Note To Self...

To be read in case of personal contemplation of reenlistment. I have successfully embraced the suck for the majority of this huge pile of bullshit that the army has been putting me through for the past couple of weeks. Its actually turning out to be quite a bit of fun. In that I have taken to watching everyone else as they descend from mature, intelligent adults, into sniveling, whiny, soft little children. Good times for me.

We have been training out here for about two weeks now and people are already starting to crack and its fun to watch them march right up to the edge and then just give them a little shove and watch the fireworks.

But that doesn't change the fact that I have been doing this shit for in excess of a decade now and I should've known better than to come along for this. Anytime you let the people that the Army finds to be in charge run anything, the reindeer games are something to behold.

We have been placed on guard duty for trucks that do not exist, we have stayed up until 2 in the morning to be told that we are getting up at 4 in the morning. We have been given a mountain of equipment that no one knows how to use. Half this stuff, when I look at it, I can't even tell what it is, much less how to use it. We have been given briefings until 2300 and taken a PT test at 0400. We have been given blank ammunition with which to fire in training simulations in the forest (which is so similar to where we are going) and then told that as we fire the ammunition we have to pick up and account for every single round due to the fact that there is some endangered frog in the woods or some shit.

We have been ordered by our commander to turn in all our weapons to the head shed (the commander's minions.) So we threw 200 and something weapons into the tent! That wasn't at all hard to figure out later. We have spent 6 hours in the middle of the night looking for a piece of equipment that was right where it was supposed to be the whole time. We have been scolded for not saluting officers when we are carrying weapons systems that weigh more than some people. We have been forced to wear equipment weighing more than 50 pounds for literally 12-16 hours at a time. We have not gotten more than 5 hours of continuous sleep for two weeks.

Am I bitching? Yeah a little bit, but I go through this one as a reminder to myself of all this shit for when I come up for reenlistment. You see every time I have reenlisted it has been because of the fact that I ignored all of this shit and only remembered the good stuff. I suppressed every ounce of bullshit the army sent my way and only thought of the things that made me smile and signed the dotted line on faulty information.

I do not regret my decision to volunteer for this, not even a little bit. I know for a fact that I will rise to any challenge that the army sends my way. Embracing the suck is all you can do, because it only gets worse. However, that doesn't change the fact that a few years from now I am going to be asked to raise my hand again and to those pricks I will say, "Kiss my ass, I'm out of here"

I paid what I owe, I paid what two people owe, and you Uncle Sam have gotten everything out of me that you are going to get. How you like them apples?