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DJEC
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Name: DJEC
Birthday: 5/12/1986
Gender: Male
Interests: Reading -- Tolkien, Lewis, Chesterton, Kazuo Ishiguro, Alastair Reynolds. Ancient history, especially military. Modern history, especially military. Hoplology. Castles. Starships and science fiction. Geography, physics, math, political science. Making good food, and eating it. Adventuring outdoors. Idyllic days under the sun.
Expertise: Thinking, reading, analyzing. Making things. Climbing trees. Sweeping the opposition with D-Wil. (Yeah, you know it!) Washing dishes better than my sister. Having inordinate ammounts of random knowledge. Oh yes, and now that I'm in the Army I practice shooting things, blowing stuff up, and clearing buildings.
Occupation: Infantryman
Message: message meEmail: email me
Website: visit my website
Member Since:
2/24/2005
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| I find the things that will or will not scare people very
interesting. Almost all of us have random phobias or fears completely
out of proportion to their real danger. Here's an excellent example
from today at work.
Our platoon has an excellent platoon
sergeant (PSG, in Army acronyms). He is perhaps the best NCO in our
company: a man who is skilled at what he does, easy to get along with,
and who always does his best to look out for his men, even in the
little ways. Above all this he's fearless in combat - and he's seen
plenty of it. There's a story my team leader told me about our
brigade's last deployment in Iraq, a time that our platoon was under
fire. A vehicle was broken down, and they were attempting to recover
it, but the men outside were pinned down by heavy fire from insurgent
machine guns. Our PSG was out there with them, and called up the
situation on the radio as he crouched behind some cover, bullets
skipping by: "We have a vehicle broken down and we're under fire. The
situation is critical: I'm out of dip."
Today we were at the
motor pool, attempting to get our Strykers fixed, as the things are
continually breaking. Our PSG came with us, as it usually helps to have
someone of higher rank there - they can make sure the mechanics work
more quickly. Even so, we always have plenty of time to sit around. At
one point one of the mechanics came up to our PSG and started telling a
story. "So, today we were working on one of the vehicles that went to
Australia last summmer. We had to replace some of the wire under the
driver's seat, and when we looked under it we saw this -" and with a
flourish he whipped out a gigantic plastic spider and held it under our
PSG's nose.
I have never seen such a big man jump so high. Our
PSG is over six feet, and well past 200 pounds. Yet he can still move
very, very fast, let me assure you. When he unstuck himself from the
ceiling he gave that mechanic a death glare like none other, but it was
too late - we were already cracking up left and right.
Come now, fearless when bullets are bouncing by his face, yet scared of spiders? Truly we are strange people. | | |
| So, we're going on a month-long training exercise to the Philippines -
Balikatan '08 being the proper name. We got up at 2 this morning,
lugged all our monstrously heavy bags downstairs, and ran around
finishing all the last minute stuff - getting our weapons, night vision
gear, and other essential items. Finally we're all done, and we sit
around waiting for the word to leave.
We don't. The plane's broken down in Nagano, Japan. So, now we're stuck here for another day.
I'm bringing my camera, so I'll try to take pictures when not otherwise occupied by training. We'll see how it goes.
LATE EDIT: Well, we still haven't gone. Apparently you can't schedule flights in some Japanese cities past certain hours - and whoever made up our travel itinerary flubbed on that one. So we're still here - and (allegedly) leaving tomorrow.
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| So. I finally read all the Harry Potter books.
I suppose I should explain. I haven't read any of them before, with the exception of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. That I only read because my sister had it and I was extraordinarily bored. See, it all started when the first books became popular. I had a reputation - quite well deserved - for reading a lot of books, especially fantasy ones. So everybody presumed I must have read and liked Rowlings' books, although in fact I hadn't noticed them when they first came out. And then in a fit of pique I decided not to read them, just so that I could proudly say that, no, I didn't like them and hadn't read them at all. I suppose this would allow me some measure of revenge at those who teased me for reading books; the logic behind it is stunningly bad and of course sounds silly to my older, slightly wiser self.
But the gist of it is that I never read them. But recently I found that, to my great surprise, one of the guys in my squad here has a complete set of the books - quite odd, as he hardly reads at all and isn't much of a literary sort. But he was talking in the most glowing fashion about how good they were, so I asked to read them and he was obliging.
It's certainly an advantage to read the whole series at once. It took me about a week and a half to finish them all; and I found to my surprise that they were, for the most part, just as good as all the hype that surrounded them while I was growing up - hype that for the most part I dismissed. Now I find that I missed out on reading a good series of books while I was younger, though I didn't much miss having to wait for the next book to come out.
In any case I'd recommend the books to anyone who hasn't read them already (Probably most of you are quite unlike me and actually read them years ago). Yes, they are still fundamentally kid's books, but that's not to say nothing can be gained from reading them. | | |
| I never used to mind cold or darkness half so much as I do now. Alaska is cold and dark in the winter. Very cold, and very dark.
Back in Lancaster, PA, there's still about eight hours of light every day. Here, we get a couple hours of twilight. And it's always cold - although fortunately it's been unseasonably warm (for Alaska!) so we haven't gone into the negative degrees - much. In February we go to the Philippines for a month of training. It'll be nice, because we'll miss one of the coldest months here; but we'll have to spend the whole time knowing it's just a short break, and eventually we must return.
The only other positive thought is that this should be my only full Alaskan winter. Next October we are scheduled to leave for Iraq, which should be much warmer. So I'll miss that winter, and as the standard deployment is 15 months now I'll miss much of the rest - and then when we get back I'll be just a few months out from leaving the Army. Unless for some reason I decide to reenlist, of course - although if I do, it almost certainly won't be for an extended time here in the freezing wilderness.
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| Whee, I'm in Alaska. Fairbanks to be exact. Alaska is interesting, although boring at the same time. Fairbanks and the surrounding region has less people than Lancaster County... much less. Yeah. And it's light all day - supposedly the sun goes down around 11-12ish and comes up again at 3 or 4, but it's not like you can tell the difference. Trust me, I got here at 2 in the morning and it only looked a bit greyer than normal. Otherwise it's pretty cool. Fort Wainwright isn't too big, but it has some stuff to do... some. Especially if you like being outdoors when it's -20 degrees. Fortunately it stays in the 70s or so in the summer, i.e. this month and the next, and maybe some of August too (if we're lucky). Oh yeah, and then in the winter it stays dark all the time about like it's light all the time right now. As one of our briefers during inprocessing said "The sun comes up just enought to shine in your eyes while you're driving." Various other things: Fort Wainwright is home to the 1st Styker Brigade Combat Team, (someone needs to update Wikipedia; we're not the 172 anymore) my brigade. My specific unit is the 1st Battallion, 5th Infantry Regiment (ignore that that article claims we're still based in Fort Lewis). Anyhow not much else to say yet; maybe I'll post more when I have my own internet connection and I'm not on a lame timed account at the base's rec center thingimajig. | | |
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