Tuesday, perhaps). It is different from the high point of my time there. I stank like a Tijuana whore house for 4 days. I threw that uniform away.

I get into work, and my aroma hits everyone. I explain what happened. I get laughed at. I sit down in the front row. I bust out singing.

"Foot loose, foot juice, blow ISIS out of their shoes! So fun, so neat, now I smell like feet meat!"

I chuckled. Then I laughed. Then I guffawed. I cackle. Like, really threw my head back and let it out.  It's one of those laughs that is in movies about asylums. I can't help myself.  I need to laugh and make fun of the fact I've been carrying around pieces of people I killed--they deserved it, but that's irrelevant to the point--make jokes, do dumb shit, etc.

 My humor, wit, and number of kills earned me quite a reputation. During my time in Iraq, I earned a damn snazzy nickname from my Army Colonel, Smiling Assassin. Something I equally slightly cringe but take pride in. It's a weird feeling some days, to be honest.

So yeah. I guess I want to say there's a time and place for everything. Audience, bystanders, and intent are all important. But also, don't be shocked, offended, or get butthurt by every little comment or joke in the military because it's not going away, and it needs to stay there.

Even when writing this, I think back and get antsy, and all I can do is giggle at my singing. At the end of the day, the enormity of my experiences is hard to bear. So, I will laugh at those experiences in the face of it. It's one of the best ways to overcome a terrible event. I have to try and see the funny side of what helped break me.

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Technical Sergeant (retired) Jason McCroskey is a combat veteran with numerous deployments overseas.