2009-01-09

Hurry Up and Wait

One of the most vital and often heard phrases in the Army is "hurry up and wait." While this may sound like a silly contradiction it perfectly explains a good portion of our days lately. We are given a time to be some where, arrive early...and then wait for things to happen. Currently most of the delays are due to situations beyond the control of those we are waiting on, but sometimes a person really starts to wonder what actually is going on.

As odd as it may sound I view waiting as quality time spent conducting mission essential training. It helps us with patience, and at least last time around we usually had to kill time waiting for things to get arranged so our trucks could be up/off-loaded. One also does a lot of waiting when on guard duty.

One negative effect of waiting for long periods (at least for me) is one seems to go through cigarettes at an accelerated pace. Oh well, we're soldiers not angels. To keep things "balanced" I would like to point out to my younger readers that smoking is bad for your health as it causes all sorts of nasty cancers, breathing problems, turns your teeth yellow, and often leads to an addiction to nicotine.

All that being said I will try not to make people wait too long between posts. For OPSEC reasons I am going to be posting about once every 2-3 days in order to try to cut down on people being able to use my posting frequency to judge if I'm on missions. Not that I believe any terrorist is really bored enough to read my ramblings in order to gain intel on the unit, but one never does know for sure. Perhaps Al Quaeda in Iraq hurries up to wait at times too?

I hope everyone's holidays went well and safe.

~~~

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I thought this was a no Terrorists allowed club? Just keep yourself safe!

Anonymous said...

Hi there! Finally dug through my old emails and found the link. No time to read all the posts I've missed - working overtime again and need to get to the office - but I did want to let you know I stopped by. Dingo says hi and requests a beef jerky, but I remind him that his diet forbids it. :)