The TIFU post that sparked this memory

So no shit there I was as a relatively recently promoted buck sergeant, in charge of My First Squad^TM. Things are going swimmingly, my guys knew me when we were all E4s, I’m not power mad, I get to extend our lunches to 2 hours if there’s nothing going on, life’s good.

We move to a new motor pool. Spent some days organizing, ordering new equipment for our shop, etc etc.

The way we had things set up was a little bit of a zig zag of equipment cages. Partially because we had welding equipment and didn’t have mobile screens, partially for some privacy if we had some downtime and wanted to play cards. Bottom line - if you approached the shop, you’d see sort of a little reception area with our desk, shop computer, and some safety equipment, and then you could zig zag around all that to the actual work area.

I come back from lunch one day and one of my E4’s is already back, spinning around in the chair. He set me up so casually and perfectly that to this day I admire it.

<SGT NorCalAthlete enters the shop> Sup SPC Slapnuts.

<SPC Slapnuts> Hey SGT NorCal, have you met Sergeant Deez yet? (With a little half smirk on his face)

I give the obligatory sound off of “Deez NUTS” and pass by him to the shop area…and run face to face with a new SSG whose name tape says “DEEZ” (not exactly spelled that way but close enough and yes that’s exactly how it was pronounced).

Queue ohshitohfuck moment. Immediately apologized, laughed a little nervously, and kinda wilted a little under a glare of “for fuck’s sake, this is the shop you’re running here?”

Turns out, SSG Deez was a pretty high speed motherfucker. Ran a tight shop at his last unit and had high expectations from our humble shitshow. I mean, don’t get me wrong, we had our shit together and got things done expediently and correctly with a high attention to detail…but we didn’t stand on ceremony too much and weren’t into the dog and pony show antics. In hindsight this was likely an outlier unit as we also had some true contenders for the Ruckle crown…Anyway, you get the point. Me and Deez did not exactly start off on the right foot.

He actually turned out to be one of the best NCOs I served under, but man…I was too much of a joker and just couldn’t resist continuing my pranks with the unit. The (semi) final prank that made me stop for a while involved Deez though.

You see, we served at a time when ACUs with Velcro name tapes and such were still juuuuuust being issued. Taking precautions to prank-proof your gear (like sewing your name tapes back on) was apparently not yet common knowledge. So when we deployed and got to Kuwait and had a couple weeks of languishing around bouncing between the MWR, Gym, and chow hall, I noticed a sewing shop and had an idea…

I went and had a couple name tapes made that said “NUTS”. And waited for my moment.

That moment finally came when most of the tent had emptied out, Deez had gone off somewhere in PTs, and left his ACU jacket folded neatly on his rack. Only 1 other person saw me as I casually walked over and quickly unfolded it, swapped the “US ARMY” tape for “NUTS”, refolded it, and returned to my area. If I recall correctly it was right around dinner chow.

The next day, as usual everyone got up, bounced around, did their thing. I was playing chess and cleaning weapons with my back to the front of the tent when my buddy I was playing with whispered “oh shit dude don’t turn around Deez is back and he looks PISSED.”

This was around dinner time again…the next day.

After some brief yelling between higher ups (and of course, absolutely nobody owning up to the prank) things settled down and we went about our business. Like I said, only one or two people had seen me, so there was some suspicion but nobody knew for sure and after that blowup I sure as hell wasn’t going to own up to it. One of the few times I didn’t take credit even when it became clear some of the other senior NCOs and officers were struggling to contain laughter and maintain their composure.

I mean, the dude was seriously PISSED.

I found out why a little bit later. Apparently, while strolling around (for an entire damn day) blissfully unaware that his uniform said “SSG DEEZ NUTS”, he’d had the misfortune of running into a 2 star that did not take kindly to an NCO not treating Kuwait as a combat zone and conducting himself in strict accordance with such. He got his ass chewed up down and sideways through the DFAC in front of everyone before he could explain that it really was his name and that someone was pranking him.

For those with keen attention to detail, at this point I’m going to pause and prompt the reader: “how many name tapes did NorCal have made again…?” For the astute among you, the answer is indeed greater than one.

The other one was still on the back of his hat…and that one lasted another few days.

After that I felt kinda bad for him and stopped messing with him so much. We got along pretty welI and after deployment I got promoted out and left the unit and he retired several years later I believe.

So yeah. Deez, if you’re out there reading this…sorry man. But that was still funny as shit for a hot minute.