Army Comp Leads to Several Deaths

Harvard - 2009

In an attempt to raise its ever diminishing “rich white boy” demographic, the United States Army set up a comp here on the Harvard campus. Advertising free canteens and real samples of Iraqi sand at the end of the comp process, the US Army was able to scrape together eight Harvard undergrads, all of questionable mental and physical capacity. 

The first comp event, endearingly called “Eat shit, you bags of Harvard shit sandwiches” was held last month on Cambridge Common. To test the compers’ stealth and alertness, Cadet James Buckley, of the 1st battalion, Ft. Worth, Texas buried land mines all over the Common, and then told the compers they were “having an Easter egg hunt, only with land mines.”  With no real skill at sniffing out and removing landmines without getting their legs blown off, the compers delicately tippy-toed over the ground in search of the some odd five hundred mines. Not fourteen seconds into the hunt, freshman Phillip Beckwithe III detonated a mine, severing his body into several pieces and tossing him twenty yards. Fellow comper JanArmy Comp Leads to Several Deaths e Massey replayed the death in her mind: “He just took a step and the fucking ground blew him apart. I found that mine, though.”

In week two of the comp, things were still looking bleak.  For Tuesday of that week, the comp leaders set up a general meeting to discuss administrative matters and upcoming events/death traps.  At 8:12 pm, juniors Tom Rossi and Will Latham IV arrived eating falafel wraps from Abdullah’s Falafel Stand on Oxford Street. Cadet Steven Billings froze immediately as gruesome flashbacks placed him at the heart of the Afghani war zone. The smell and sight of the falafel was so overwhelming that Cadet Billings believed he was once again sniping terrorists in the streets of Kabul.  Unable to take control of such powerful memories, he pulled out his M-9 semiautomatic pistol and shot dead both compers in the chest. When asked what hell was wrong with him, Billings responded, “The same thing happened last week in Bombay Café, and they’re Indian.”

In its final week, only five compers remained, one might say the bravest or luckiest five, and they’d be way off.  As an end-all trial to determined their fitness for the army, the comp leaders had the remaining compers alternate driving an armored tank on Mass Ave at 7:00 am. The first comper, sophomore Patrick DeSantis, pulled out of The Yard and onto Mass Ave pretty smoothly. Cadet Jeff Pierce then radioed into DeSantis to take a right turn onto Plympton Street. As he tried to put on his blinker to signal the turn, DeSantis instead fired off the turreted gun, killing an oncoming trucker who was delivering ice cream sandwiches to Annenberg. DeSantis later complained, “There are like a million frigin’ buttons in there. How the hell was I supposed to know which button is which?”

In the comp’s closing ceremony, Colonel George Carothers had few words but congratulated the compers on not dying in the horrendous events his cadets set up. “We lost a lot of good men out there,” lamented Carothers, “but let’s not forget, one of them was a truck driver.”

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