Thursday, April 17th, 2014.
The fleet now understands why I hate Col. Kevinson and Lt. Col. Kevinson, the people who're supposed to be my parents.
We spent today tidying up the base for the visit. Initially, the fleet was very eager to see what my parents were like. They had faith that my parents weren't as bad as I had implied them to be, that I must be simply overreacting or just being all tsun-tsun towards my parents whom I hadn't seen in almost half a year now, which isn't a very long time at all to be away from your parents at my age. The girls were unwilling to believe that my parents were disagreeable people. I didn't try to convince them otherwise - I knew that the moment they met them, they'd understand.
Before they arrived, I sat in my office and did my little meditation thing. Ol' man Terry told me in his email a week ago or so that because I hold the Navy equivalent of the rank of Colonel, technically, not only can my parents not give me orders purely on rank, but also they can't demand to have special base privileges. In fact, the classification levels pertaining to my post here in Okinawa technically give me military superiority over my own parents...something that, as you'll see, they both extremely resented. But to begin, I decided to bite the bullet and just roll with whatever my parents wanted to, just to prove a point. Strict professionalism...until I find the perfect chance to tell my parents to go fuck themselves.
As on schedule, my parents arrived at exactly 1200 hours. I had the fleet line up next to the Six Pack and dressed myself up in full American Navy uniform garb, complete with both of my swords. I remember the girls being pretty nervous, at least the ones who cared - the ones like Hayashimo and Wakaba who didn't give a damn didn't look any different. Several US Navy officers and JMSDF officers came with them in their squadron of MH-53M Pave Low IV's heavy transport helicopters.
This is where I insert some witty punchline from Meet the Parents or something stupid like that.
Gordon Aasgaard Kevinson is my father. Half Norwegian, his parents gave him his mother's maiden name for his middle name to signify his heritage. He'd made up his mind from an early age that he would fight for those who couldn't fight for themselves, and fittingly, he joined the Marines straight out of high school, saying "ain't nobody got time for college". He served an astounding fifteen years as a Marine, even serving as a reserve troop for the elite Delta special ops force before transferring to the Army as an experienced field commander before finally achieving his current rank in the US Army. The Army is his life to him, so much so that by this point, I'm pretty convinced that if he was in a situation where he was forced to choose between saving the nation or saving his family, he'd gladly save his nation and ditch his family. It wouldn't even be a question to him.
Alexis Carl Sherwood Kevinson is my mother. She comes from a military family; both her parents served in the Navy, her father being a destroyer captain and her mother working in one of the Navy's eastern logistics bases. All five of her siblings, four brothers and one sister, entered the military quite willingly, so her family as a loved one in every single branch of the American military. Imagine their pride, then, that their nephew, me, eventually rose to become the commander of an entire carrier strike group. My grandparents on my mother's side attended my promotion ceremony and my inauguration ceremony. My grandfather, especially, was moved to tears when I accepted the post. Military tradition at its finest.
But it's not these qualities of theirs that makes me hate them with a passion. There's nothing wrong with patriotism and dedicating yourself to your country's military in the name of serving your country. If that was all there was to it, we'd never have any problems with any military. The problem is what my parents want to do beyond what they've already achieved - namely, what they want me to do for them.
My parents are both ambitious people. As I've probably implied with the description of my dad, both of them are achievement freaks. It's almost like getting Xbox Gamerscore or Playstation trophies or something for them - they want to do as many things possible, attain as many military achievements, recognitions, medals, ribbons, and decorations possible to stroke their own egos and show their neighbors, friends, and family everything that they've managed to get done in their lives, like it's some sort of disgusting contest. It's like how I read about how Japanese commanders, during their invasions of Korea under Hideyoshi, I think it was, cut off the ears and noses of captured Korean soldiers as proof of all the people they'd killed - not as brutal or violent as this, but practically the same mentality.
But as all people who have too much ambition for their own good eventually find out, my parents realized that despite everything that they'd done, there were some things that they couldn't accomplish just due to how things worked out and fell into place over the courses of their own lives. For example, my mom also dreamed of becoming a carrier strike group commander like I was, but she collapsed from overwork and exhaustion when I was six that forced her to take a year's leave from the military to recuperate, dashing her hopes of acquiring such a position, and afterwards, she transferred to the Army because she felt that there were no more worthwhile prospects for her in the Navy anymore. My dad, too, has a couple things like this where things didn't go the way he wanted them to.
And now here comes the reason why I hate them and everything they stand for: their work-around solution for the "failures" they'd had is to use me to become everything they couldn't become. Both of my parents are now pretty old for military officers nowadays - my dad is 50, and my mom is 48, but both of them refuse to consider retirement until they legally need to. But they know very well that their opportunities are dwindling - they'd achieved too much already, so logically, they didn't have very much else to achieve. So they decided to use me. My mom pushed me to work towards becoming a carrier strike group commander or a similar high-ranking important naval officer; she's the reason why I went to Hargraves in the first place, to become an officer right away instead of having to grind my way through the grunt ranks of the Army to get to where she and her husband are now. They conditioned me from an early age that the military life was the only life I ought to have, that I ought to carry family tradition and, being their only child, no other career choice was acceptable at the threat of disownment, or whatever that word is.
As I saluted my parents when they came up to me from their helicopter, I knew that my girls would find out very soon how I'd been raised at home. As I barked at my fleet to stand to attention (in English), I could tell that my parents were looking at the girls with disapproving looks of disgust, making comments like "So this is what the secret platoon is? Just a ragtag bunch of Japanese schoolgirls?" and "They don't even look fit to fight! They don't even all have the same uniforms, let alone decent ones!" I watched the looks on the girls' faces as they saw the reactions of my parents while we walked on through, and even though they can't speak English, their faces told me that they could tell my parents weren't saying good things.
I ordered the fleet to carry out training procedures as they'd normally do so that my parents could get an idea of how they fought. This changed my parents' perception of them briefly, once they showed how they could fight. My dad expressed his surprise at how well these "robots" were built to mimic human movement so fluidly. Technically he's not wrong, but the way he said it pissed me off regardless.
That was strike one.
Once they got a good idea of how the fleet fights, I took them on a tour of the base. My parents are very Spartan when it comes to their standard on military bases - they feel that what homes offer and what bases offer should be kept separate at all times. So when they inspected the Shinsengumi Izakaya, the bathhouses, and the forms, they were severely disappointed that I was allowing so many "needless facets of entertainment" at base. In addition, while they could understand the presence of Toyoda the Akita dog, since both of them worked in units that had combat dog units, they couldn't understand why we had Chika and Batsubyou also running around.
"Since when does a modern military base have pets around?" my mom demanded of me. "Get rid of them immediately. They don't serve any military purpose other than a distraction."
I wanted to point out to them that it's navy tradition to keep ship pets on board, like cats. But I kept my mouth shut for the time being. I did, however, explain the reasoning behind the docks, showing them how they worked, the science behind it, and why it was militarily important for the fleet for rapid repairs. While they accepted the docks' presence, my dad asked me why such a repair facility needed to be in the form of some kind of Japanese bathhouse on the mainland. When I asked him back what a proper repair facility ought to look like, he said,
"A naval shipyard, of course! You should know this, son, you're a carrier commander."
Was. Not now.
We kept Re-Class and Ta-Class in the kitchens away from the poring eyes of my parents, and after the tour of the base was done, my parents and I went to my office so that I could resume my work for the day. They insisted on seeing the contents of my work, but I said that I wasn't authorized to allow them to scrutinize the details of my work, that if they did so, I'd be forced to report them for violating the terms of their military visit. While the fleet finished up their training (there wasn't any sortie today), my parents talked to me about how they'd been keeping on eye on Japanese politics and noticed an alarming trend towards Japanese right-wingism, and that this place wasn't the place that they wanted me to work in anymore. Initially they'd wholeheartedly sent me here because having a son in a highly classified military project gave them lots of prestige and honor among the military brass back home. But they weren't willing to sacrifice me just yet; I was still too young to kill off, they still needed to farm more prestige from me like they're farming gold on top lane while 2v1'ing. So they told me that they were making arrangements to have me transferred out of the Moebius Platoon as soon as possible, probably after this "Operation Rising Sun" that they'd heard of, which they asked me to tell them about. That too, I told them, was classified information that I couldn't divulge.
My mom got pretty pissed off by that. Classified this, classified that, she said. "We're your parents! We deserve to know what our son's up to that involves national security!" she said.
Strike two.
When the fleet finished their training, Emily, the flying boat, barged through our office doors that we didn't lock and flew straight for my face in a frantic flight because Yuudachi was chasing it with Akitsushima hot on her tail. I caught Emily as it barely swerved up over my dad's head and asked what the hell the girls were up to, and Akitsushima frantically explained what had happened - Yuudachi had apparently gotten the idea of chasing Emily down when she saw Toyoda barking playfully and jumping up at it at the pier, and Akitsushima was trying to save her Taitei-chan. I told them that they shouldn't disturb us now, since I was speaking with my parents, and I sent them out. This caused my parents to ask me why it looked like I didn't give either of them any sort of punishment. It was a punishable offense for a soldier to simply barge into a superior's office like that without prior invitation or notice - on top of that, weren't they supposed to be machines? Why did they just so brazenly violate military protocol like that? Were they defective, faulty, perhaps?
I didn't bother answering them from that point forward. It's one of my common methods to deal with my parents whenever they get like this - just shut up and don't give them any response until they get tired of yelling at me and go away. Back when I was growing up, my parents would sometimes force me to listen and answer them if they were pissed off enough. My dad would pop one right in my head, and with his training as a Marine, he knows where to punch to make it hurt the most. But at least that was as far as he'd gone. My mom was the meaner one - she'd drag me out of my room, down the stairs, and slap me around and throw me against the wall and such. Military training at its finest. But at least now it was different - they couldn't just go around beatin' their kid to make him talk. The fact that we all knew that aggravated them even more. If I were any more sadistic, I would've been laughing at them instead. But I don't even think that's worth my time either.
When I was done with the day's paperwork, I told them that I needed to inspect the fleet's weaponry and help my secretary take inventory of our munitions and supplies. It was then that my dad stood up and told me that he'd seen enough to make up his mind, whatever that meant. They were going to cut the visit early and return back to the mainland to go back home to their original posts, and he told me that he'd made a grave mistake letting me come here in the first place. The way he worded that made it sound like it was my decision to come here when in reality he was the one to make that call.
So before they left, my parents asked me to call the fleet together so that they could speak to them with me as a translator. So I ordered the fleet out to the Six Pack again and lined them up so that my dad could speak to them. Col. Kevinson declared that he found this so-called "secret platoon" a complete farce of a military unit, that aesthetically, this unit did not embody "true military spirit", citing their lack of matching uniforms and the prevalent skimpiness of several of them. While he couldn't judge them on their combat performance because he knew nothing about it to make an education opinion, he told the fleet that whatever they were trying to be, they certainly were not up to the standards that should be present in all developed militaries in the world.
"For God's sake, we gave you Japs your damn militaries back, and this's what they make? Looks like they didn't learn anything at all for the past seventy years!" he said. "The people who made you ought to stick to making video games and comics, that - that anime or whatever it's called, and whatever else shit they've been making for God knows how long instead of getting involved in the military and making a fool out of everyone!"
I translated that part, too.
This is the kind of behavior my parents have. They make demands, push people around and throw their authority around whenever they know they can to get whatever they want. I can see why they married, because they're meant for each other. They just don't give a flying fuck. They're willing to make as many enemies as it takes to pin as many decorations on their uniforms as they can. They don't just hurt feelings and egos, they burn entire bridges and cities. And for as much as I lament my job as a military officer and how in order to be a good officer, you need to learn to send good men and women to their deaths, my parents take this ideology to the next level and will pull a Soviet Russia, throwing as many bodies at a fire to smother it as it takes to put that extra pin on their shoulders. They wouldn't save a comrade in battle unless it got them the Medal of Honor or some distinguished medal or decoration.
It's a good enough reason for old man Terry, who can always find something nice to say about anyone, refrains from doing so about my parents.
Their little message to my fleet went on for about half an hour, by the end of which it had become more of a rant than anything. After my dad was done, I asked him if he was done just to make sure, and he said yes, saying that he and my mother needed to head back immediately to make arrangements to have me transferred out as soon as possible. I simply told my parents that they didn't have to do anything - the right-wing Japanese in the Diet would ensure the removal of my post faster than they could make it happen over in America. I didn't bother saluting them when they boarded their helicopters to head back to the mainland, but I did watch them take off and fly away.
I then turned around to face the fleet. None of them said anything.
Before dismissing them, I remarked,
"My parents are nice people, aren't they? Who wants them to come visit again?"
No one answered.