h/t Mrs. G. This is the funniest and sadly truest thing I have read in a long time. Old Blue had to take a trip to Bagram and ran into the most-hated species of all field soldiers, the REMF. Pogadishu is the petri dish of fobbitry. At all times of the day you can find its denizens unconcernedly strolling the main road, Disney Drive, often in PT gear of whatever service sentenced them to their tour there. There are two PX’s, movie theaters, the famous clamshell where they have Karaoke Night and Country and Western Night, two Green Beans Coffee establishments, Burger King, Dairy Queen, shops, an expensive and inefficient private internet service with charges scaling from less than $50 to over $100 depending on the bandwidth purchased, and 24-hour shuttle buses. That’s just for starters. Sergeants Major and bored officers lurk like trap door spiders to pounce on the unwary who sport any semblance of field wear or who do not wear their reflective belt. For most, the workday is similar to that performed back home, if under more crude circumstances. Only 7% of them will ever leave the wire. Many arrive at Bagram, leave only to go on leave, and finish their tours without ever having left the wire save by air. There is no end to the fobbitry inherent to the streets of Pogadishu. On a recent trip, one of our junior NCO’s was confronted by a Lieutenant Colonel who stopped in mid-jog to assail him for having turned the cuffs of his ACU jacket inward, a common alteration that allows more air to circulate around the arms, increasing the ability of the body to cool itself. However, this alteration, while I don’t believe it is specifically forbidden by the AR’s, is sometimes expressly forbidden by certain units, due to the fact that some Sergeant Major doesn’t feel that it’s a “good look” to be sporting. Go read the whole thing and giggle your ass off. It brought to mind many fond memories of the many folks I sent off cursing to themselves after they failed to make any headway at all toward making me give a *** about the dozens of regulations and uniform standards I was flagrantly violating. Heck I had a team sergeant who was so used to the swath of destruction we would wreak through whatever base we were visiting that he would holler "Violators, mount up" whenever it was time for us to ramble on.
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Posted
Aug 18 2009, 02:23 AM
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BLACKFIVE