I was discussing some Alt-Pop tunes of the 90’s today with a friend, and military rank with another and it got me thinking of a song with a story. The song is “Hey Jealousy” by the Gin Blossoms. A side note of the Gin Blossoms, being really one of the few bands to make it from Arizona, the day they broke up was front page headline news in the Phoenix paper. The opening to that song starts out:
“Tell me if you think it would be alright,
If I could just crash here tonight,
See I’m in no shape for driving,
Anyways, I’ve got no place to go.”
This song will forever be in my head the “Alpha-10 Song.” To explain, let me give you some background information, in the military all vehicles are assigned numbers, and they use the phonetic alphabet, so A-10 would be referred to as “Alpha-Ten”, though on the radio you would say Alpha Won Zero but that’s not important. Alpha-10 was a HMMWV (High Mobility Multi Wheeled Vehicle aka a Hummer) which was issued to Staff Sergeant “Millhouse” (name changed just because he really was a Millhouse.) Something that you probably don’t know about the military Hummers, they don’t have keys, they have an ignition switch, and to lock the vehicles up, they use a cable that’s hooked to the floor of the vehicle, they also do not have a “Park” gear on the transmission, when you stop, you put it in neutral and engage the hand brake. We were on an exercise in California, when you can guess what Staff Sergeant Millhouse forgot to do when he hopped out of his truck. If you said “A) Forgot to set the hand brake” you are correct, if you said “B) Did not put the car in Neutral” you are probably right, but he swore that he did, and while the former is easy to prove, the latter is subject to debate. Let’s talk about the geography of California, where our story occurs. If you were to look at your bed in the morning, how the blankets form all sorts of ridges, hills, and valleys, you would have a close comparison to the geography of California. Time to do some math; take one vehicle with no means of stopping, add elevated geography and guess what you get? Did you write 300ft drop? You’d be correct. Hummers are tough, but they really aren’t designed to Knight Rider down a hill, so there was a most spectacular crash at the bottom of the hill in the gulch where both hills met.
This being the Army, of course it’s not the end of the story. While the truck was broken, there was still equipment in it, so the commander decided that we should retrieve said equipment, and there was only one way to do it, on foot. So we had to walk down that 300 foot drop, which was quite steep to the point where I could be standing upright and almost touch the ground, load up our rucksacks with whatever we could fill, and carry it back up. This involved several trips up and down, which was no easy task, and as I was doing that, I was alternatively cursing Millhouse and singing the first verse of “Hey Jealousy”
