I’m sorry I haven’t written lately. It’s for several reasons. Number one, I am a terrible friend and a lazy writer. Two, I’ve been enjoying my pre-deployment leave and getting super drunk every day and surfing and jumping out of actually quite a few airplanes and playing host to Paul while we play pirate games and sing sea shanties and get drunk at Disneyland. So I’m sorry I’m not sorry.
Now many of you might have seen some movies sometime. Those movies might have been military themed. Did they involve charming leading men? Were those leading men officers? (if you don’t know what an officer is, you need to read more, you uncultured swine). In those movies, officers are the most inspiring and charming individuals that you’ve ever seen and give rousing speeches to cheering men and make ladies swoon in white dress uniforms.

Now maybe some of the more idealistic of you are thinking to yourself, “Boy, they are handsome. I’ll bet they are noble and principled warriors.” You are a fool. We are crazed, disgraceful lunatics who drink like you wouldn’t believe. Or maybe those of you who read my story about Thailand would believe it.

We current breed of officers are a new class of military men who tend to treat every Friday night as a special occasion. That occasion being that, despite two wars and an ever increasingly politically correct military that is more and more damning to anyone who is a “rough and ready” warfighter, we have survived another week not having either killed someone (that we aren’t supposed to) or gotten ourselves fired.

So we drink. And we drink hard. We all hope and hold a small candle in our hearts for the days of gentlemen officers fighting civilized wars but the truth is that we are a bunch of dogs. We are the unwanted doing the unspeakable for the ungrateful. We have done so much for so long with so little we are now qualified to do anything with nothing.