Page 1 of Whiskey Tango Foxtrot

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Tango

(2 years, 3 weeks, and 6 days ago)

“What. The. Fuck.” The blond dude, with the patch that told us his road name was Rabbit, laughed as he called out those three words that apparently meant more to him than they did to us. The three of us just looked at him like he’d lost his damn mind. He hadn’t said it in a questioning way. The idiot was laughing. Actually, he was full-on belly laughing. Then he sobered, looked at us questioningly, and shook his head. “You don’t get it? Come on! I can’t be the only one to have pointed it out to you guys. You’ve been together how long?”

“We’ve known each other 8 years,” Waters tells him from my right. Waters is one of my two best friends. We all three met in Army basic training and managed to stick together for the entirety of our military careers. That was not always an easy feat, but we managed thanks to our specializations.

“I’m not getting what’s so fuckin’ funny,” Farley grumbled to the man from my left side.

Rabbit started pointing at us in succession. “Waters, Travers, and Farley. Dudes, you’re even lined up perfectly in a row.” We were still giving him blank face apparently because he slapped a hand over his own mug and dragged it down incredulously. Then he glanced at each of us in turn as he stated, “W,” while pointing at Waters. “T,” while moving his accusatory finger my way. Then he moved on to “F,” when he got to Farley. It finally dawned on me as literally every man and woman in the clubhouse began laughing at our expense. “What. The. Fuck.” Rabbit called out again, slowly this time, as to leave no doubt what he meant, for our benefit. “Seriously? I’m the first to call the three of you on that in eight fuckin’ years?” We all shrugged at once which apparently was hilarious to the men around us.

“They have my vote as long as they get to be Whiskey, Tango, and Foxtrot once they make it through their prospecting period,” Rabbit laughed out.

“Fuck that!” Farley was the grumpiest bastard ever to be put on this planet. “The fuck if I’m rolling out with an old bitty dance as my fucking name, phonetic alphabet be damned.”

Rabbit waved away his concern. “No worries, we can shorten it to Fox, dude.”

That was the day the boys and I became prospects for the Aces High Motorcycle Club, and also the day we got our three-part moniker. We would forever on be collectively known as WTF, or What The Fuck, but separately we became Whiskey, Tango, and Fox thanks to the first initial in each of our last names and our Army service fucking us over phonetically.

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