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.

We were told last month about daily brown-outs scheduled for every day over the next month. I say ‘told’ but we really found out on the first day of brownouts and then in the Manila newspaper that same day. They’re finally fixing the same lines they ‘fixed’ over the last 4 months of scheduled brownouts.

At the risk of sounding critical of the infrastructure management going on here - remember this: we could routinely bypass the power for the entire Green Zone (IZ) in Baghdad with about 200x more usage…. bypassing all existing grids … and maintaining smaller loops of active current while repairing the main system.  Daily. It took a long time to finally upgrade the system but we never had outages on this magnitude and that was in warzone with minimal resources.

Schedule? Monday - Friday 0830 am to 1730pm. Saturday is halfday, their choice of hours. Sunday is off for them so we get to keep juice. The biggest irony? The only office of Akelco (power company) is also completely without electricity during a brownout. Its pretty humorous really.