Kevlar Dickflap!



Today we were issued the Interceptor Body Armor. The only thing that is important about this is the kevlar dickflap. This entire post is dedicated to it. Just look at the pride and elation on Willy's face!

Christmas Leave

This post has more images and links about my life and friends than may keep your attention, so I'm putting it all under a separate link. It has nothing to do with training, the Army or Iraq. If you're curious about my life outside this deployment, follow the link below. If you are not interested in my civilian life, you can skip this entry knowing you haven't missed any good G.I. Joe action.

How far does the rabbit hole go?


My roommate, Erin thinks you should follow the rabbit...

Quick Christmas Bonus Post!

Just like you don't wear white after Labor Day, the new rule is you don't wear woodland camouflage after Christmas when deploying to Iraq. Shortly before our holiday leave, we started wearing the desert camouflage uniforms. Modeling the new uniforms for us here is the company's sniper team, Chris, Ray and Socky. Socky should know better than to wear his cover indoors, but who's gonna tell him to remove it? You? One look at Socky's stone-faced expression should tell you to think otherwise. On the bus ride out of Fort Drum at the beginning of the Christmas leave, Ray said, "Socky can't stop talkin' about Puerto Rican Day Parade Barbie." Apparently he's not the only one eager to get some over the break.

You know that Army commercial that shows soldiers doing a bunch of badass stuff like jumping out of helicopters into the water while a macho rock song blares behind the voice-over? It goes, "If they made a movie of your life, would it be as badass as this commercial?" or something to that effect. Well, a smartass kid in New Paltz asked me once in reference to that commercial if they make you listen to Godsmack all the time in the Army. (I suppose the song from the commercial is by Godsmack.) I gave the patronizing little neo-hippie a courtesy laugh and answered no. Flash forward to every morning since I met Kirk. Homeboy plays Godsmack and all manner of macho rock you can imagine, twenty-four-seven. So I guess I lied. We are made to listen to cock rock, or "hate music" as Matt calls Kirk's musical tastes, all day, all the time. The only disc Kirk and I can agree on is Tool's Aenima. Right now I'm listening to War All The Time, the new Thursday CD. Hmm.

It's Christmas Eve and I'm sitting on a JetBlue flight to SLC. CNN Headline News is on the little TV screen. I've had the biggest crush on Rudi Bahktiar ever since I became a news junkie after 9-11. I worked at John F. Kennedy airport for eight months watching passengers get violated at the security checkpoints and after work in the wee hours in my crumby hotel room I would watch Rudi intently as she told me about the day's stories. She seemed more attractive every night I watched her. Those bewitching Persian eyes, that aristocratic Iranian nose, breasts too small to preclude her from the category of sophisticated beauty. Before this deployment I was able to watch the news during the day and I found I was becoming infatuated with Soledad O'Brien and her mesmerizing smile. But of course they have to broadcast from Atlanta. How will I ever be able to visit? Why can't they broadcast from NYC? What the hell is in Atlanta anyways? While I was at the airport I emailed CNN a few times asking them if they could set up a service that would email fans of Rudi each day what she would be wearing the next day. I got no response. So I would stare at the TV waiting for that fleeting moment when the ticker at the bottom of the screen would drop just before or after a commercial break, revealing her body below her armpits. Willy was my roommate for those eight months and found my Rudi obsession amusing and slightly troubling.

In my last post I promised you an entry about our last field exercise. Now that it's days in the past, that whole experience is a million miles away. Besides, what's the point? Sometimes I bore the hell out of myself with my repetitiveness. It was cold. The training was miserable. As a compromise, I'll gloss over some highlights and provide you with some images.

On the first day out, another dick managed to fall from the sky and hit Juan square on the head. Let me explain. Juan recently had a temporary cap put on a missing front tooth and he was really psyched to go home for Christmas and show his wife his new choppers. Ever since I've known Juan, he's had this little mini front tooth. Apparently it was filed down to the size of a baby tooth in preparation for a permanent cap that never seemed to find its way into his mouth. This cap was attached to the mini-tooth. Well, while Juan was eating a frozen power bar on that freezing afternoon, his tooth snapped off. This is the kind of thing that I literally have nightmares about. Shaking his head in frustration, Juan looked utterly dejected, holding his tooth in his fingers for me to see. What remained of his mini-tooth was all but gone now, severed at the gum. I found Doc and had him check out Juan's tooth. It wasn't an immediate medical problem, so Juan stayed in the field for the rest of the exercise.

That night it snowed a foot and a half. We began to build shelters to stay outside, but once the leadership realized that too many of the guys had no idea at all how to handle this kind of weather, we retreated to a building and holed up there for the next few nights. A kid in Willy's squad caught a pretty serious case of hypothermia which really gave impetus to the decision to skip this particular cold-weather training opportunity. Juan and I had a pretty nice little hooch set up and would have been fine, but Eric was really hurtin' at one point too, like a lot of other soldiers.

To really boil it down, all we did was guard some stuff, ran some traffic check points, and the coital moment was a semi-permissive raid on a town that turned into an off-off-off-broadway production. This exercise was the last one we would perform at Fort Drum, the second-to-last exercise before going into combat and the first exercise being performed on a battalion level. About a hundred-and-fifty real Iraqis were shipped in to play the part of, um, Iraqis. Apparently they were all from Michigan or something and had been living in the US since '91 when they left Iraq. Interacting with them added an additional level of realisticness, but a lot of the time they couldn't wipe the grins off their faces trying unsuccessfully to better get into character. There were a lot of interesting situations that occurred as a part of this exercise, but my company didn't get to participate in many of them since we had been the main effort for so many exercises in the past. When it actually came time to raid the town, my squad's job was to intercept anyone that tried to flee the town through the woods we occupied. So we laid in the snow just outside the town watching and listening to the chaos that took place in the town as each actor put on the performance of his or her life. There were even Iraqi children atop buildings throwing snowballs at the Humvees that passed underneath.

There were so many things that made this exercise seem utterly disorganized on a battalion level. Communication between companies seemed to vary from bad to non-existent. Maybe I'm totally wrong, after all who am I to judge our performance on that level. But boy, did it seemed hosed from the perspective of the lowly grunt. All I can say is that combat is going to be very interesting with these guys.


An infantryman spends an enormous amount of his time laying on the ground in the prone position. This gives him the opportunity to analyze nature on a very intimate level. This is my view of some moss on a dead log. The snow had not yet begun to fall.


As we prepared to move out it started to snow.


And it continued to snow. The hooch Juan and I built.


Anthony amid the snowscape. The ground beneath the eighteen inches of snow was icy and slick. It was virtually impossible to walk anywhere without falling on your ass at least twice.


After a while I just stopped wiping my nose and it started to look not unlike the back of this Humvee.


This is the view I had of the town as I laid for hours in snow that would melt beneath me from my body heat then refreeze. For the life of me I couldn't find a position to lay in that didn't involve my penis pressing against or dangling onto a freezing layer of ice. For once I wished I were wearing briefs. (Can you find the four soldiers in this photo?)


The view from the back seat of a humvee. The turret gunner is the guy on the right. Brings new meaning to the phrase "to have one's ass in a sling."

Pardon Me While I Burst Into Flames

It's been a very trying day for me. I can say I truly exploded today, something I have never done to anyone that wasn't my father or my girlfriend. If a human being could detonate, I would have today. Deep within my chemistry is a rage gene I think I got from my biological father, an evil superpower I have that has been dormant for quite a while now, but I'm realizing it may be reawakening with this deployment. Let me explain. We got back from the field last night after what collectively everyone agrees was one of the most miserable field exercises of our careers. I'll elaborate on that later. Then today I spent the better part of the morning defending a decision I made about the most inconsequential of things, considering all we just went through. In an attempt to alleviate a little of the suffering of my squad, I split up a guard schedule where four guys could patrol for one two-hour shift then me and three other guys could patrol on the next shift, instead of having everyone on both shifts. It was my plan to maximize our down-time since being out in the cold was such an unpleasant place to be. But when people saw that four of my guys were on patrol and I was taking a nap, it looked really bad. In retrospect I should have just gone out with both shifts. Hindsight. Then the gossip channel spread how I was sleeping while I made my guys go out on patrol. First Kirk tells me this morning how he heard I was fucking his guys over in the field (he was not in the field because he is the platoon's Hazardous Materials sergeant and had to oversee the loading of our equipment being shipped to Kuwait) which turned into a yelling match, the only way he and I communicate in uniform since we are the most mismatched pair of team leaders the United States Army has ever seen. He and I yelling at each other has become something of a spectator sport for the platoon, by the way. Then I get Stan counseling me on the same issue a little later in the morning. By this point I was completely exasperated having to explain the same nonsense twice. There's something you have to understand about the military. Once you've been accused of something, the issue is done. There's no defending yourself, it's already set in stone. This may sound unduly harsh, but the average soldier is somewhat weak-minded. Maybe that's too harsh. Restatement: The average soldier is very impressionable. This means that the first, strongest or loudest opinion or perception stated is pretty much always the one that sticks. Case in point: it was observed that my guys were working while I was sleeping, therefore I am a shitbag. And as much I might bitch about how much I hate this, I have no excuse because I know as well as anyone that perception is paramount in warrior culture. As much as I loathe the idea of putting the perception of correctness before actual correctness, I know that perception is really the key. Insert here longwinded metaphysical discourse titled "What Is Illusion, What Is Reality?" Sticking feathers up your butt may not make you a chicken, but if you can convince everyone that you are a chicken, well, by god, you're a fucking chicken.

Anyways, to make a stupid story even longer, after hearing it from Kirk and Stan, John runs into me and says. "I hear your entire squad hates you, that you slept while you made them go on patrol." Keep in mind that John is the CO's RTO (translation: captain's radio man). For him to hear this rubbish pretty much meant that I could assume that Soledad O'Brien was at that very moment convincingly feigning veiled disgust reading her teleprompter before a bank of CNN cameras saying, "Today at Fort Drum Army post in New York it was discovered that infantry team leader Jason of Bravo Team, Second Squad had brazenly been sleeping while his fellow soldiers sludged through the snow in single-digit temperatures outside. Sources say that it is a certainty at this time that Jason is a shitbag." At this point I could take no more. I was gonna drop bombs. I stormed back to my room and found to my livid wonderment another gay joke -- a picture torn from a magazine and taped to my wall locker of what I am supposed to assume was a gay sailor, bare-chested and tattooed. Then my cup floweth over. I tore the page down. In the margin on the back side was printed the source of this untimely homoerotica: FHM, page 60. I opened the door of the room to Alpha team, the soon-to-be recipients of SPLEEN, JASON TYPE, 1 EA. but they were gone. Ah, lo and behold, there layeth an issue of FHM. And page sixty was torn out! So I did the mystery owner of the magazine a favor and went back to my room and tore out all the rest of the pages to save him time in the future. (side note- this was the international version of FHM and it actually broke my heart to destroy it like that. There were SO many hot girls in it.) Then I laid in wait, rage at a slow boil. Then they returned. I entered their room, closed the door and locked the bolt. I flung the mass of pages to the ground and out of my throat boomed the words,"IF YOU FAGGOTS HAVE A PROBLEM WITH ME, TELL IT TO ME NOW." It's really embarrassing how when one is pissed off, all political correctness goes out the window and the use of disparaging terms based on sexual orientation are used without thinking. Anyway, once I was done venting and they explained to me that it wasn't them that ratted me out, (it was actually an observation made by my platoon sergeant that I appeared to be slacking, something I didn't learn till it was too late) all that was accomplished was I had made an ass of myself for being overly furious and destroying a magazine that didn't belong to any of them. It was Kirk's magazine and his personal joke and my little act of rage was completely lost on them. "Um, Sergeant, whose magazine is that? Did you tear those pages out? I'm confused." I felt like that guy that sprayed manure all over what he thought was a courthouse that had wronged him, only to find out that he had the wrong building.

I can't believe I just wasted two huge paragraphs to tell you all that. Oh well. Forgive me for being a drama queen, I was having my man-period (manstration?). Unfortunately it was the focus of most my day, that whole stupid circus act. So much bad energy in the barracks today, so many guys stressed out. Ya know what, tomorrow I'll put up a real post about our little four-day field problem-from-hell complete with full-color photos. Also, I should have photos of Socky in his new desert uniform that we all start wearing tomorrow. Quick note to friends and family. I will be off from Dec. 22 to Dec. 28. I will be in New Paltz, NYC, probably SLC and possibly SF. The Army STILL hasn't been paying me correctly, so SLC and especially SF are iffy.

The Infantry Gods must have realized that things had only sucked in ways of coldness on our recent six-day field exercise, so for the exercise we just finished they decided to have it suck in multiple ways. Even though we were only out for two days, I'd have to say that it really sucked. Let me 'splain. No, there is too much. Let me sum up. Yesterday: rained all day. Today: was freezing ass-cold all day. To use the parlance of my urban brothers, it was brick, yo. I shouldn't have to explain why it sucks when you get soaked then the temperature dips below freezing. We moved out Thursday at 3am. I got three hours of sleep. We spent much time dismounted from the Humvees getting rained on. Last night we were in an overwatch position for a traffic control point. The four men in the truck should have slept in shifts, one guy in the turret, one on the radio. We all fell asleep at one point. The OPFOR (opposing force) actually did a drive-by shooting on the vehicles at the check point. We slept through the entire thing. Um, this is really really bad, but really really funny in retrospect. I was so profoundly unmotivated at this point that I didn't care when someone banged on the window and said, "What, are you all asleep? We just got in a fire fight! Did you see any of it???" I should have gotten destroyed by my leadership for this fubared move, but most the guys in the other two trucks were asleep too. Crap weather, lack of motivation and massive sleep deprivation really test discipline during training.

Today wasn't much better. We assaulted a small town training area, something we're getting pretty comfortable with on the whole. My lack of motivation bit me in the ass again. We made contact as soon as we got to the buildings and I had the worst weapon malfunction of my career. My rifle was stuck like chuck (duh!) from all the rainwater that had frozen in it. Note to self: better pre-combat inspections. I fired one round, had a misfire, charged it, then had a wicked double-feed. I couldn't get the magazine to drop, I couldn't get either round to extract, I couldn't even get the charging handle to move anymore. I was completely flabbergasted. Matt was dead at this point (i.e. his MILES laser tag crap was beeping, signifying that he was killed), so I took his SAW and gave him my M16 doorstop. The rest of the mission was completely uneventful. Cleared a building, made no contact, then continued on to the second phase of the mission. For this phase we sat in a hasty ambush position for two hours. We froze. And the enemy never came through our ambush point. This is probably good. Anthony has a chronic cough and Juan's snoring made us the loudest ambush point ever. This field exercise didn't exactly see our best soldiering abilities, I'm a little embarrassed to say. No sleep, very little time for food and utter crap weather will really test your mettle. Commanders: give your men time off from their training schedules every once in a while, otherwise motivation goes straight to hell. This is no excuse on the part of the soldier, but come one, you don't want us to be basket cases before we even get to the desert, do you?

Tonight I'll probably get six hours of sleep (I've had about four in the last two days combined), we'll spend tomorrow prepping for the field, then it's another 3am wake-up on Sunday to go to the field for a four-day operation. I could tell you more about how Willy had an instrumental role in this operation and basically did the job of a lieutenant or how it's funny how one can easily be transfixed on thoughts of sex during states of great physical discomfort (similar to thinking of food when you're hungry, perhaps?), but I really want to get to bed right now.

I promise to be more motivated on the next field exercise and give you a good solid posting. I’ve been taking great pleasure in a quote that Scott Mize, a very cool reader, shared with me from Homer's The Odyssey, quoting Odysseus: "Much have I suffered, long have I labored through wars and waves. Add this to the total; bring the trial on!" This is getting posted in my Humvee.

Because of the generosity of readers, I now have a digital camera to add photos to the blog. All hail Pedro! And I wish I could figure out a way to set up a "tip jar" as many readers have suggested (Chet recently) where the funds could be publicly viewable, but I don't know how to do this. So for now, if you trust me and you want to contribute to a fund that will help cover incidentals associated with this blog (like satellite internet service in Iraq, protective equipment for my laptop and the additional web hosting costs due to increased bandwidth and space requirements), please contribute to my paypal account: j_paypal @ recognizant . com. All surplus funds will be applied to equipping my squad and platoon. Right now there is a pretty big wish list of gear we would love to get our hands on such as rail systems for some of the weapons, Surefire lights and vertical foregrips for the rifles, various pouches and accessories for the Interceptor load-bearing body armor we'll be using in Iraq and a whole load of other things the Army probably won't be issuing us. Any time anything is purchased, I'll post it to the blog so that there will be some semblance of public bookkeeping and to give props to those who help us out. I will also be setting up a P.O. box soon too for those that have asked for a mailing address should they wish to send stuff.


Stan and Eric patrol the woods. In the rain.


Eric keeps an overwatch on some "Iraqis" protesting in the distance. In the rain.
Eric and I agree that you're not actually miserably wet until your crotch is wet. Eric stopped me at one point and said, "Sergeant, you know what? I'm miserable. You know why? My dick is wet."


Our Humvee. In the rain.


Fall fashion, infantry style.

I just finished packing to go back out to the field for a 48-hour operation that will integrate all the various skills we’ve been working on -- reacting to IEDs and ambushes, traveling in a convoy, cordon and search of buildings, CQB, setting up roadblocks… all sort of motorized infantry stuff with a light infantry twist. After I finished packing my rucksack, Eric looked at it and asked, "Sergeant, why does your ruck have two right-shoulder straps?" All I could do was give a Cheshire smile in response to this immensely meta-physical statement-in-a-question my little grunt novitiate unwittingly proffered me in regards to my dicked-up ruck. "Because that’s how it was issued to me", I replied.

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So we just got back from the field for six days. Mind-numbingly boring and spirit-crushingly cold. Spent the better part of that six days sitting in cramped but heated (thank god!) rooms waiting for our firing orders to be called. Even the parts where we drove around in the Humvees shooting things was dull, to tell you the honest truth. I sat in the passenger side -- oh, I’m sorry, I mean the Truck Commander position -- of the vehicle, and called in targets as they popped up yelling at my gunner to engage them. "One-six, this is one-five, be advised, four enemy dismount troops in the open, eleven o’clock, three-hundred meters. Engaging at this time, over." In all actuality, it was the cold that made it so horrible. When the temperature gets in the single digits, even machine guns lose their fun-factor.

For the last four days two platoons lived in a structure that was meant only to feed soldiers firing at the motorized gunnery range. While waiting for firing orders to come up, we sat. Or napped. Or ate. Imagine sitting in the same place for four days straight, only getting up to move a few feet to talk to someone else or to go to the bathroom or have a cigarette. The incessant chatter and yelling produced an unbearable din. It was so bad. Then when it came time to sleep, every square inch of flat surface had a body in a sleeping bag covering it. This included the tops of tables. It was like living on a slave ship. John asked the commander, "Have you seen the chow hall when first and second platoons rack-out? It’s like Amistad over there." As what I think was a penance for making us stay at the range every night, the commander slept outside a few nights. The first two nights I slept in a cement machine gun firing position in sub-zero temperatures. I found a wooden pallet that I put a poncho over to make a little shelter for myself from the snow. Soldiering makes you a good bum. It’s no wonder homeless people are all vets -- they’ve all been trained to be professional bums. Point of this paragraph: for six days we all lived in conditions that were part central booking and part homeless shelter with a twist of male brothel, e.g. "Dude, I can’t get out of my bag yet. I’m not wearing any clothes and I have morning wood."

It’s been asked what soldiers fight about. Here’s a good example: The table where the big coffee thermoses (thermi?) sat was covered with coffee stains. Once when the fresh coffee thermoses were delivered, this genius sergeant decides to pour water all over the table to clean it off, covering it and the floor with water. This janitorial feat had a lot of guys up in arms. "Yo, we sleep on that floor you asshole!", someone yelled. Once the brain surgeon left, the guys were trying to decide how best to dry out the floor. There were two camps -- those who thought we should open the doors for a while to let it evaporate and those that thought we should just keep the doors closed. Personally, I didn’t think the doors open thing would do much except make me cold and seeing as how all the sleep gear we have is waterproof, I really didn’t care if the floor was wet or dry. The dispute was never really settled. Someone would open the doors then someone would close them. Then someone would open the doors then someone would close them. At one point two soldiers almost came to blows over the most appropriate state the doors should be in. This is what soldiers fight over. The best way to dry a floor.

Oh yeah, I almost forgot. The first night we were in the field, Dan got a concussion. Our company NBC (nuclear, biological, chemical) guy is this… hmm. Ya know, I don’t want to talk bad about the kid, so let me just say that he probably won’t be going to the soldier-of-the-month board anytime soon. Anyways, NBC super trooper had his rifle slung over his back and caught Dan right above the eye with his barrel when he swung around for some reason. Dan blacked out, puked, and did all those concussed things. After getting sent to the rear and examined, he was confined to quarters for three days and will be on profile for the rest of the week, precluding him from participating in any training. This sucks because in addition to Dan being down for the count, my SAW gunner, Eric is a friggin’ sick-call Ranger and always seems to be getting blood work done (he’s convinced that he has clotting problems) or having his tonsils looked at or having his snoring looked into or having his excema examined. The day Dan got clobbered, I lectured my guys on "The Aura", the dark force that causes soldiers to get injured. My squad is having aura problems these days. Oh yeah, one more thing. The new guy in our squad, Ken, is going through the classic situation where his live-in joint-checking-account-having girlfriend decided to change all the locks on their apartment and drain his bank accounts. Ken won’t be part of this exercise either so he can try to sort out the mess this financial succubus has made for him.

In three hours it will be 3am and I’ll be waking up to start this operation. Rather than try to be witty about the monotony that is Army life, let’s get to the part where I bore you with personal photos.


Me at Bastogne, er, I mean at Fort Drum


Shameless close-up to make the mom happy -- the pain in my toes apparent on my face


Frigid but beautiful


All hail BOB! (big orange ball, a.k.a. The Sun)


Firing machine guns from atop Humvees


This is how you warm your feet when they get frost nip -- the medics make you put them on some innocent bystander’s bare belly.


Me and Willy performing synchronized bowel movements -- we’d get up but we’re both frozen to the toilet seats


The biggest sleep-over ever -- This is the moment where everyone is stripping down and getting into their sleeping bags and it becomes painfully apparent that no one has bathed in a week due to the symphony of body odors that crescendos as each soldier hops in his sack


Ray’s family -- Melissa is now a sandy blonde and Socky is sporting his knit wool cap


Willy celebrates every moment, even the ones filled with freezing pain

I've spent the last two days responding to email and responding to comments in previous posts. If you had questions you put in the comments, I think I answered most of them now.

I'm going to be in the field a lot this month. I will try to post something on December 10 while I'm back from the field for one day and again on December 13 or 14. After that, I'll post sometime around Christmas while I'm on leave.

Once again, things haven't really been all that interesting, so I feel as though I have to reach to share anything notable.

Juan and the Runaway M240 (or Boring Machine Gun Shop-Talk)

I was in charge of the M240 machine gun range for a couple days, making sure guys ran through the qualification process efficiently and with a minimal amount of bitching. The qualification process involves hitting at least seven out of eleven targets ranging from 400 to 800 meters during the day and seven out of eleven targets again at night ranging from 100 to 400 meters. The shooters were guys that had other weapons as their primary weapons, so this was to qualify them with the 240 as their secondary weapon. I've never actually qualified on the 240, so this range was a bit of a learning experience for me too. I learned that I can't see targets that far out worth a damn, and even with binoculars I couldn't see the 800 meter target at all. It's funny because guys would still hit them, even if they couldn't see them. The guy on the gun will always have an assistant gunner that will spot the targets with the binos as they pop up and give verbal adjustments such as "left three! up two!" meaning to adjust your fire to the left approximately three body widths or up two body widths. I'm convinced that a huge part of being in the infantry is learning how to use the force to accomplish a lot of tasks, this being an excellent example, hitting targets so far away they aren't visible. Also, having an AG that is on top of things is vital. You could be essentially firing blind, but as long as you have a good spotter, you'll get acurate fire downrange.

You may remember Juan, a SAW gunner in my squad that had a bad run of luck one day, well, he had a little more bad luck on this 240 range. The take-down pin that holds the pistol grip and trigger assembley in place was having a problem with its detent spring. During the night-fire, this pin on Juan's gun actually fell completely out causing the entire pistol grip to come off in his hand while he was shooting it. The most important thing that we learned from this is that the mechanism that stops the gun from firing once you release the trigger is located in this part. So once it became separated from the rest of the gun, the gun didn't stop firing. I imagine that this must have been terribly disconcerting for Juan, to say the least. How to stop a runaway gun is something we're all taught how to handle (you twist the belt of rounds, breaking it off and stopping the feed), but normally you'd be holding the gun by the pistol grip the entire time, keeping the gun pointed in a safe direction. With no familiar way to control the weapon, I think I'd be momentarily at a loss, holding the trigger in my hand while the gun was blazing uncontrollably into the night sky. Instead of the familiar sound of controlled bursts of rounds, the continual roar of a gun firing non-stop garners a lot of attention. Now that Juan had put the weapon down while it was still on it's bipod to try and handle the malfunction, all eyes were on the bright orange rainbow of tracer rounds arching high into the air. Frightening but beautiful. It seems the one random dick that sometimes falls out of the sky happen to fall on Juan again.

Ray, Melissa, and Socky

To spice up this boring post, I'll throw in some flavor, or what Ray likes to call "sassone."

Ray has a sock filled with sand that acts as a tool to help him steady his hand while he shoots. This is such an integral sniper tool, Ray saw fit to name the sock "Socky" and give him his own beret. Ray takes Socky completely seriously. Socky stands in formation with Ray, beret and all. I'm not kidding. Oh, and one other thing. Some of my feminist friends find it offensive that women are not allowed in the infantry. This is untrue. They are. Meet Melissa.


Ray, Socky and Melissa


Ray and Melissa, a lovers' embrace

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It's getting wicked cold and perhaps not coincidentally morale is at an all-time low in my platoon. Fights are starting to blossom up here and there, but have been kept on the down-low so far. The specialists are talking about all going to sick-call on the same day in protest of... whatever it is they're upset about. In a way, I feel kinda left out. I'm pretty happy if you want to know the truth. I'm where I belong, I'm where I want to be. I feel like I'm at that point now where every day is Groundhog Day. It's like we're in infantry purgatory, damned to live the same day over and over again for eternity. But as far as I'm concerned that's fine by me, I'm kind of enjoying myself. Or maybe it's just my generally contrarian personality. The more these poor bastards complain and get pessimistic, the more optimistic I seem to feel. I could maybe argue that it's because I'm a good person with sunshine in my soul or whatever, but in reality I think I have a streak of sadism, watching the other soldiers unsuccessfully trying to cling to certain ideas of what happiness and comfort is while the more it sucks, the more I seem able let go of my attachments and learn to love the moment. Okay, so I've reported less than thirty-six thousand dollars the last three years combined on my income taxes, my credit sucks, I can't keep a girlfriend to save my life, the most expensive thing I own is my bed in New Paltz, I have no car, no cell phone-- and I can honestly say that I've never been more content in my life. I have a lot of very close friends whose love I cherish, I have a bizarrely excellent Flanders-esque relationship with my family (notwithstanding the strained relationship I have with my father in Salt Lake), and I am grateful for every day I get to experience. I know this probably sounds nauseatingly cheesy, but it's how I feel.

I could go on, but I don't want to embarass myself too much. To quote William H. Macy's character, Donnie Smith, in Magnolia, "I really do have love to give; I just don't know where to put it."