Shoup Airlines

Beautifully written

I found this poem on THL’s website today and laughed and laughed and laughed…

Somewhere A Seed

Somewhere a seed falls to the ground
That will become a tree
That will some day be felled
From which thin shafts will be extracted
To be made into arrows
To be fitted with warheads
One of which, some day when you least expect it,
While a winter sun is shining
On a river of ice
And you feel farthest from self-pity,
Will pierce your shit-filled heart.

Michael Fried

Cease Fire! Cease Fire! Cease Fire!

I was gone for the better part of last week as an advanced party member assisting in weapons qualification for our unit (B Co., 64oth) and a smattering of the aviation brigade brass from up north. This was done at Camp Roberts, a sleepy little National Guard owned base just north of Paso Robles that looks more like something out of that bad horror movie where a bunch of teens drive out to the “old abandoned base” to do what teens do: drink, smoke, fornicate and rage against authority figures until the prom queen/ditzy blonde and her jock/alpha male boyfriend stumble upon the box that contains a long forgotten military project that awakens the frozen in time cyborg Nazi soldier, the ghost of some uber-elite SS trooper, or raises an entire squad of Nazi zombies that are bent on killing everyone under the age of 18 who has had sex in the last 20 minutes along with the octogenarian groundskeeper/sergeant/just plain creepy dude who hangs around old abandoned bases but knows what “really happened” there in 1944 until the nerd/outcast/virgin solves the mystery and saves the day night for him/herself and the only attractive teen (of the opposite sex of course) that was cruel to said nerd/outcast/virgin at first but then realized there was more then met the eye in nerd/outcast/virgin and they live happily ever after.

Can you tell I am a product of Movie Macabre. I’ll let you figure that one out.

On a historical side note, Camp Roberts was established in 1940 as a basic training facility for infantry and field artillery units. In the end, 436,000 soldiers passed through Roberts’ gates en-route to the Pacific and European theaters of WWII. More intriguing though, the camp was also a prison for German POWs who built most of the buildings now standing including the barracks we stayed in.

Returning from both digressions, the advanced party was slated with running the zero range and qualification range. Zeroing is firing to adjust your M16′s sites until you hit the center of the target. The qualification range is just that, a range you must hit 23 out of 40 targets with an M16 to qualify. I was assigned to the zero range as the “tower,” the guy that sits up on high overseeing all firing lanes with a P.A. system calling out commands and yelling at anyone that doesn’t follow said commands. Problem was, the zero range had no tower. I got stuck with this little platform that put me maybe five feet in the air. That’s a problem when you’re trying to watch 50 lanes!

You’d think zeroing sounds easy, but it is a long and tedious process. You fire three rounds, walk down range, check your target, walk back to the firing line, adjust your sites and fire three more rounds. You repeat this process until you can get 5 out of 6 rounds in a 4 cm ring at 25 m.  Now add yourself to 49 more lanes and you know what we were dealing with.  Our crew did this from sun up to sun down every day for four days.

Oh yeah, there were also soldiers lowest common denominators that don’t want to follow instructions, want to load rounds backward, stick the magazine through the ejection port or point the barrel of a loaded rifle at everyone else. These people caught the wrath of Shoup plugged into a speaker system turned to 11. Those were the lucky ones. Others got to meet Mr. M.D.

If they weren’t bad enough we also had to deal with the elements.  The first day was overcast and bitter cold, the next day 20 mph winds blew all day long, it was blisteringly hot on the third day and it rained all day on the last day.  Fun times!

Never have I felt so exhausted and frazzled as I did at the end of each day.

The Landlord

And it isn’t Will Ferrell that is funnier than hell!

You can blame Funny or Die for the coding that won’t allow me to stop the auto start or embed the clip easily. Stupid, stingy people.