Why the 9?

Army bandsmen are a crazy lot. They like to have their own little inside jokes, and you're in the cool group if you understand something that no one else does.

I don't know if the army still does this, but when I first shipped to Germany in 1980 we had to sit in a classroom for two weeks to try to learn some basic German before we got to join our assigned units. It was another bullshit Army way of them saying they know what's best for us. Anyway, our textbook was this pamphlet that portrayed little situations a foreign soldier may find himself in on German soil. Say the guy is lost and he wants to find the 'bahnhof', or train station, and he asks the German dude 'Ist das der Bahnhof?' ('is that...') and then the Rad (the modern term for 'kraut', or German citizen) says, 'NEIN, das ist NICHT der Bahnhof!' and from there it's not hard to imagine him rattling off a bunch of local German dialect that they would never teach in this little two-week bullshit class.

So now you've got this Rad pissed at you and you're even more lost and frustrated than you were before, and we thought that sounded funny as hell. And you're having some drinks (or whatever) with your mates and talking about how stupid this class was, and suddenly 'NEIN!' becomes this keyword between the guys in your clique. You want to make it even more oblique to those outside the clique, so you substitute the letter 9 for the word because John Lennon used it in 'Revolution 9' on the White Album. Then the artistic one of the bunch (in our case Tony Jacobs) has the idea to take the 8th ID Pathfinder patch and change it into a 9. Now it's got a life of its own. And when everyone is good and hung over one bright and early morning for PT and then we get to the number '9' during our jumping jacks, everyone yells out 'NEIN' and we all laugh because we know the joke and the other dumb-asses in our company just look at us like we've got on Soviet uniforms or something. And then when the clueless company commander reprimands us for our 'NEIN' episode and the next time we have PT the number 9 goes completely silent, we have another laugh all over again.

So that's what that's about. You have an Internet connection; you want a real 8th ID patch, Google the damn thing.

Terry