Proud To Be A Technoviking

Army units love their mascots, nicknames, and mottos. The PSYOP insignia hosts a chess-piece knight's head, implying we prefer mental strategy over brute force. All PSYOP units have some variation of the horsehead in their Company mascots. Black Knights, Wild Horse, Ghost Horse, etc. Our unit, the 315th PSYOP Company, claims the "Darkhorse".

Each platoon (or "detachment") within our company has some liberty to make up their own sub-motto. My group, Detachment 1230, settled on "The Technovikings".

Understandably, this needs some explanation.

Spend some time around young adults or late teens,and one quickly notices how tech-savy and gadget-friendly they are. Every last soldier in my platoon keeps a personal laptop computer, along with all of the accompanying gadgets: cellphone, Sony PSP (handheld video-game console), and digital camera. They are constantly talking, texting, IM'ing, screening DVD's, and surfing the internet as the situation allows.

Anyhow. Enter YouTube, the video website with its memes and overnight sensations. A certain video enjoyed a brief period of popularity recently, the "Technoviking" video clip. This clip consisted of nothing more than some amateur hand-held footage of a "street rave" in a European city, i.e. people dancing in the street to techno music.

Doesn't sound too interesting.

Until, that is, the Technoviking enters.

Of course, one needs to see the video to truly absorb its gestalt, but suffice it to say that the Technoviking is one of the most compelling characters to appear on the video screen since...well, since ever. He is a real-life combination of Leif Ericsson, Chuck Norris, Gandalf the Wizard, and Michael Barishnikov. The Technoviking - a shirtless, muscular street-raver whose facial expression is permanently set on "Urgh?" - steps in to regulate a scuffle between a drunken passerby and a groped female raver. He then gives his trademark gesture: pointing up and off into the sky, to remonstrate that the drunk needs to turn around and keep moving along his merry way. Spontaneous street justice set firmly in place, the Technoviking proceeds to lead the crowd in a march up the street while dropping intensely intricate euro-dance moves, his Teutonic pectoral muscles bouncing up and down in time with his beard-braid.

Utterly hypnotic.

For $3, the Kuwaiti tailor here on base made us custom "Technovikings" tabs for our unit identification patches. Pretty flippin' sweet.