Report from Camp Gustafson—weekend pass

As a command post, Camp Gustafson is as about as tight as it’s going to get. It’s hard to find the beds, let alone bounce a quarter off of them. There’s no dusting at Camp Gustafson—we already have plenty of dust, we don’t want more. Luckily, Commando Mom’s white gloves are lost somewhere in the back of a lingerie drawer—a dusty reminder of when she had time to care about putting lotion on her hands and wearing moisture retaining gloves to bed.

This is not to say that the Commander doesn’t do anything. The amount of housework required to keep up with a Commando Kid, however, has been shown to be exponentially proportionate to his or her age. This is because the work of a Commando Kid, while vigorous, often seems to be in the vein of counter-intelligence.

Thus, every room is a military theatre, complete with minefields of carpet-colored Legos (leading to important-to-remember oral vocabulary drills for attentive Commandos), illustrated battle plans, and the detritus of various toys of mass destruction littering no-man’s land. The mess hall—well, need we say more?

The Commander can order the Commando to assist with collecting the bombs and cleaning kitchen camouflage, but it’s also been shown that it actually takes 100 times longer to finish when using a Commando Kid as minesweeper.

Meanwhile, adults should try assigning a task such as latrine duty to a Zen child, and count the days and excuses accrued until it gets done.* A Zen child, though highly responsible on many fronts and prone to attack like a stealth bomb with a zinging wit in self-defense, generally epitomizes the relaxed exterior attitude as completely as the Commando channels an inner G.I. Joe. The Zen, then, will put off any task until the spirit moves him or her to do the job.**

Despite the lack of work Commando Mom gets done around the house, and the laissez-faire attitude of the recruits—or perhaps because of it—she still somehow harbors the quaint notion that she might occasionally get a weekend pass.

Commando Mom should remember that nothing’s free, nothing’s easy, and it will be another 13 years before she sleeps with both eyes closed.

She should also remember the lesson from latrine-duty delegation when deciding to assign babysitting command to a Zen Child.

Putting a Zen Child in charge of a Commando Kid is fine, if the Commander expects casualties and knows which battlefronts to sacrifice. And if, in a moment of weakness, she thinks all must surely be fine on the home front and grants herself a small extension on the pass, what happens next is predictable.

This is because the Commando Kid, as the Zen’s opposite, knows how to use all of that counter-intelligence that he’s so diligently practiced to gain the upper hand in the weekend pass wars. Hypothetically, a determined Commando Kid will simply refuse to be put to bed by a not-so-determined Zen Child, and will be waiting up for Commando Mom when she arrives home at 00:30 with her eyes propped open by civilian-issue toothpicks. The Commando Kid might, actually, still be planting Lego mines at 00:30, in a solo mission, because the Zen Child declared defeat and retreated to her quarters.

When the Commander marches the Commando Kid up to the barracks, it’s possible that in his tired state he will declare war on the bed and launch a super-sonic audio attack, setting off a neighborhood K-9 alert and destroying a few of his mother’s brain cells.

In the end, if all this comes to pass, everyone could end up on their sixes for much of the next day—except the Commando, who thrives under harsh operational conditions and appears to survive on 10-minute eyes glazed car naps.

It may be a good day to watch “training” videos and refuel.

*Alternately, one could count stars, gray hairs, or search for a needle in a haystack and complete any of those tasks before the Zen will actually complete the 10-minute task.
**This place of peace with the way things are originates from the middle-eastern mantra that a job will get done if the deity wills it to be so, and therefore is beyond the control or responsibility of mere mortal forces to pick up a disinfectant wipe, use it to clean the toilet seat, and deposit it in the garbage can.