SLSL "TSR" plowboy

[pynchonoid]

When I was in boot camp summer of '72 (we were all on
the conveyor belt to Vietnam, they told us, until our
next-to-last week of boot camp, when they decided to
send no more draftees to the War, you had to volunteer
if you wanted that action), at Fort Ord, Monterey,
California,  "plowboy" is what the African-American
drill sergeants (badass Vietnam vets, all of them in
our training company, just back from tours of combat
duty) called us, white and black alike. These drill
sergeants especially leaned on "plowboy" as an epithet
when we proved unable to sing rhythmically, with
feeling, and march in step all at the same time. I
never did get around to asking our drill sergeant to
explain to me precisely what he meant by "plowboy" but
I came to suspect that it had something to do with a
rather rustic and unsophisticated way in the world
that the drill sergeants seemed to associate with life
down on the farm, whether any of us actually came from
that sort of milieu.  These same drill sergeants even
had to help a very few (one in my platoon, a couple
more in the company) of the plowboy trainees learn how
to do things like brush their teeth, shave, etc., with
the help of instructional films of course.

-Doug



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