Moving on...

My neighbor in the JOC is having a flag flown on a mission as a thank you gift to some friends of his for all their help during this trip. In addition to sending packages and the like, they did one thing that is particularly inventive.

They took his wife out for her birthday. Nothing crazy there. But waiting for her at the restaurant was a blown up life size picture cut-out of him. A flat-him if you will. Flat-him had dinner with everyone. Flat-him went to the bar with everyone. I suggested they send flat-him on his next deployment instead. Everybody would win w/no degredation to operations.

He's actually pretty busy some of the time. Things come in spurts at the JOC. He also has some additional duties that take more of his time and attention than his primary duties. Funny how that can work.

He was nice and gave me a couple extra sets of the Army uniform he had lying around. I'm waiting for the second set that I had on issue to come in and so have been making due with the one I bought before I came out here. Now I have one more set close to my size and an extra that would fit two of me. Technically, I'm not supposed to be wearing the Army uniform anyway, but I like it better and it's more comfortable. No one here cares.

One of today's amusing adventures was roaming around the conventional side of the base. They salute and stuff over there. It's like they forgot we're in a war zone. We have to carry a weapon, but it must be unloaded. What's the point?

So I grabbed my pistol. I put it in a concealment holster for convenience and it was kind of like being back home. Except back home I am treated like an adult and can carry my pistol loaded. I guess if anything happened I could seek cover, take the magazine out of my pocket, load the weapon, chamber a round, and engage the threat. Seems like it save time and lives to just be able to draw and engage, but apparently it is unsafe for members of the military to carry loaded weapons when prosecuting a war.

Sure some people will bring up yesterday's incident where apparently the shooter did not kill himself as originally reported but instead killed five of our comrades. Actually, the current policy of carrying unloaded weapons is due to an institutional fear that Joe will shoot himself in the foot and so rather than train people we take away their bullets. The individual that killed his brothers is a special case.

Maybe the Brady campaign will come and take all the guns away and then we'll all play nice together.

Anyway, the whole point of going to the conventional side of the post was to pick up the supposed stash food. But, as I should have expected, it was all Halal meals.

Of course.

My other funny moment was talking to one of the senior guys here about terminology during my briefs. There are only so many ways to say that due to X weather condition, asset Y will be unable to operate or whatever. The terms my predecessor used were favorable, unfavorable, and marginal. Apparently go and no-go are the desired terms. Works for me. I'm briefing the ground guys. They don't need the details of what will impact things, they just need to know what they can use and what they can't on any given day. Drive on.

I was also told that I should explain that when I discuss impacts to certain communications equipment, that I'm referring to the impact of activity in Space on our radios. He said there are maybe 4-5 people in the JOC that understand the technical details, but I should clarify which aspects of the functionality I'm covering. I made sure he understood that I'm not one of the 4-5 people that knows all the technical details, but that I could give a quick overview so people know what it is I'm referring to when I brief impacts to communications.