A couple weeks ago I went to Allen, TX to play in a hockey tournament with the St. Louis Blues Warriors. What I didn’t realize was traveling with The Warriors made up of actual warriors would feel as much like a military deployment as it would a hockey tournament. This made it even more fun.
We “deployed” three teams: Alpha, Bravo, and Charlie. It was surreal to experience a travel hockey tournament for myself and not the boys. I went all out and got new sticks, personalized warmups, monogrammed garment bag for my Blues Warriors jerseys, and even a personalized bag for my sticks. After years of driving and spending on them it was my turn. If we did it for the boys then I was doing it for me.
People sometimes ask why the boys need to go out of town to play, plenty of teams and rinks right here. Uh we’re in a “Travel Hockey League” (so we travel). We try to get the team in a tournament as early as possible before the season even starts. It is more about the team bonding than it is a trophy. The kids will remember running around the hotel, playing shinny (knee) hockey in the hallways, and getting chewed out by hotel security way more than winning or losing. These are promises I have made to newbie hockey parents time and again. The parents also bond or find out they probably won’t be bonding early as well. There is just something about being on the road together, getting up at the crack for an early game after being up all night.
There were a ton of other similarities between the boys tournaments and the grown ups. There were sandbagging teams (teams purposely playing at a low skill level to win all their games versus less talented teams), goodie bags, tournament t-shirts, local team friendly officiating, but most important to all travel tournaments there was a lot of bonding and a lot of fun. Just with a lot more alcohol involved.
I am a defenseman on the Charlie team, which is the least skilled of the travel teams, therefore we played in the lowest division. Our interpretation of low and the tournament’s idea of low were two wildly different things. We played other Warriors teams from Texas, Colorado, and Utah. Only one of the teams was at our skill level and ironically, we tied them. The other two teams were vastly more talented, fast, and skilled. They both annihilated us. They were mostly respectful about it. Mostly.
What struck me at different points of the trip as well as after, was how much like a deployment it felt like. I mean that in all the positive ways one can go on a deployment. If you’re a civilian, you’re thinking “What in the world is he talking about,” and/or “what’s positive about a deployment.” Well, for every Soldier, Marine, Sailor, and Airman there are several different kinds of deployments. I’ll speak in Air Force, because that’s what I know best.
There is of course the Oh Crap We’re Going to War Deployment, the BS Training Mission No One Wants to Go On (Also Inspection Deployments where your entire unit, base, wing etc have to pick up and go somewhere stateside to prove to the Inspector General your unit can pick up and go somewhere only with someone watching over you and judging your every decision/movement = el sucko) there’s the Go Somewhere Awful in Horrible Weather for Pretend War, then there is a Boondoggle. The greatest of all the deployments. Normally this means you are going somewhere really cool to not really do anything resembling work or war. This could be a backfill trip where you slide into Hawaii, Vegas, etc while another unit goes somewhere crappy. It could be a big conference or training class.
The hockey tournament fit the Boondoggle category in the best sense of the term. It was like only your favorite bosses are going and all your buddies plus some new guys you don’t know are your future buddies. Your anal supervisors looking to write everyone up and go “by the book” are staying home and the guys who would tell on you for staying out too late are not going.
Regardless of what type of deployment you go on there is a similar process for all the Armed Forces. You are going to stand in line for a really long time. You are going to haul tons of gear uncomfortably for long distances. We call this process a “bag drag.” Normally this happens in a staged gauntlet of getting your affairs in order before you get on the plane. The base will have stations from Admin, Legal, Medical etc you have to check in with all of them. You will all stand around wondering “what the F is the holdup?” Ninety percent of anyone’s time in the military is made up of “hurry up and wait.”
This process I believe has been happening since cavemen got into groups to throw rocks at other cavemen. They probably had to gather all the rocks, find something to put them in, drag the rocks all over the cave, mountains, and fields only to discover the other Army of cavemen got held up by a herd of wooly mammoths and you’re going to have to “smoke em if you got ‘em” and stand around, bitch, moan, and nap until finally hours after the rock throwing was supposed to start, you get hit with a rock coming from the wrong direction. Through all of time from the Romans, Samurai, Medieval Knights, they all stood around waiting for their gear then hauling that gear wondering “What thee F be thy hold up?”
We have the most advanced technology used by the most skilled, well trained, and dominating military force the earth has ever seen. This very evening there are troops standing around in a line somewhere making sure they have all their rocks gathered and wondering “What the F is the hold up?” Their rocks might have lasers on them, but they still go in a bag that you have to drag from one place to another with someone making sure everything is in your bag that should be and that you made a last will and testament, and your teeth don’t need pulling. Yes the teeth thing is a thing or at least it was back in my day. Never did I think I’d make it to an age to legitimately use the phrase “back in my day,” but here we are.
So, on a Thursday night I parked my Jeep at the airport and strapped on my hockey bag with all my gear 49.6lbs, my suitcase 45.3lbs, (according to the check baggage scale) my stick bag, (no one cared what it weighed it was free thanks Southwest!) and my carry on. Heaved it all up on the shuttle to the terminal 3 hours before my flight (if you’re not early, you’re late) then heaved it all to the ticket counter line about a hundred or so people deep and stood and waited.
Once all the heavy gear was someone else’s problem at Southwest airlines it was time to have a beer and see who all was early and wait to stand in line at the gate for the flight. Once we got to Dallas we had to of course get all our gear again and here is where the flashbacks hit, every deployment I have ever been on in 20 or so years of service when a large group with a ton of gear gets off a plane there is no one right there to store your bags on a bus. Nope you are walking/dragging all that crap for awhile in a line of course.
We military types love to be in lines. Well, the Army and Marines seem to love lines. Whenever deployed with them we Air Force folks always got a kick out of watching them being marched in big groups to go eat, march to their duty posts, march to the showers etc while we pretty much came and went as we pleased because we didn’t need anyone to show us where the chow hall or the showers were, but I digress.
We hockey players knew there was to be a large bus waiting to take us and all our gear together to our hotel, where if you didn’t check in ahead of time would find yourself in yet another line dragging your gear through the lobby. It was too much to hope that bus would be right outside the terminal. Nope it was a half mile (probably was really around the corner just seemed far with all that crap) or so down the street, so we did what we know best, we got in a line and hauled our gear down the street then efficiently made lines to make a chain getting our gear packed on the bus. Several of us remarked on how familiar that felt.
Before every military deployment you get orders on who is going with you. Inevitably that list will change. People get hurt or must bail for personal reasons. You get a safety briefing telling you all the things you should NOT do while on your deployment. A large chunk of my military career found me in a unique position of working with and being supervised by fighter pilots. That is another blog, but in this case, I just have to illustrate a funny-to-me similarity in deployment to tournament.
Our safety brief if you will, was written and given to us by a fighter pilot from the team. The brief was a Code of Conduct we each had to sign. This was sort of like a Rules of Engagement (ROE) for the local area you would deploy to. In my personal experience the fighter pilots were usually the most likely candidates to break the ROE or at least the first to do it. Our tournament ROE was immediately broken by said fighter pilot who shall remain nameless. This still cracks me up. Now when I say broke the ROE or our Warriors Code of Conduct it wasn’t something illegal, unethical, or really any big deal at all he was just the first and loudest chirper initially of our three teams. We technically weren’t supposed to chirp the other teams, but they really did ask for it. And really any Code of Conduct or ROE are like the speed limit on the highway, really more of a suggestion.
Every deployment has a “that guy” who gets too drunk, or is late all the time etc. There is always someone who gets chewed out by a Non-Commissioned or a Commissioned Officer whether it’s a real-world scenario, (especially if it’s a real world scenario) training mission or even on a boondoggle. As a Soldier/Marine/Sailor/Airman you are expected to “fight like you train.” Hopefully this means you’ve trained hard so you will fight hard.
We played like our coaches trained us. We played hard (except for one or two shifts of Charlie’s last game where we got chewed out justifiably) and like being in training or in a battle we bonded. We knew we could trust each other on the ice, the bench, out at the bars, or at the hotel. Like every deployment we had people that had to leave early and we had unfortunately picked up a lot of injuries or guys/gals admitted to showing up at the tournament injured and made it worse, but you never ever want to skip a boondoggle or let your unit/team down by staying home because you need a silly surgery or have other aches and pains. Not a chance.
Some of us paid for that pride and are out of commission still. I totally understand though. I had one of the greatest boondoggles ever on a trip to Key West for some training exercises. All I had to do was sit in a vault 12 hours a day making sure no spies grabbed classified material out of it then go out boozing with the pilots and enlisted Operations guys all night. I had a pretty bad cold or sinus infection the day I was to get on the plane.
I was even on the advance team which is a small group of command staff and operations personnel who make sure everything is ready before the larger force gets there. This usually means we get to fly commercial while the rest of the peasants bag drag the flight line on to a military cargo plane. In this case though we ended up on an Air Force puddle jumper. As we strapped our selves in the pilot let us know this particular model of plane only flies at a certain altitude, because the cabin cannot be pressurized (piece of junk). He asked if any of us were sick as flying at altitude without pressurization can cause your sinuses some “discomfort” and we should skip this flight and go with the main group. Not a chance I can handle some discomfort.
Well, when I woke up on the gurney on the way to the Key West Naval Air Station Medical Center I was informed my ear drum had burst. That must be where the most excruciating pain I have ever felt and all the blood down my face was coming from. I remembered my head hurting then feeling a loud bang in my head and wanting to cry like a baby in front of my fighter pilot bosses and our grizzled veteran Non-Commissioned Officers (NCOs). Well cry I did for a minute anyway until I passed out from the pain and pressure. Oops. On a positive note my bosses and those old tough guy NCOs could not have been cooler about taking care of me. Just like I know my Warrior teammates will on and off the ice. And I still made the absolute best of my Key West boondoggle.
Although now when I’m hurt, I mention it. Well, I mean when I am really hurt.
My weekend in Dallas was awesome. I brought out some of my very best chirping once that rule was broken it was open season from the stands and on the ice. Back to it being compared to my kid’s tournaments instead of hockey moms going nuts, we had some hockey wives lose their cool at a couple games. In case my mom or grandma reads this, I cannot repeat what was being said by them or me. But man it was awesome and hilarious.
Oh and I did actually play hockey. Although it looks like hockey in slow motion on the livestream I swear I was cruising in real life. I learned a ton about playing defense at game speed versus practice. Mostly that my game speed is lacking. I did block a lot of shots and get in a lot of people’s way and cleared the net of enemy intruders with impunity. I also learned that I love playing defense.
We had our very own Warriors Press Corps that commentated and live streamed the games so our friends and family at home could watch. My boys were most proud of me knocking someone down who was trying to knock me down instead. I got videos of my grandson cheering for me from my daughter that got me fired up like a letter from home on a deployment.
What caused me to write this though was what happened to me when I got home. It took me a day or two to figure out why, but I got really depressed the day after I got home from Dallas. As that week went on the more down I got. Then I realized I was missing my teammates. I was missing the ice and the hotel and going out at night with everyone from all three teams. Like every deployment I have ever been on no matter how terrible or how awesome I always ended up missing the people I was deployed with even if I had spent weeks or months whining about how bad I wanted to come home and when I was going to get out of this crap-hole country. I’d find myself even missing the crap-hole country.
I kept these feelings to myself, because it seemed childish of me. Childish and weak. We St. Louis Blues Warriors have several online chat groups going between the teams we talk to each other on daily. Someone mentioned they were missing Dallas and being around the teams. It was a huge relief to find out it wasn’t just me. As I have written about extensively, you do things in the military that no one else does good and bad. No one knows what you feel about those things except the people you did them with. Whether it be boot camp, survival school, combat, or a crazy boondoggle, you have your own language and bond with each other in ways people in the “real world” can never understand. It occurred to me and obviously others that we were missing not just the trips but the bond.
Some of us feel we were dumped or disposed of without a second thought from the military world to the civilian one. We didn’t have a unit to report to, people to stand in line and make jokes with…about standing in line. For me I didn’t understand how people could live their lives so undisciplined or complain about the slightest discomfort. I couldn’t use my daily vernacular anymore. I have felt sort of outside or alone in the world for five years since I retired. I had no idea how much I missed even the hard things, because I missed the people I shared them with and the ways we found to make it through them.
I have so enjoyed our practices and our scrimmages and we bond through those and the online chats, but where any unit/team really comes together is out in the field on a deployment or in this case Dallas, TX for a hockey tournament. It’s when you drag the bags together, fight together, compete together, count on each other, and understand each other’s unique language and jokes. Whether you fought side by side in a foxhole or on the ice, home seems kind of boring at first when you come back. It bummed me out, but it was nice to know I was not alone and it didn’t make me any weirder than I already am. I had no idea I missed all that until I missed all that.
Hopefully none of the new guys boot me off the Charlie team and the riots calm down in Minnesota, if so hopefully I will be deploying for another tournament in June. The St. Louis Blues Warriors have added so many new and talented veterans the competition will be tight, but I am glad we are so full now we have a waiting list. We must be doing something right.
In Dallas we learned that the Warriors organizations from other states are not supported anywhere near the way we are. Most NHL teams have little or nothing to do with them. They don’t get to practice as much as we do, can’t wear their jerseys, and certainly don’t have alumni coaching them.
It is my sincere hope all NHL teams come around to supporting their Warriors. I hope the St. Louis Blues and St. Louis Blues Alumni shame them into it either directly through time honored traditional chirping or indirectly by seeing how successful our program is. Everyone who can should be able to feel like they’re deploying again with their buddies to play the greatest game on earth.
Jacked Up Dad 