It’s definitely not the same as combat situations, but in my experience in emergency medicine, you really do learn to love boring. I’d much rather sit around doing crossword puzzles, playing solitaire, and meticulously restocking the department than have 3 back-to-back codes in a pediatric level 1 ER.

If you have a good unit then most of the military experience is hanging out with your friends all the time.

Except for the 5am PT every morning, and at 7am when you’ve got to get your truck ready at the motor pool, or 8am when you’ve got special duty to set up the range, or 9am when there’s a 2 hour briefing about keeping your hands to yourself and having a designated driver.

Lunch at 11am is usually alright, except the base you’re at has the worst DFAC you’ve ever seen.

That range you helped set up? It’s at 12am, and it’s fun to blast away at targets thinking about how much weapon cleaning you’re going to do tonight.

There’s a lot of leftover ammo, but you only had to shoot 2 magazines, so your rifle isn’t going to be that hard to clean. (Any vets know what’s coming next?)

First Sergeant says we can’t waste ammo, if we don’t use the 10,000 rounds they give us, they will only give us 5 rounds next time.

So the next several hours is spent in the sun, loading more rounds to mindless blast in the general direction of targets on the range.

7pm rolls around, it’s quitting time. Just kidding, night land nav, time to stumble around around in the dark with shitty NVGs and try to find all the points scattered throughout 2 miles, using nothing but a compass and a map.

Except nobody ever gets all the points, so everyone gets together at the end to share the points they found.

10pm, now it’s quitting time, except wait, some moron has lost their night vision goggles, so instead of going back to the barracks, everyone is going to spend the night on the land nav course until it’s found. In the morning it’s found right next to one of the vehicle tires.

Those are the general events of a somewhat easy day in a combat unit. A day without overnight watch, hours of formations and drill ceremony, 30km ruck marches, endless briefings, flipping landscaping rocks because first sergeant doesn’t like the side you flipped everything to last month, etc etc etc.

Wait until you find out who shakespear’s shadow writer was.

It’s actually historically very common. Most of the “classics” had them.

Never heard that about Hemingway, but I have heard that about Tennessee Williams. Maybe they’re confusing the two?

This is Markdown, like Reddit. There is an easy fix, and you don’t need bullets (though that did the job in a pinch, good thinking). Check it out:

If you put two spaces after every line before the line break, they will display as separate lines.
Without the spaces, the line breaks don’t matter and you end up with a big paragraph.
I usually do four spaces just because, but two spaces should do the job.
Try it.

🥹

You can’t apologize in advance after you do the thing you’re apologizing for. That’s just apologizing.

It was Key, not Keyes, and his relationship with slavery was complicated. Far more so than many of his contemporaries.

Propaganda is about intent, not whether its true. It would still be propaganda if the intent is promoting a political point of view.

Kinda wish I’d been on a ship just for the experience of it but the closest I got was a grudging admission about being under the “Department of the Navy” umbrella and a dangling carrot of a MEU if I’d been willing to reenlist. Sorta regret not doing it but I’d had my fill of the routine daily bullshit and was ready to move on. All the Navy guys I knew with the first name “Doc” were cool as hell though, the rest were probably at least all right.

CARDBOARD BOX!