The Sand Box

[DogOnPorch]

Doonesbury has been running a feature called the Sandbox for some time now. It allows the troops in Iraq and Afghanistan to speak their minds about the war as well as a glimpse into the daily grind of a tour of duty.

Well worth a look: http://gocomics.typepad.com/the_sandbox/

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$250,000...and that's my final offer.

---Doonesbury's Duke.

[DogOnPorch]

100 days until I am home.

100 days until I can have a tasty, cold beer.

100 days until I can see the face of a woman and not think it is a rare sight.

100 days until I don't have to bring a gun and wear body armor and a helmet each time I go "out".

100 days until I can travel down a road without wondering if a culvert, pothole, parked car, or pile of rocks is going to explode as I pass by.

100 days until I don't have to analyze people and cars up and down, looking for weapons or signs they may be a threat or a suicide bomber.

100 days until I will no longer be woken up in the middle of the night because someone is attacking the place I call home, or we're being spun up for a QRF mission at any hour.

100 days until I see my family and friends again.

100 days until I am home.

Just an example of the content...I read some good Canadian soldiers' stories as well.

Again...worth a look.

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None of those guys had any overt desire to actually shoot someone. They did, however, have a strong desire to remain unharmed.

---'Old Blue', Afghanistan: The Sand Box

[DogOnPorch]

Name: JP

Posting date: 1/24/08

Stationed in: Kuwait / Iraq

Hometown: Burke, Virginia

The only real point to this list is to have a laugh, so keep that in mind. Personally, I love each and every care package I receive. Hopefully you have a sense of humor if you choose to read on. Or a tall glass of wine...

1. Do not send party invitations for weddings or Independence Day or any other festivities while we are deployed. Because we can't attend. Anybody who sends a party invitation to a deployed soldier is clearly retarded.

2. Do not continue to write a soldier when the soldier never writes you back. If you really want attention that bad, jump off a building.

3. The meanest thing you can do to a soldier is to send generic, not name brand, goods. Hey, I like to save money too, but sending generic brand goods is worse than taking a dump in a cardboard box and shipping it over.

4. No more magazines dated back to 1980. It's not like anybody is actually going to read them. I know vacuum cleaners with better care package sense than you.

5. Don't ever send school supplies unless we ask. Most soldiers don't like to criticize care packages, but you could send over a box of deadly scorpions and that would be a better package. Yes, seriously.

6. Do not send a typewritten letter about your personal life to a soldier. It doesn't matter if you're Elvis Presley back from the dead, or the first person to ride a unicorn. Receiving a typed letter about your personal life is the lowest form of support known to a soldier.

7. Don't shop at the Dollar Store for your soldier. I'm sure it sounds great when you tell your family and friends that you support the troops by sending care packages, but if you're shopping at the Dollar Store you're probably worse off than we are. Please, send us the mailing address to the bridge you live under, and we'll try and help.

8. If it's not electronic, sometimes (okay, almost always) it's not worth sending. I'm convinced 99% of what people send us is garbage. I haven't seen a soldier yet complain about receiving an iPod in the mail. I'm just saying.

9. Do not send crossword puzzles. Or word finds. It's a sure way to disappoint a soldier when they open the care package. I've seen people who were punched in the face repeatedly look much happier than soldiers who opened care packages with crossword puzzles.

10. Don't tell a soldier that you understand what he or she is going through because your neighbor's cousin has a sister who has a brother who knows somebody who was deployed. It's a sure way of having your care package transformed into a kicking ball. Or a smoking pile of ash.

http://gocomics.typepad.com/the_sandbox/

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If [barack Obama] wins this nomination, I'm going to do what I can to help him become president...After all the mean things they said about me, I can't believe I'm saying this.

---Bill Clinton

[DogOnPorch]

HOW TO PREPARE FOR DEPLOYMENT TO IRAQ / AFGHANISTAN

1. Sleep on a cot in the garage.

2. Replace the garage door with a curtain.

3. Six hours after you go to sleep, have your wife or girlfriend whip open the curtain, shine a flashlight in your eyes and mumble, "Sorry, wrong cot."

4. Renovate your bathroom. Hang a green plastic sheet down from the middle of your bathtub and move the showerhead down to chest level. Keep four inches of soapy cold water on the floor. Stop cleaning the toilet and pee everywhere but in the toilet itself. Leave two to three sheets of toilet paper. Or for best effect, remove it altogether. For a more realistic deployed bathroom experience, stop using your bathroom and use a neighbor's. Choose a neighbor who lives at least a quarter mile away.

5. When you take showers, wear flip-flops and keep the lights off.

6. Every time there is a thunderstorm, go sit in a wobbly rocking chair and dump dirt on your head.

7. Put lube oil in your humidifier instead of water and set it on "HIGH" for that tactical generator smell.

8. Don't watch TV except for movies in the middle of the night. Have your family vote on which movie to watch and then show a different one.

9. Leave a lawnmower running in your living room 24 hours a day for proper noise level.

10. Have the paperboy give you a haircut.

11. Once a week, blow compressed air up through your chimney making sure the wind carries the soot across and on to your neighbor's house. Laugh at him when he curses you.

12. Buy a trash compactor and only use it once a week. Store up garbage in the other side of your bathtub.

13. Wake up every night at midnight and have a peanut butter and jelly sandwich on a saltine cracker.

14. Make up your family menu a week ahead of time without looking in your food cabinets or refrigerator. Then serve some kind of meat in an unidentifiable sauce poured over noodles. Do this for every meal.

15. Set your alarm clock to go off at random times during the night. When it goes off, jump out of bed and get to the shower as fast as you can. Simulate the lack of hot water by running out into your yard and breaking out the garden hose.

16. Once a month, take every major appliance completely apart and put it back together again.

17. Use 18 scoops of coffee per pot and allow it to sit for five or six hours before drinking.

18. Invite at least 185 people you don't really like because of their strange hygiene habits to come and visit for a couple of months. Exchange clothes with them.

19. Have a fluorescent lamp installed on the bottom of your coffee table and lie under it to read books.

20. Raise the thresholds and lower the top sills of your front and back doors so that you either trip over the threshold or hit your head on the sill every time you pass through one of them.

21. Keep a roll of toilet paper on your night stand and bring it to the bathroom with you. And bring your gun and a flashlight.

22. Go to the bathroom when you just have to pass gas, "just in case." Every time.

23. Announce to your family that they have mail, have them report to you as you stand outside your open garage door after supper and then say, "Sorry, it's for the other Smith."

24. Wash only 15 items of laundry per week. Roll up the semi-wet clean clothes in a ball. Place them in a cloth sack in the corner of the garage where the cat pees. After a week, unroll them and without ironing or removing the mildew, proudly wear them to professional meetings and family gatherings. Pretend you don't know what you look or smell like. Enthusiastically repeat the process for another week.

25. Go to the worst crime-infested place you can find, go heavily armed, wearing a flak jacket and a Kevlar helmet. Set up shop in a tent in a vacant lot. Announce to the residents that you are there to help them.

26. Eat a single M&M every Sunday and convince yourself it's for Malaria.

27. Demand each family member be limited to 10 minutes per week for a morale phone call. Enforce this with your teenage daughter.

28. Shoot a few bullet holes in the walls of your home for proper ambiance.

29. Sandbag the floor of your car to protect from mine blasts and fragmentation.

30. While traveling down roads in your car, stop at each overpass and culvert and inspect them for remotely detonated explosives before proceeding.

31. Fire off 50 cherry bombs simultaneously in your driveway at 3:00 a.m. When startled neighbors appear, tell them all is well, you are just registering mortars. Tell them plastic will make an acceptable substitute for their shattered windows.

32. Drink your milk and sodas warm.

33. Spread gravel throughout your house and yard.

34. Make your children clear their Super Soakers in a clearing barrel you placed outside the front door before they come in.

35. Make your family dig a survivability position with overhead cover in the backyard. Complain that the 4x4s are not 8 inches on center and make them rebuild it.

36. Continuously ask your spouse to allow you to go buy an M-Gator.

37. When your 5-year-old asks for a stick of gum, have him find the exact stick and flavor he wants on the Internet and print out the web page. Type up a Form 9 and staple the web page to the back. Submit the paperwork to your spouse for processing. After two weeks, give your son the gum.

38. Announce to your family that the dog is a vector for disease and shoot it. Throw the dog in a burn pit you dug in your neighbor's back yard.

39. Wait for the coldest/ hottest day of the year and announce to your family that there will be no heat / air conditioning that day so you can perform much needed maintenance on the heater / air conditioner. Tell them you are doing this so they won't get cold / hot.

40. Just when you think you're ready to resume a normal life, order yourself to repeat this process for another six months to simulate the next deployment you've been ordered to support.

[M.Dancer]

Soldiers have the darkest sense of humour.

[DogOnPorch]

Soldiers have the darkest sense of humour.

It's been a long war. Are you aware of the works of Spike Milligan? "Rommel? Gunner Who?" for example.

Same deal only WW2.

I have one book somewhere of outhouse graffiti from the Viet-nam War. Now there's dark...

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How do you know she is a witch?

---Monty Python