06 July 2009

When posting is light...

When I decided to keep blogging during this deployment, I had to make a decision that ran counter to my every inclination. I was, I decided, going to have to be nice.

Now, you may have noticed I'm not always very nice, but trust me - I'm genetically inclined to be a total ranting bitch on wheels. I am of the school that tells children: If you can't say something nice, come sit by me.

But I didn't know what sort of...tactical situation this trip would present, and so I planned for the worst-case scenario. That one would, of course, involve people dying. And, given my ability to jam my feet in my mouth, I figured that if I went off on a good long rant about how much of an absolute shithead moron Captain So-And-So was, he would be immediately killed the next day.

Then, the way I figured it, his grief-stricken family members would eventually be directed to a post on the internet about him, written only days before he died, in which some random chick devoted paragraphs and paragraphs to describing him as dumber than dogshit. This would, of course, probably make his Mom sad. And really, if there's one thing I never want to feel responsible for, it's making someone's Mom sad.

So sometimes, when there's not a lot of posting, it's because I can't sit down at the computer and generate anything but a seething vat of rage and vitriol. As a deployment winds down, it gets worse. Everyone would rather be somewhere else, all grand ideas have been given up on, and frankly, we grow sick of the people we've been tolerating for months.

So - in summary - everyone in the Army in Iraq who is not on my Civil Affairs Team is an idiot. All of them suffer from cranial-rectal inversion, which might be solved if they extracted their heads far enough for good advice to reach their ears.

But, rather than write mean, bitter posts that would make me feel bad if someone's Mom read them, I will simply take a deep breath and sometimes, rather than write something rude, occasionally leave you with no Bad Dog howling. I think it's best this way.