By Eric Milzarski, We Are The Mighty
There are many things that troops do that keep mom and dad proud. The truth is, there is a lot more downtime during war than civilians expect. Part of this just feeds into the “disgruntled sheepdog” mentality that leaves us being the only ones not disgusted by our own jokes.
Deployment downtime is basically all of us getting together and doing dumb sh*t that would make our prim and proper grandmas question their “Support the Troops” bumper sticker.
7. Working out
There’s an interesting trend with deployment fitness: either troops give up two days in country or spend every waking second of downtime in the gym. There is no in between.
Although, by “gym” we mean minimal equipment usually left behind by someone. And for some reason, tire flips are the big thing.
6. Sleeping through Indirect Fire (IDF) sirens
Command policy is usually that whenever the incoming mortar siren goes off, you run your a** to the bunker — regardless of what you’re doing.
Mortars go off constantly. Day or night. And if you’re asleep…f*ck it — the boom already went off and you still have the same amount of blood in you.
5. Pirating movies
Back in the heyday of pirating, everyone was doing it. Nowadays, more and more people stateside are willing to pay for a subscription based services like Netflix or Hulu. Not deployed troops.
Netflix doesn’t stream to Trashcanistan and troops still want to catch up on the shows they’re missing stateside. Meanwhile, the local who sells sh*tty rips doesn’t have the film they wanted. There’s really no other choice if you think about it…
4. Make deployment videos of us doing dumb sh*t
Maybe they have their combat camera guy make an “overly-hooah” video of them remixed to Drowning Pool. Maybe it’s them lipsyncing along to some pop singer. Or maybe they make a video of them clearing a portajohn and they all stuff themselves in there for comedic effect.
We’ve seen them all. And yet they’re still funny.
3. Insect fights
Give a bunch of troops too much free time, a good amount of money, and nothing to spend it on. They’ll start gambling it away.
A common form of gambling that is sure to piss off PETA is betting on which insect will win a battle to the death. So think of it less of us being cruel to animals and more of us being aspiring Pokemon trainers.
2. Way too intimate web-chats with a significant other
We get it. Troops get lonely and miss their other half back home. With Skype or Facetime, troops sometimes put on one of those shows with their loved ones back home.
You do you. But seriously. We all hear you. You’re not subtle.
1. Laptops in portajohns
For those soldiers who probably don’t have that special someone to have that “video-chat” with, and even if they do, they’ll probably still grab their computer or smartphone with headphones and take a stroll to the latrine.
The dude spending more time than required in a 130-degree Portajohn is handling more than his normal business, if you catch my drift.
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