Jackie Chan's Who Am I?

Listening to - The Storm Still Rages by Orphaned Land
(An Israeli metal band, I heard about them on NPR during a program about heavy metal musicians in Baghdad)

So my friend Linda said she wasn't too interested in reading an Army blog, which is fine by me, since she's not in the Army. To remedy the over-soldier-ness of this blog, I will attempt to keep things related to killing and dying down to less than 130% of my content. Shouldn't be too hard, since I'm not deployed right now, and drill...drill is usually not exciting. But it is funny to watch someone that just got back from basic training manhandle an M-16 like its a giant greasy semiautomatic carrot. Scary too.
You may notice, loyal and numerous readers, that I changed my header pic to something less devastatingly depressing. I took this new pic in Pristina, Kosovo sometime last summer. The skies there happen to be quite beautiful, which is a comment from anybody who spends far too much time inside the wire of the giant military-industrial-complex bases. Big Tobacco has good comments on this sort of phenomenon. Read his blog - click it over on the right, since I haven't yet figured out how to put links in posts. Being inside the wire all the time, believe me, was not what I would have chosen. It was also the opposite of my Iraq deployment in the respect, not to mention the billion others. But you know, Fobbits need ice cream too. By the way, this blog doubles as a free advertising service for my other favorite milblogs.

Let's Start With Beer

Yes, let's start with Beer. The author of a paper I had to read for today, but that's beside the point. Also, do not buy Staropramen, this Czech beer I got today. Blech. Unless you like aged horsepiss.
But this post isn't about beer, it's about the bullshit I recently agreed to subject myself to for at least the next 3 years, for a nice taxable bonus of $7500. So here’s the awesomest story on the fucking planet. I set the bar high, what can I say.

A small FOB, built on a defunct chicken factory. There are about three groups of portashitters on this FOB, and like anyone taking a shit in a highly effective greenhouse, soldiers scrawled all sorts of funny shit on the walls like “3ACR sucks dick” or the always classic “FTA” and sometimes something about that hot admin chick.

And the usual depictions of titties. What are ya gonna do?

So the commander of said FOB got pissed off, and so decided to place a 24-hour guard on…well, just one group of shitters. Makes sense, right? Put a guard on one group of shitters, who has to sign in every person going to use the shitter, check the inside walls after every splattercrap to make sure there’s no new unauthorized creativity, and sign out that person after they’re evacuated their bowels or other fluids. And apparently mine and another team had responsibility over this, the only group of guarded shitters.

Combined, we had 12 people. Two officers, several NCOs, a few enlisted. Obviously officers can’t draw this duty, but they prohibited NCOs from this also. So for 24-hour guard we had a half-dozen NCOs guarding portashitters. I might mention that we were attached to this unit that owned the FOB, and were reservists while they were active-duty airborne. Well.

Great duty. Gotta love the muthafuckin airborne. Good use of soldiers’ time when they have a fuckin job to do outside the wire – make them stand shift at a shitter! But I digress. Touché. That’s enough venting for one day.

I'm not one of those that posts only negative things, I promise the next post will be an exciting description of the most ridiculous immunoglobulins you've ever heard of.

CW

Grimy assholes

If I ever see someone come to my wedding reception in a grimy wife beater and flip-up sunglasses, I will fucking break his nose. Needless to say, some cockbag came to a reception M & I were at last weekend dressed as such. Dude looked like he needed serious rehab. Maybe shock treatment, courtesy of me. And I wasn't even in the wedding party! Anyway, rant complete. Please forgive my post title, it may be somewhat misleading.

First Post

So this is my blog. It seems to be the thing to do. I better introduce myself then. In this blog I'll go by the Combat Wombat, or just Wombat, or even "that fucking weird Wombat dude." An explanation seems to be in order for this one. First, a little about myself...

After nearly ten years, I am finishing up college. What took me so long? I took a little three-year detour to technical college to find out once I graduated that I really don't like computers enough to work in that field. Then off to university, where I've been ever since, except for a couple year-long vacations to Iraq and Kosovo. In Iraq, a guy on my team, Birdman, who did not belong in the army, one day called me the Combat Wombat. A fuzzy little marsupial running around with a Kevlar and M-16, yup that fits me perfectly, right?

Anyway, most of the writing I've been doing lately is on research, which is mostly about as exciting as doing the dishes. Slosh University is a pretty good school, in terms of education, but good times are almost guaranteed. It's in a town where you can park your car on the lawn, plug the laptop into the car stereo, and have an outdoor theater. And commence drunk-watching. Doesn't really matter what time of day it is. Or you might see a grey-haired biker-looking dude sitting on the sidewalk outside a bar at 10am waiting for the place to open. The ad on the bar's sign: Where No One Remembers Your Name. Uplifting as fuck! But really the place is fun, besides the rising attempted murder rate. I say attempted because Sloshians really haven't the hang of it yet, apparently. It's really a great town. There's tons of stuff to do then never remember.

That's it for this first post. The next should appear shortly.

Tonight: Helping the wife with our wedding invites. Never thought this would be so much work!