2004-08-01 8:02 p.m. The worst thing about being in the Army is peacetime. During peacetime, they come up with all sorts of crazy stuff for the unit to do. During a war, it's easy. They hand out flashcards with pictures of what a typical enemy looks like and if you come across that enemy, you shoot them until they don't move. Or you can crawl across through mud in the dark, if you happen to be out of bullets for shooting them until they don't move. You can crawl through the mud with your knife in your teeth and slit their throats. But when there's no war, they have to keep us busy. And then we end up driving Jeeps out in the middle of the desert looking for monsters. The first year I signed up, it was giant insects. They gave us flashcards with pictures of ants and other pictures of mushroom clouds. They said nuclear radiation had caused ants to grow larger than their exoskeletons should be able to handle. The ants wouldn't be able to move at the size they were growing to. Their exoskeletons would collapse under their own weight. Also, ants don't have lungs. They just have tubes in them, air tunnels. These wouldn't work if they were too big either. We drove around the desert in our jeeps looking for giant, non-moving, non-breathing ants and when we found them, we were supposed to shoot them, then light them on fire. My unit found two of them. We camped out around them and waited until night so that when we burned them, we could really see them burn. They burned so bright the stars dimmed and our sergeant told us stories about the last war. About island-hopping in transport jets and crawling through caves. He said he landed on an island where the enemy had taught monkeys to throw grenades at our troops. Thankfully, the Sarge and his unit had arrived before the monkeys learned to remove the pins on the grenades. Otherwise it would have been trouble. As it was, the biggest danger was slipping and falling on all the grenades you had strapped to you, 'cause they really hurt. You could break a rib. Another time, we were supposed to drive our Jeeps in the desert and find a single scientist who they said had been changed by radiation. I asked, "Has he become giant, like an ant? Or has he become an ant that we must set on fire?" The Sarge said no, he had just injected himself with something that belonged to the nation and now when he got angry, his face would get really red and he could run for hours. The Army was worried he would run so far he would make it to China or to some other Commies, so we had to kill him. It was hard work. He could run really fast. We once flipped a Jeep while chasing after him. The desert is a beautiful place, I found. It has a kind of quiet that gives you room to think at night when you're oiling your weapon. I don't think I regretted the time I spent out there. I was still able to use the satellite phone to call my parents once a week. It's just that it doesn't seem right, taxpayers spending so much to train me every year, making sure I have nothing but bullets that will fire straight and true, putting printers to work running off thousands of flash cards, just so I can hunt monsters instead of enemies of my President. I guess that's all I'm getting at. |
1. today is nice 3. happy yesterdays 8. thanks for hosting 4. doing other things |
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