https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LwiKBFyYBGQ&t=3s

The following address was delivered by Capt. Vince Williams at his Headquarters Company change of command ceremony.

Good morning everyone. I won’t start with our battalion motto because the very sound of it makes my stomach curdle and my jaw clench with an unholy rage.

Eighteen months ago I stood right here and thanked the battalion commander for the privilege and honor of leading an infantry rifle company in combat and in garrison. You all have no idea how happy I was to hand over control of that lunatic asylum. I took some leave and came back prepared to spend my last six months in the Army behind a nice comfortable desk up at the Division Headquarters waiting for my unqualified resignation to process.

After command was over I had managed to convince Sheila to come home with the girls, and we were working on repairing the train wreck that my marriage had become. We’d even started sleeping in the same bed again. I had also started a nice routine with my AA group off-post, and was clean and sober for almost three weeks. That was when I got the call that the HHC commander had been caught making inappropriate comments on his personal Facebook page and that I would be the new commander.

Let’s fast forward ten months to today. I stand before you all a broken man. These soldiers are the refuse of society. The overweight, the battalion staff, the felons, and the drug addicts. No human being should have to endure what I have gone through over these last months. I had been in command seven hours when I got my first phone call…from the ATF! My mortar platoon sergeant had decided to sneak away from a training event and try to sell his 60mm tubes to an undercover agent who he thought was a domestic terrorist.

And don’t get me started on the staff. Technically I’m a commander, but what does a commander do when someone outranks him and refuses to come to work, is nineteen pounds overweight, and has a rater who is also his drinking buddy so he’ll never get a negative counseling in his life? I’m looking at you, sir.

The real highlight of my tenure as the HHC commander was when I had to come in on Christmas to explain why my senior medic was caught having sex in the Sgt. Major’s office with the assistant S-2 while she was on staff duty.

We won’t even talk about the time my wallet was stolen when I was forced to spend Thanksgiving dinner in my Class A’s serving food at the mess hall, or the enormous pile of human shit that someone left in the dayroom two hours before this ceremony.

That’s because seeing you all standing before me today, in your clean uniforms and black berets, masquerading as human beings and not the vile hell-spawn you really are, brings a darkness over my soul that can only be fixed with lethal amounts of hard alcohol or a manslaughter charge.

So to my successor remember this: always lock your door, don’t ever go into the barracks at night, for any reason, and never provide information about you or your loved ones to anyone in your unit — ever!

Or better yet, go AWOL. Right now. It only gets worse from here.

This is Havoc Six signing off the net. I still hate you all.