The Melting Pot

I want everyone to relax. The earthquake and the aftershocks in Pakistan have not had any effect on your soldiers in Iraq. Quick Geography lesson I am in Kuwait which is a very small coastal country that is slightly smaller then the State of new Jersey, Kuwait borders the Persian Gulf, Saudi Arabia and Iraq, Pakistan borders the Arabian Sea, between India on the east and Iran and Afghanistan on the west and China in the north, Pakistan is a little less then twice the size of California. In order for me to get to Pakistan I would have to travel through Kuwait into Iraq through Iran and then into Pakistan. Not gonna happen. The odds of me feeling an earthquake happening in Pakistan while I am in Kuwait is similar to Miami residents feeling a Cali Quake. I'm sure that all of you have probally figured out by now that a wide variety of very different people join the military. People from every different walk of life are represented in each and every soldier... I am constantly trying to remind my soldiers that while their issues and problems may seem huge there will always be someone out there with a bigger problem. Recently it has been brought to my attention that a couple of the people I work with enjoy portraying the victim. It seems that no matter how bad a situation is for someone there are a select couple of individuals who have it worse off.... A rather grim example one individual is often heard spouting is this... Lets say we are talking about our Families Back home and I brought up that I hadn't spoken to my father in the last eleven years, and that the man who raised me for the first 10 years of my life was a horrible person, Our victim would say "You should be thankful you had the choice to be treated poorly, my mother was shot in a firing squad along with eleven others by my cousin while he was fighting for the revolutionaries." It gets more graphic in detail and in pity, but I think you get the idea. Our other victim is much more of a never accept that she could be wrong kind of person, If you call her out for being in the wrong uniform or for setting a bad example instead of accepting that she'll say "Well you forgot your beret two months ago and you used my car so you could go and retrieve it." She is currently my problem child.. Or I should say she is one of many. My leadership has been trying to send her to a different platoon (she was passed to us about three months ago) but no one is willing to put up with her crap she is currently one of two women in the female tent that have the entire rest of the females trying to get them moved out of the area... A ton of fun... I don't want you to think that I am under the impression that I have no short comings I am very aware of them.. infact I tend to bring them up quite often. But I also understand that we are here to do a job (even if we don't actually know what that particular job is) and there is a time and place for everything. So onto fun things I have been familiarizing myself with some very large and very powerful boom sticks recently (boomstick is what the people of the 12th century called Ash's weapon (a shotgun) in the movie Army of Darkness which is the third movie in the Evil Dead trilogy.)
I have been playing with fully automatic large caliber machine guns as well as fully auto grenade launching crew serve weapons... Isn't that grand... My friends and I have decided that I have superhuman like reflexes. Today Idaho was trying to hit me for mocking him about something petty and as he went to hit me, I turned just enough that my weapon which I have on my back caught the full extent of his blow... He ended up busting his knuckle and I didn't feel a thing... And the lesson he learned don't hit the Fat Guy... Or if you are going to hit him distract him first.... More to come
Random Fact of the Day (courtesy of Snapple) The Official State Dance of Washington is the Square dance.... Go figure