Never Seen Nobody Get They Ass Kicked by a Pork Chop

Imagine, if you will, a war-torn country.

25 December.

Christmas.

 Mosul, Iraq.

2005.

It is a cold day in Northern Iraq but it has been a good day. Everyone is singing and dancing and living it up. Not really, we are in Iraq, you dumbass, it's cold and kind of miserable. Well, it was still a little fun... and there may have been dancing... so, I guess I apologize for calling you a dumbass.

Fuck yo Couch!

Anyway, it is Christmas Day in Mosul and after our normal 12-hour shift, we decided to get together and have a barbecue. Everyone is kicked back with their non-alcoholic beer because for some reason some people actually just like the taste of beer. Freaks.

I just happened to get stuck on the same base as my brother, Chris, after he got some strings pulled and I was having a blast. This was my first time out of the states and even though there was the constant possibility of death, I was loving every minute and I miss my time there every day. I was finally out of Shawshank and in the big, wide, world I want to explore.

I was fairly new in-country so everything I had for personal items were recently bought. I didn't know anyone very well and though I make friends pretty easily, I was hanging out with Chris, who had volunteered to cook the pile of pork, chicken and beef we had surprisingly managed to buy at the PX.

Chris and I were bullshitting while he was cooking and I was opening packs of meat for him. All of a sudden, one of the icy packs of meat (which so happened to be Pork Ribs) started to slide out of my hand. having the cat-like reflexes that I do, for a tubby bastard, I lunged to catch it, and catch it I did!

With just reacting to the beautiful meat falling to a certainly horrific end upon the god awful Iraqi dirt, I had forgotten that in one of the two hands I was lunging with was holding my brand new knife. The knife that plunged through those glorious Pork Ribs and into the middle finger on my left hand.

Blood, oh boy did I bleed. I bled upon the tragically ruined Pork Ribs, I bled on the ground, I bled on my brother, I bled on me, the porch... pretty much anywhere that the blood pouring from my rapidly shaking hand could reach. I thought for a second I had just lost the tip of my finger, I bled so much. To this day, 11 years later, Chris has those boots, still spotted with my blood.

So as I bleed profusely on everything in my path, I make my way to the medic.

We tell the Medic what happened... he laughs... the Medic is a dick.

Finally, when those douchenozzles calmed down, they got around to cleaning my wound which looked much worse than it was. Those chuckleheads gave me three stitches in the side of my finger at the first knuckle.

So, in this whole process, though we are not working, we had to call safety. The safety lady was the funny, short, black woman with short hair and glasses. We tell her the story of what happened and after about a second to process it she says, " In all my years doing this job, I have never seen nobody get they ass kicked by a pork chop!"

The medic laughed... like I said, he is a dick... my brother laughed... he is a dick too.

From that day forward I have been Porkchop which has since mostly been shortened to Chop, which, honestly is much better than the name my hippy parents gave me.

I earned my name in a war zone, sure, I didn't do anything cool, or heroic... wait, no fuck that... the act of me trying to save that tasty piece of pork was a truly heroic act, especially for the part of the world I was in.

It was heroic, fuck you, call me Chop.