The World's Most Expensive Game of ...

Today was a joke. From top to bottom, left to right, and from 0830 to 1730. We sat there and didn't do shit. I mean literally, not a thing. We got up really early, like 0530, which isn't Army early but its early to me, then we got some breakfast, laid around for another hour and then we got told we were going to some convoy simulation training.

We have learned that simulation means "video game". So we get there and there are all these trailers set up which people are going in and out of doing important looking things, and carrying official looking papers, and moving quickly and yelling at each other in military acronyms and what not. So I, correctly, assumed that this is the place where the training was going to take place.

Shortly after arriving we were notified that another company had to go through the training also. No big deal, we'll just get in line with them and we'll all get through this. Right? Not a chance baby, this is Uncle Sam's mean green machine and we don't do anything the easy way.

We sat there all day. Now when I say all day, the only exaggeration is that we didn't sit there for 24 hours. We sat there on the pavement, moving our gear from this place to that, and shuffling it around to avoid the sun as it passed over our heads and redoing this and adjusting that to get comfortable enough to sleep on the blacktop. We sat from 0830 alllllllllllllllllllllllll the way through to 1700, for those of you keeping track that's 8 and 1/2 hours. Then we finally got into this thing, which turned out to be a big plastic humvee with a bunch of cords coming out of it and a fake 50 caliber machine gun on top, all facing a huge screen.

We then pretended to drive this plastic beast through a stretch of simulated Afghani land. We ran into some explosions, we got shot at a little bit, and we ran over some civilians, shot a camel, and accidentally lit up an ambulance. Lots of fun, but all in all we were in there for 15 minutes.

So I would just like all the taxpayers in my audience to think about this. Your government, due to lack of competent leadership, subjected an entire platoon of mobilizing soldiers to a day spent sleeping on the blacktop outside a training facility, while somebody else played with the toys, not to mention the government has managed to sink what I can only imagine to be zillions of dollars into a gigantic video game for soldiers to learn how to run a convoy in the middle east and Asia. Relax ladies and gentlemen, your government is in charge, you can feel free to go back to sleep now...

Don't forget to vote.

Love you mom.