Posted on 09/10/2010 4:01:08 AM PDT by Mad Dawgg
This July, at a forward operating base in Afghanistan's Paktika province, I dropped my Kindle. Soldiers say that no plan survives its first contact with the enemy, and now I know that a Kindle-based travel library is unlikely to survive its first contact with concrete.
In the wake of this fiasco, I have become reacquainted with the libraries of leisure reading with which the military equips it deployed soldiers. Most military bases, even very small ones in remote valleys that are attacked daily by the Taliban, have what is known as an MWR: a morale, welfare, and recreation center.
Sometimes the MWR contains a pool table or a popcorn machine; almost always it contains a bank of computers and a shelf or two of books. Who selects these books I do not know, but I will go out on a limb and guess that it is not the soldiers who wind up reading them.
After painstaking browsing at a place called Camp Blessing, in Kunar province, I discovered three books that looked readable: a Tom Clancy novel, Tobias Wolff's memoir This Boy's Life, and a battered copy of Tom Wolfe's Bonfire of the Vanities that I put back together with the green military version of duct tape.
(Excerpt) Read more at theatlantic.com ...
Sometimes I wonder if America is doomed because it is full of Americans who have no clue about God and Country...
When my son was in Iraq, the care packages we sent were filled with Cliff bars, Tim Horton’s coffee (his favorite), and DVDs. And some NY Yankees paraphernalia during baseball season. He liked them!
I’m surprised they don’t have a field manual on how to survive in open water, or learn Japanese in 3 hours....;-)
Quinn and Rose occasionally air a bit they call, "They Walk Among Us".
There really is an almost overpowering number of a compilation of innocently stupid and evil people that actually have power and authority to do such things as .. show Barbarella in prison.
That's true and don't ask how I know ... suffice it to be .. that was in 1969 ...
They've been at it a long time.
That's why we sometimes bang our heads against the wall in disbelief.
They walk among us.
A friend was in Iraq and I sent similiar stuff, plus fly paper for the tents (he said the flies were really bad there) and multiple copies of South Parks “Team America”. The movie became a cult favorite in his camp LOL.
When this same friend was in Bosnia I sent Jim Beam in the smaller plastic bottles, didn’t realize at the time that it was a) illegal to send hooch through the mail and b) that he was on a dry base LOL. He wanted it, so I sent it!
You worked at a prison movie theater in 69???
HAHAHAHAHAHAAHAHAHAHAHA
“They walk among us.”
And they vote & reproduce. (Face palm)
a couple of letters from the kids in my childrens classes also. Especially around Christmas
And WHAT is wrong with Hello Kitty t-shirts? Hello Kitty and soldiers are a good fit. Kittys don't take anything off of anybody.
Hell, we used to say that no plan survives contact with reality.
(Thanks to FR, this conjures up the image of a ludicrously herculean Obama ravishing an apparently "tingly" Chris Matthews.)
I am tempted to send him some "Hello Kitty" stickers just to see where he'd end up applying them, but past experience tells me that might be asking for trouble.
Mr. niteowl77
Why do these types of threads always wind up with some people telling the rest of us how smart they are and how they do things?
When I still had my Hobby store I sent Magic The Gathering Decks (A two player or more card game that is popular among college age kids and up) and a Popular War game called Warhammer to some of the guys that lived in my area and got stationed over in the sand (as they called it).
The first package went out in September By the time Christmas rolled around I had everybody in their gaming click several Decks of Cards and at least a full army of Warhammer each.
People from around the area got wind of the gaming crew and come in droves to donate money to buy those guys stuff. Then we started sending DVDs and CDs and all kinds of food they requested. My store became the collecting point and we would box it all up and then walk to the post office sometimes it took ten or more people top get all the packages to the post office during the Holidays.
Then all of the sudden we couldn't get packages through we tried for about three months straight. (We used priority mail and the box would come back marked undeliverable no reason given) It fell apart then but we had a good run of nearly three years.
A missionary friend told me one time that people would send USED tea bags because everyone knows you can use a tea bag more than once....
Nigerian law prohibits the importation of “used tea bags”
This guy worked on Indian reservations in the SW US.
OK...anyone want to organize a “Berlin air lift” of Skoal and Jim Beam?
You can’t send a Bible but you can send DEVIL-WORSHIPPING CARDS!!! /sarcasm
Let's just cut to the chase. I'm the smartest and coolest person here and the things that I do are the best and most interesting things that anyone could possibly do. Now that we all agree on that, we can have some profitable conversation.
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