Homeless Diver

I have to agree with Nick on this, some people simply cannot keep themselves from embellishing the facts.  Having been in the military and again in war in civilian capacity, I can vouch that a great many people call home with ‘war stories’. He references a story on military.com that reeks of a bunch of hooey that seems to be todays calling card for gaining sympathy for those that have otherwise un-extraordinary lives in the military/gov’t sectors. Just because you ‘were there’ does not make you a fucking hero. Nick is a contractor on Antarctica, (and has experience in Iraq as well).

I like his take on this. The most interesting parts are the comments that came back to slam him from POV’s assuming fellow Ice Folk identities.

I once had another blog where I slammed the military and contractors alike for calling/writing home about how ‘dangerous’ it was… when none of these people experienced anything more dangerous than high cholesterol from the 4x daily buffet of all-you-can-eat DFAC meals. I would regularly get nasty grams about how insensitive I was to the war fighters.

One rather large group of correspondence was from the friends of a particular person that is now part of those fictitious Pajamas Media ‘experts’. He lied blatantly and embellished everything so bad that one blog entry claimed to have a mortar hitting next to his trailer when it was actually 4 kilometers away outside CP-1 (which I had to do the report on). He talked about having to endure the hardships of eating bland military food when he was actually only issued a single MRE for the flight over and had access to the Embassy chow hall at 4 meals a day…. and it was great food. I had his billeting info, his work schedule, his civilian work history, his palace office info & tasking, ..everything. I was not part of the RSO and the info was nonsecured. His was a social agenda - so was mine.

Even after calling out this supercool cat, his friends then slammed me for the act of ‘calling out’ instead of admiting their friend was a craptastic lier.

Today, July 1st, 2008 marks my one year anniversary on Boracay.

I had parted ways with Iraq and The Company in mid June 2007. No more contractor for me. They gave me a ticket going to Texas by the most lengthy and impossible route imaginable. I had no intention of going back to the USA. In Dubai, I purchased my own ticket to Manila - one way. Copped a squat there for a few weeks for some dental work (bad decision), new glasses (that broke in 4 pieces when a took them off and they refused to replace them), and to wait for Chad. He had been visiting Boracay for 3 or 4 years constantly and suggested staying here for a few months before we parted and looked into other fields of work. Neither of us had any great plans at the time so it sounded like a new plan in motion.

We set foot on July 1st, 2008 and walked up to Blue Mango where Chad secured us a couple of rooms at monthly low-season rates with ease. Vaughn was very accommodating and the party began!

It honestly doesn’t seem like it’s been a whole year.

We might have our differences Chad, but for this past year, I say Thank You. I can easily say that its been a blast and the best time Ive had.

just do a google search on the word “contractor” and “killed”. In the past, no one was ever labeled as a “contractor”. like the guy killed at the stadium by a pallet skid…says ‘contractor killed’. Well, duh. But in the past it would have been a person, a worker, etc… was killed. But now the connotation is that contractors are bad and if they got killed, it was somehow the fault of himself or his contacting company. All the services done by just about any city in the USA are contracted jobs. highway maintenance, sewage, electricity, phone building maintenance, ….all of it. Those people aren’t on the cities payroll, they are paid by the company that won the contract.

Been that way for a long, long time. But all of a sudden, its become necessary to use the label ‘contractor’ to set the tone of negativity.