Zonk!

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Ron calling you from Fort Rucker, Alabama.

Okay.

Fort Lucker? Fort Rucker?

Fort Rucker with an R.

Okay, gotcha.

Tell us about Fort Rucker.

Oh, it’s the home of Army Aviation.

Okay.

Interesting.

Okay.

If you want to be a pilot and fly helicopters, this is where you come.

And you fly? Are you part of that?

No, actually, I’m a chaplain here, so I provide support to the soldiers and the instructors here.

Oh, cool.

Outstanding.

What can we help you with?

Well, I have a question, and it’s a particular Army term, and the word is zonk.

Z-O-N-K, zonk?

Z-O-N-K, yes.

Okay, how do you use that?

Yeah, you’ve got to tell us about that.

So we start very early in the morning, of course, in the Army with physical training, and it’s Monday through Friday.

And so you can imagine being doing physical training Monday through Friday.

And normally a zonk would happen on, say, Friday morning.

And so it’s dark and it’s raining and standing in formation waiting for Reveille and you salute the flag.

Oftentimes it’s the first sergeant who’s the senior NCO at the front of the formation.

And then he says zonk, and everybody takes off in a mad dash in different directions, some back to the cars, some back to the barracks.

And the new soldiers don’t know what’s going on.

And so if the first sergeant catches them, then they have to continue and conduct physical training.

So all of their peers have taken off because they know what’s up, but a couple poor souls, they get literally grabbed by the first sergeant and made to stay?

Yes, because they don’t know what’s going on, if you can imagine, and everybody running off a mad dash in a different direction.

That sounds scary.

I’ve seen reference to this on some of the military discussion forums back to the 1970s, but it’s a big fat origin unknown, mostly.

Although it’s funny when you read the old discussion forums, the old timers, you know, the guys from like the Korean War.

They’re like, what do you mean you didn’t have to do PT? That’s not right. That’s not the army I know.

There’s a couple of videos on YouTube of that, by the way, if you want to, if people want to see exactly what a zonk looks like.

Yeah.

So it’s a thing.

It’s a thing.

Yeah.

The one I saw was like very dark, like some officer of some kind was standing up on a platform and talking in a microphone, just kind of blah, blah, blah.

And then he just shouts zonk in his loudest voice.

And you should see the crowd. It’s like they burst out. No formation. They’re running in all directions. It’s madness.

Oh, wow. So it’s sort of a kind of hazing for the people who aren’t in the know.

And it’s a bonding experience for the other ones, right?

Sure. Well, I guess it could be, you know, they necessarily have to continue conducting physical training.

You know, maybe not. Maybe the first sergeant gives him a break.

I was kind of thinking that maybe it might be an acronym, you know, because we have a lot of acronyms in the Army.

But I really couldn’t come up with something that starts with a Z.

It’s probably not an acronym.

More than likely, it comes from the word zonk.

We know it mostly today as to zonk out, which just means to go heavily to sleep.

But it’s had a variety of meanings over the years since it first kind of came on the scene in the 1950s and 1960s to mean high on drugs or drunk on alcohol, da-da-da-da.

But more than likely, it just means that you get to go back to zonk yourself out.

You go back to your barracks and catch a little more shut-eye.

It’s probably that really simple explanation like that.

Great.

Well, I sure appreciate it.

Yeah, sure.

Really appreciate it.

You call us again sometime, all right, with some more Army stuff.

I’d love to hear it.

Yeah, we love this stuff, Ron.

Yeah, I’ll let you know.

There’s all kinds of stuff.

All right.

Take care now.

Yeah, you too.

Thank you.

Bye-bye.

Okay.

Thanks, Ron.

Bye-bye.

Bye.

Yeah.

Bye now.

We want to hear your stories from the military.

Call us 877-929-9673 or send those language stories to words@waywordradio.org.