It’s Veteran’s Day, and I took a day off from work.  To celebrate, I’m going to relive some of the best moments from my glory days.

Here’s my agenda:

• Take a perfectly clean rifle out of the safe and spend a few hours ‘cleaning’ it before presenting it to someone who hates me with the fire of a thousand suns for ‘inspection’.
• Get into a spotlessly clean and pressed suit of clothing, complete with immaculately shined footwear, then climb around a greasy, dirty truck for an hour while filling out paperwork that will be glanced at and thrown into the trash.
• Remove everything from my basement, sort it out into neat lines, and have the neighbor check to make sure I haven’t lost anything since the last time I opened up the storage room.
• Lock a craggy old fart who’s too old for this shit into a room with an enthusiastic college senior who thinks he’s Patton.  Take side bets on which one survives the encounter.
• Pack everything I need to survive for a year into two small bags, carry it all to the end of a runway, then sit and wait in the rain until told that the op’s been cancelled and there’s an equipment inspection in the morning.
  • Repeat that last step while blind drunk at 2 the next morning because you never know when you’ll need to do it for real.
• Spend weeks planning something really, really important and extremely fun, including travel and lodging arrangements and a list of interesting people that you want to meet and have long conversations with, then cancel it after your plane has taken off because some pissants in some 3rd world shithole decided to have a ‘peaceful election’ and form a ‘democratic government’.
  • Spoil sports
• Pack a briefing room full of guys from upstate New York, Michigan, North Dakota, and Alaska for four hours and teach them how to stay warm and dry in the winter.
• Pack the same room full of native Texans and Arizonans and teach them about surviving the heat.
• Teach about both heat and cold injuries after issuing a complete set of cold-weather gear to two Air Force guys and telling them to walk two miles for chow.
• Be called fat and out of shape by someone who got carried by a fat and out of shape dude after she passed out carrying 20% of her body weight up the side of a relatively long, steep mountainside.
  • It’s OK, she only weighed about as much as my rucksack did. Soaking wet.  Holding a brick.