June 2011 - Argghhh!

Sergeant First Class Petry and Staff Sergeant Guinta are going to be some lonely men at Medal of Honor gatherings 30 years from now. But at least (barring entropy intervening) at least there will be gatherings 30 years from now...Three years from event to award is still an exemplar of inexcuseable bullshit bureaucracy on the part of stuffed shirt self-important bureaucrats in the Pentagon, an opinion I will hold and assert until such time as they offer up some transparency to how the process works...

SWWBO had market today, so releasing the herds and flocks and tossing 'em enough food before they decided *I* was food fell to me this morning. In the Bunnery (as I call the rabbit rooms) we've had some hens roosting on one of the hutches as that sat eggs. They chose the place because it's safe from the peafowl and ducks who like eggs as much as I do - they just like 'em raw. SWWBO asserted earlier this week they had about a week to go. Uh-huh. Riiiiiiiiight.

This one really hurts just down the road at Fort Riley. One of "those" emails... DOD Identifies Army Casualties The Department of Defense announced today the deaths of five soldiers who were supporting Operation New Dawn. They died June 6 in Baghdad, Iraq, of wounds suffered when enemy forces attacked their unit with indirect fire. They were assigned to the1st Battalion, 7th Field Artillery Regiment, 2nd Heavy Brigade Combat Team, 1st Infantry Division, Fort Riley, Kan. Killed were: Spc...

Taliban Hand Bomb To 8-Year-Old Girl, Detonate It As She Walks Towards Police Checkpoint…And the WH is wetting its pants concerned because these dirtbags turned their noses up at its Kum-Ba-Ya overtures?!?Give each of our troops in AfStan a Barrett and a fifty rounds, and tell them that fifty black turbans gets them an R&R in Sydney....

...after those posts below. So, here it is. The Castle's Colt SP1, mounting a AN/PVS2 night vision scope. With bayonet, as a form of immersion therapy for 11B40 who apparently gets the heebie-jeebies from sharp pointy things. Small tidbit of trivia - the AN stands for "Army Navy" meaning a bit of kit (very oft-times comms gear) developed for use by both the Army and Marines, and sometimes actually the Navy... [The pic will enlargify if you have the sekrit code.]

There ain't no justice. Sometimes, in war, you're just screwed. We're currently running an ad for a small "coupla guys in a garage" operation that riffs off the old soldier bromide of "Somewhere out there, there's a bullet with my name on it." The corollary is, "That's not the bullet you need to worry about, it's the one addressed "To whom it may concen." This is a story of that bullet. Of an air crewman who dodged the bullets with his name...

If you're a friend of the Master and Mistress of Castle Argghhh!, you're invited to celebrate the Second Amendment on the Fourth of July - apt, considering how interrelated the two things are, even if President Carter thinks the Revolution was, on balance, a bad idea.

...say from Omaha to Jeff City and beyond, and you'd like to see the flood maps your county and city emergency management officials are watching... click here for the Kansas City District Office of the US Army Corps of Engineers . The Castle isn't under any looming threat, that would take a flood of bibilical proportion, but it's a very interesting example of something computers do well, and that the internet makes easy to access. If you really want to get your geek on - use these links...