It’s that time of year again: the entire BN took the day off to attend mandatory seminars. Until lunch, it was the familiar parade of lectures that boil down to “It is better for you personally and for the Army if you are not a drunken boor.” After lunch, we had an interesting tour of [...]
The army’s schedule accommodates no man. It doesn’t matter that I signed in from leave three days ago or that I’ve been living from a duffel since the beginning of October. Today there was a mission! An important, long-planned mission which, since I’d been gone for the duration of the planning, basically required me to [...]
I just finished out a two week long exercise for the Army. I can’t talk about what I did, because the nature and conditions of my work are classified. That’s too bad: my role in all this doesn’t really deserve the paranoia, and I would really like the opportunity to vent a bit.
Nothing, really, was [...]
I am in the midst of new romance. I’ve been dating this girl for a month now, and things are going very well. It’s all very exciting: in the Grand Planned Schedule Of My Life, this is right around the time I’d expect to find someone to settle down with permanently. I’m not rushing into [...]
Anytime an Army pilot arrives at a new post, they have to get to a status called Readiness Level One, which just means that they’re familiar with the local flying procedures, the local area, and their new unit’s mission. This can take several months. Here in Korea, since the default tour length is only a [...]
The Army has determined in its institutional way that morale is a good thing to keep high. As such, every so often, they let people out of work and take them on a field trip. The nature of the trip varies according to the circumstances–one of my friends was in the Old Guard previously, and [...]
Whenever I see a Warrant Officer in the news, their rank is invariably given as Chief Warrant Officer. It’s almost correct, and it certainly sounds like a military rank. The only problem is that it is incomplete.
Unlike every other rank in the Army, which we imported wholesale from the British, the Warrant Officer corps was [...]
It’s been just over a year since I bought my first laptop. I bought the cheapest one I could find, because all I really wanted was to be able to dedicate a machine to the Army. It needed to be able to check my email, run the Army’s flight planning software, and little else.
It’s been [...]
I keep putting off going to sleep. I think the idea is that this is the last hour of the last day of my vacation, and tomorrow I have to get up to an alarm and go to work and resume the daily grind. As it happens, I like my job; the daily grind really [...]
I woke up this morning slapping my alarm clock into snooze mode. In that moment, snapping from zero to consciousness, my first thought was that that wasn’t the first alarm that was supposed to go off. Upon investigation, I had apparantly already snoozed my cell phone without recording a memory of the event.
It is for [...]