An Orgy of One

There's a lot of Presentations to be viewed in the Army. There are 3 main categories:

Common sense - don't drink and drive, wear a condom (this presentation usually has shockingly disgusting photographs), wear a helmet on bikes, make sure people know where you are when you go camp out in the woods for a week, don't take 20 hour road trips without stopping, etc. These presentations usually breeze by pretty quickly, but the presenter almost always will find the need to supplement the Powerpoint with boring anecdotes from his life. Or interesting anecdotes about how he got his last STD.

Stupid Army policies - Can't drink with officers, wear reflective belts if you're going to be running outside, stop making sexual jokes at work (which always prompts an immediate increase in inappropriate humor in the workplace)

And then there's the WTF category - Don't engage in human trafficking. Or arms smuggling. I don't think I really needed a Powerpoint brief for that. But I guess it was enough of a problem that the Army said "we gotta tell our soldiers this before they go overseas!"

Posted by Joe Dirtbag at 8:37 AM | Permalink | Comments

My buddy Evan brings a pretty amusing story from Iraq.

Posted by Joe Dirtbag at 6:03 PM | Permalink | Comments

In honor of the Army's birthday, our brigade performed a brigade run. Basically we got into 3 columns in our subordinate units, and all 4,000 or so of us ran. Slowly.

Now you may be wondering, "Wow 4000 soldiers sounds like a logistical nightmare." And you'd be right. My unit had a formation at 0615 and we didn't start running until 0800. Yes, it took an hour and 45 minutes to start running on a 40 minute run. To be fair, there was a speech and the band played some music, and they cut some birthday cake for the Army. Cake that maybe the handful people who work at Brigade HQ might get a chance to eat.

Someone also thought it would be a good idea to spray a firehose onto our run trail and make the entire brigade run through it. I really hope my only pair of running shoes will dry out before PT tomorrow.

At least I got the rest of the morning off.

Posted by Joe Dirtbag at 11:24 AM | Permalink | Comments

So I'm back at my normal duty station after 7 weeks on TDY and unwinding this weekend before getting back to normal crappy garrison work. I've been gone so long that the airport was completely renovated while I was gone, and I didn't recognize the terminal at all. Also, one of my regular restaurants closed down, and the main highway in town is undergoing really inconvenient road construction.

I came home last night to notice some unusual stuff in my shared kitchen/bathroom area with my roommate. It was really late, so I didn't think anything of his completely transformed taste in food, and his shift to cheaper shaving cream. And he had always been so good about keeping clean - why was the bathroom a mess?

I found out in the morning. I knocked on the door to basically let him know that I was back after 7 weeks, and to offer to help clean the bathroom some. Well, some new guy answered the door. Uh, ok. Awkward introductions follow. And then:

NewRoommate - "So yeah I figured nobody lived here after the first month."
me - "Yeah, I've been on TDY in Hawaii. So, uh, what happened to OldRoommate?"
NR - "Oh I don't know, but I got here at the end of April and I heard he was in jail or something."

Man, that means it happened the very next day after I left here on Apr 29. He was a good guy, too, as far as I can tell - one of the few combat arms guys under the age of 21 that I actually liked. I guess I'll take care of his coffee maker and dishes until he comes back. I hope this new guy is as cool as the last one.

Posted by Joe Dirtbag at 7:35 PM | Permalink | Comments

At least the mother turned around.

Posted by Joe Dirtbag at 7:00 PM | Permalink | Comments