Camp Swampy Trailer Park – Fort Polk, LA
October 2011
From late June to early September 2011, I lived in a trailer park at Tigerland, North Fort Polk, LA, aka Camp Swampy. Why the Army named it Tigerland is beyond me but I think it has something to do with the Viet Nam war days when soldiers trained at Polk before shipping out. Today, Tigerland is a base for military personnel going through Combat Advisor training prior to deployment to Afghanistan and Iraq; it is overseen by the 162nd Infantry Brigade. Why the soldiers renamed it Camp Swampy is far easier to understand than the Tigerland name especially to those of us who trained there in July and August, the months with the most oppressive and swampy Louisiana weather. I never did see alligators at Camp Swampy but I can vouch for the snakes, black widow spiders, and some larger critters such as wild pigs and ponies so I’m willing to bet
the alligators actually were in the mix in some swamp or another; we just didn’t cross paths.
I arrived at Camp Swampy after completing 77 days of school house training and 2 weeks of pre-mobilization at The Landing, Fort Leavenworth, KS. Each member of our class was housed in their own hotel suite in near-by Kansas City, which incidentally, is a great town. Our rooms had kitchens with full sized refrigerators and dishwashers; housekeepers came in regularly to vacuum, dust, and change the linens. The hotel also served free breakfast and an evening “happy hour” snack bar. Additionally, each of us was given a rental car for which our gas payments were reimbursed, plus we received a daily per diem for meals. We lived close to many, many (chain) restaurants and bars, Zona Rosa Mall, every big box store you can think of, and several nice grocery stores. At the time, most of us thought we were sort of hard done by, being away from our families and our usual routines, but hell, in retrospect we were living large!
Of 29 people in the Human Terrain System (HTS) March class, I think 18 of us hung on until graduation. Along the way the other students either bailed or did not make the cut at some point or another when we had to reach a certain goal in order to stay in the program. At any rate, on the last weekend of June those of us who had successfully graduated and sworn in as Department of the Army Civilians (DACS) flew to Alexandria, LA about an hour from Fort Polk where we were picked up by our liaison officer and toted off to Camp Swampy.
We arrived mid Sunday afternoon and Tigerland was surprisingly quiet. We were assigned our barracks and had a quick look around after dumping off our heaps of luggage in our rooms. While we were not actually housed in trailers, Tigerland was highly reminiscent of a trailer park the way the barracks were laid out in rows on little gravel roads just wide enough for, say, a half ton truck with giant wheels and a shotgun rack in the back window to race through. The barracks were medium sized modular buildings with 8 bedrooms and two latrines at the end of the hall. Thank god they were air conditioned and we had plenty of hot water but we shared rooms and there were only 6 showers and 4 toilets for as many as 20+ people in each building. (Now I don’t know about you, but if I’m in charge of a situation like that where a bunch of women are sharing a bathroom, I am not giving them weapons … just saying.) This being the army, males and females lived in separate barracks although I have extremely reliable intel confirming there was some very shady and clandestine fraternizing going on behind the scenes in the laundry room, team rooms, and other shadowy places. As it turns out, Swamp People can be very creative…
Historically the Camp Swampy trailer park has a shifting dynamic that more or less reflects the character of each class. Still, the overall vibe is constant and some things don’t change much from class to class like damp uniforms hanging from improvised clothes lines strung between buildings, stinky army boots dangling from metal handrails of barracks steps in order to air them out before the next morning, people hanging-out smoking and (often) drinking late into the night, or playing poker on top of Styrofoam beer coolers while sitting on Wal-Mart camping chairs strategically stationed on what passes for the lawn in order to catch the best view of who was coming and going. I do, however, think that Class 128 – my class – was maybe more “lively” or “spirited” than some other classes that had come through Tigerland. We adopted the trailer park – hell, we embraced the trailer park and all of its funky red neck culture. Its attributes were our attributes and we were A-OK with that. After all, as it turns out, Combat Advisor training actually prepared us for life in a real deal trailer park, although somehow I don’t think that was the Army’s intention.
Moreover, the trailer park was the great equalizer in a lot of ways. Our class of 46 people was made up of the HTS DACs, an Ohio National Guard OMLT (Operations, Mentoring, and Liaison Team), a selection of Air Force reservists, plus one lone Navy helicopter pilot - all of differing ranks and ages. From the Puppies to the Mullah, and from the advocate of genocide to the small town paramedic, we covered a lot of bases. We were not one of those nicely coordinated classes all from the same service branch, sharing a similar culture, and wearing identical uniforms. Oh, not even close; we looked like a bunch of mutts in our various get-ups and man-oh-man, did we bring a range of cultures and experiences to the table. But right off the bat we had one thing in common - the trailer park – and we enthusiastically took it on and made it our own.
Our section of the trailer park was across the street from the DFAC (mess hall), gym, and MWR (sort of like the community center). Just down the street was a little Shopette that carried some essentials like mini shampoos and conditioner, soap, razors, magazines, and things like that but mostly it was where you went for snacks and booze. It didn’t have a huge stock of alcohol but it had a pretty good selection of beer and besides, if you were in need of a whole keg of beer, for example, you could always hitch a ride to the Class 6 Military Liquor Store at the PX. Next to the Shoppette was a small Pizza Hut. Bottom line: we had booze, chips, and pizza almost within spitting distance of home. You could walk to the Shopette, buy a Styrofoam cooler, fill it with Bud Light and ice, snag some Doritos and teriyaki beef jerky, then slap the whole kit and caboodle on your shoulder, pop in a plug of dip, and be home in 10 minutes. Not a bad set up. And just think, the army actually prepared us to handle this critical mission with finesse by making us run around in the sun for days on end wearing full battle rattle. Once you took all that army weight off of your body, throwing a cooler of beer on one shoulder seemed like a reward.
The lifecycle of the trailer park was ten weeks – the length of the Combat Advisor course – and I do believe that in our ten weeks Class 128 set some type of record for most “visits” to the Company or Battalion Commander’s office to discuss some allegation or another. Seriously though, most of it was made up bullshit started by crazy people with an axe to grind, but think about it – don’t you imagine that every trailer park needs a good gossip mill to keep the world turning? Some of the rumours that took flight actually were pretty damn inspired. I would have to say the winner was the one about a male officer regularly having 3-ways with two female class members in a team room located in a male barracks. It didn’t matter that no one ever saw this go down (bad pun!) or offered any proof of this ménage a trois, the idea was so off the wall that no one cared that it was in no way, shape, or form true. It was great theatre if nothing else and it helped to pass the time talking about how this could possibly be going on right under our noses and none of us had been lucky enough to have seen it!
There also were charges made that students were threatening other students, sexually harassing folks they had never even acknowledged, and this being a trailer park, there just had to be reports of fighting. “Allegedly” there were one or two end-of-the-night locals vs. military fights in Leeseville that “maybe” spiraled into a few punches later being thrown in the trailer park but who knew for sure. Then again, what else is a guy to do when he’s had the better part of a case of Bud chased with enough Jack and Coke to float a small navy and nothing better to do with himself than get all riled up? As one of my esteemed colleagues noted, “the only real way to end a trailer park party is with a fight.” So that is what might or might not have happened, maybe kinda sorta, once or twice …
Combat Advisor training – the real reason we were at Tigerland – is intense, especially for those of us without a military background. Our days started with formation and PT at 06:00, that is unless it was one of those days when we drew weapons at o’dark thirty, staged our vehicles, had breakfast at the DFAC, and were on the road with our convoy by 06:30 enroute to one of the many Tigerland ranges for weapons training. We worked hard six days a week often for 12-16 hours a day, but come Saturday night we were ready to play even harder. And that is exactly what happened. Surprisingly the local constabulary never made a house call (trailer park call?) in our entire ten weeks.
Saturday night parties in the trailer park were customary but we had a few that were real doozies. More often than not, there would be a group of folks who in the early evening would set up shop on the little gravel road between the female barracks and the first male barracks. They would hold down the fort until everyone else came home. People returned from Leeseville in waves – some right after dinner at the Wagon Wheel Steak House, Hana Japanese, or one of the many Mexican joints; others came back after a few post-dinner Monkey Wrenches or Octane 93s at the Daiquiri Station; and the rest would wander in all wound up after the Leeseville nite clubs closed. By 02:00 there would be critical mass on the trailer park road. 20 or 30+ lawn chairs would be scattered around with folks smoking, drinking, and even belly dancing (no, not kidding). Most times there was music - usually someone’s IPod shuffle - but towards the end of our stay there was a guy from one of the new classes who brought out his guitar and played while we sang old songs that we thought we knew all the words to but as it turned out really only knew the chorus and flubbed the rest.
In the course of one particularly active Saturday night some of the guys got tattoos (with interesting artwork – “titties and a moustache” on one guy’s butt, a happy face on another’s toe where the nail was missing) and one of the gals took off her shirt on the dance floor at a Foam Party at a Leeseville nite club and traded it with a local guy for his shirt because she liked it better than hers. (She later explained that at the time she thought it was OK to take off her shirt in a bar because she was wearing a fancy bra...) Belly dancing lessons were given in the trailer park after much beer and Jack Daniels was consumed, and of course, clandestine romance simmered. Later that night, or rather early the next morning, somewhere in the neighbourhood of 04:00, one of the gals decided she needed a shower after the party wound down. Needless to say she was more than a little toasted. After showering and wrapping herself in a towel, she walked back to her room only to discover the door was locked. Now here’s the thing: we were not given keys for our rooms so we put duct tape over the latch to keep our doors from locking. Well, maybe not all of us did it because this gal was definitely locked out of her room, in the middle of the night, wearing nothing but a short towel. As she described it the next day, she decided the solution was to try and break in through her bedroom window. She pulled a chair outside and put it under her window, climbed up, and attempted to reach the pane but oops ... the window was too high. Back inside she went and stood in the hallway for quite some time staring at the wall trying to make herself focus so she could figure out what to do. After a bit, it registered that she was looking directly at a phone so she picked up the receiver and dialed the number for emergency services. Some guy with a master key came over and let her back into her room. Apparently he was not prepared for her to be standing there in just a little towel because that seemed to make his job all the more difficult for him. Bottom line is she got into her room without losing her towel and the next day it made for an excellent story. Sadly there was no
photographic evidence …
As romance blossomed in the trailer park, one couple actually took the plunge and legally were married. We joked that it was our trailer park shot gun wedding – the one thing that was missing from our portfolio – but in fact there was no shotgun needed. Colleagues of mine from the HTS program had been dating quietly while we were in Kansas and by the time we got to Polk they were crazy in love. It didn’t take long for the rest of us to spot this and once the cat was out of the bag we began lobbying for a wedding. As it turned out they were thinking the same thing and on the weekend before we graduated, they were married in the little wooden chapel at South Polk. The chaplain was a laid back dude in cowboy boots who performed a very touching ceremony. He told us there had been many weddings in that chapel over the years but this would be the last one because the army in all of its wisdom was tearing down the little wooden chapels and replacing them with modern structures. What a shame. The reception was held, of course, back at the trailer park. We had a big BBQ with two kegs of beer, loads of hamburgers and hotdogs, and cupcakes with Care Bears on them (it was what the Wallyworld bakery had fresh that morning). After the bride and groom left for their 36 hour honeymoon in beautiful downtown Leeseville, the party continued way into the night as we shared our kegs with just about anyone who walked by. That was the night I got my tattoo but that is a whole other story.
Our final week at Polk was crazy as we wrapped up our training with the three day capstone exercise in “the field.” Thursday afternoon was graduation and immediately after people began to split for vacation. We’d been together for ten weeks, night and day, and had become like family with all of the same drama, bickering, and jealousy you would expect of the Louisiana Swamp People we’d become. However, we also had a lot of great times, forged a lot of bonds that will last lifetimes, and shared some truly remarkable experiences that no one outside of our trailer park and Class 128 will ever understand. And that is the real reason the trailer park worked for us. We had our own little universe, inside the Tigerland universe, inside the wider Army universe. It was our Camp Swampy trailer park/Combat Advisor bubble and it worked. And as ridiculous and frustrating as it was, some days I really miss it.
