I Want To Know What I Did In A Past Life, Because Karma Is Eating My Ass...

It’s true, I am getting to the point where I believe that I have more to fear from my chain of command than I do from the Taliban. Check that, I know that I have more to fear from my chain of command than I do from the Taliban.

So apparently, the commander is tired of not having anything to write about when he turns in his daily reports to our battalion. Evidently, putting a big goose egg in the casualty box is not good enough for him. So our missions can now jump off at any time day or night, regardless of our preparedness, regardless of whether or not we have slept, regardless of anything other than the weather. As soon as the weather is good we are leaving. It could be three in the afternoon, or three in the morning.

We are basically on call, which makes me laugh because we aren’t getting the commander enough publicity with his higher ups. The word through the grapevine says that he made the wonderful statement, “I am sick of my troops keeping banker’s hours!”

Now what the fuck does that mean? I would have to say that I think it means he doesn’t want us to be able to work the same hours that he keeps. But I digress.

You know what my biggest problem is? Well I’m going to tell you. I have the shortest fuse of any white man on the planet. I have flash point anger. My fuse is about the size of a gnat’s giggle stick. But that’s just me, so it goes, right?

I whip myself into such a rage over some things. In this case I think that I am justified. When someone makes a decision that puts my soldiers in unnecessary danger, then I feel I have every right to call them an asshole.

Which is something that my squad leader doesn’t understand, nor does he know how to tell me things without sending me into an uncontrollable tantrum. Whenever something happens he tells us in such a way that you would think that the world was coming to an end. And then I get pissed. Fortunately, I have a platoon sergeant, who while he can be a dickbag, is also a lot better at explaining things to me in a way that gets through to me without causing a meltdown. So thankfully, I could go and talk to him prior to attempting ever so subtly to end someone’s life.

This place, this command, this mission (if you can call it that), everything here is testing the limits of my self control. Which, admittedly, wasn’t all that high to begin with. But if self control is like a muscle and it has to be worked out, then when I get home there won’t be a fucking thing that can get under my skin. Maybe this will actually work out for me in the end.

So now it’s the next day. And it has gotten windy, a very special kind of windy, you would think that there was a Congressional committee meeting on the mountain just outside the FOB. But I digress. So with that kind of weather we don’t have much to worry about as far as missions are concerned. I think that when I get home and someone asks me how I made it through without getting hurt, I’ll be able to tell them that the weather was bad so we stopped the war!

Now I have nothing to write about so I’ll be done with this.

Later,

I love you mom...