How to prepare for Deployment to Iraq or Afghanistan (LOONG POST) by Static

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How to prepare for Deployment to Iraq or Afghanistan (LOONG POST)

POSTED BY: STATIC
UPDATED: Saturday, February 14, 2004 21:25
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Saturday, February 14, 2004 1:52 PM

How to Prepare for the Afghanistan or Iraq Deployment

Your first day in Afghanistan or Iraq can be a real shock to your system. By following these simple steps, you can be mentally prepared for everyday life in Afghanistan. 60 days before you deploy, do the following:

1. Everyone in the house sleep on a cot in the garage. If it is hot in the garage, make it hotter - if it’s cold, make it colder!

2. Replace the garage door with a blanket.

3. Six hours after you go to sleep, have your wife whip open the curtain, shine a flashlight in your eyes and mumble, "Sorry, wrong cot."

4. Renovate your bathroom. Hang a green plastic sheet from the middle of your bathtub and move the showerhead down to chest- level. Keep four inches of soapy, cold water on the floor.

5. Stop cleaning the toilet, no - pee everywhere but in the toilet itself. Leave two to three sheets of toilet paper on the roll. Or for best effect, remove it altogether. For more realistic deployed bathroom experience, stop using your bathroom and use a neighbor's. Choose a neighbor who lives at least a quarter mile away.

6. When you take showers, wear flip-flops and keep the lights off. As a matter of fact, take all the light bulbs out of the bathroom!

7. Put lube oil in your humidifier instead of water and set it on "HIGH" for that tactical generator smell.

8. Don't watch TV except for movies in the middle of the night. Have your family vote on which movie to watch and then show a different one. Tape all the sports you don't like and play them during the day. Play the same one 5 days in a row.

9. Leave a lawnmower running in a closet 24 hours a day for proper noise level.

10. Have a friendly paperboy give you a haircut. #1 means: so close he draws blood. #2 means: same as #1. #3 means: leave it long #4 means: same as #3. When he gives you the mirror, no matter what it looks like, smile and get out. (Do not tip with cardboard chips - these are only for change.)

11. Once a week, blow compressed air up through your chimney making sure the wind carries the soot across and on to your neighbor's house. Laugh at him when he curses you.

12. Buy a trash compactor and only use it once a week. Store up garbage in the other side of your bathtub. Trash with Top Secret information (your address, name, mail, etc...) must be burned. Do not mix the two! Make your wife inspect the trash before she burns it.

13. Wake up every night at midnight and have a peanut butter and jelly sandwich on a saltine cracker. Again, in the dark.

14. Make up your family menu a week ahead of time without looking in your food cabinets or refrigerator. Then serve some kind of meat in an unidentifiable sauce poured over noodles. Do this for every meal.

15. Set your alarm clock to go off at random times during the night. When it goes off, jump out of bed and get to the shower as fast as you can. Simulate there is no hot water by running out into your yard and breaking out the garden hose.

16. Once a month, take every major appliance completely apart and but it back together again.

17. Use 18 scoops of coffee per pot and allow it to sit for five or six hours before drinking.

18. Invite at least 20 people you don't really like because of their strange hygiene habits to come and visit for a couple of months. Exchange clothes with them.

19. Have a fluorescent lamp installed on the bottom of your coffee table and lie under it to read books.

20. Raise the thresholds and lower the top sills of your front and back doors so that you either trip over the threshold or hit your head on the sill every time you pass through one of them.

21. Replace all the chairs in your house with either folding chairs or milk crates.

22. Keep a roll of toilet paper on your nightstand and bring it to the bathroom with you. And bring your gun and a flashlight.

23. Go to the bathroom when you just have to pass gas, "just in case." Every time.

24. Announce to your family that they have mail, have them report to you as you stand outside your open garage door after supper and then say, "Sorry, it's for the other Smith."

25. Wash only 15 items of laundry per week (the laundry bag counts as one item!). Roll up the semi-wet clean clothes in a ball. Place them in a cloth sack in the corner of the garage where the cat pees. After a week, unroll them and without ironing or removing the mildew, proudly wear them to professional meetings and family gatherings. Pretend you don't know what you look or smell like. Enthusiastically repeat the process for another week.

26. Go to the worst crime-infested place you can find, go heavily armed, wearing a flak jacket and a Kevlar helmet. Set up shop in a tent in a vacant lot. Announce to the residents that you are there to help them.

27. Eat a single prozac every Sunday and convince yourself it's for Malaria.

28. Demand each family member be limited to 10 minutes per week for a morale phone call. Enforce this with your teenage daughter. Dial the number and hang up 30 times, on the 31st time, complete your call.

29. Sandbag the floor of your car to protect from mine blasts and fragmentation.

30. While traveling down roads in your car, stop at each overpass and culvert and inspect them for remotely detonated explosives before proceeding.

31. Fire off 50 cherry bombs simultaneously in your driveway at 3:00 a. m. When startled neighbors appear, tell them all is well, you are just registering mortars. Tell them plastic will make an acceptable substitute for their shattered windows.

32. Drink your milk and sodas warm.

33. Spread gravel throughout your house and yard. If you start to wear a path in the rocks, put down more....and bigger.

34. Make your children clear their Super Soakers in a clearing barrel you placed outside the front door before they come in.

35. Make your family dig a survivability position with overhead cover in the backyard. Complain that the 4x4s are not 8 inches on center and make them rebuild it.

36. Continuously ask your spouse to allow you to go buy an M-Gator.

37. When your 5-year-old asks for a stick of gum, have him find the exact stick and flavor he wants on the Internet and print out the web page. Type up a Form 9 and staple the web page to the back. Submit the paperwork to your spouse for processing. After two weeks, give your son the gum.

38. Announce to your family that the dog is a vector for disease and shoot it. Throw the dog in a burn pit you dug in your neighbor's back yard.

39. Wait for the coldest/ hottest day of the year and announce to your family that there will be no heat/air conditioning that day so you can perform much needed maintenance on the heater/ air conditioner. Tell them you are doing this so they won't get cold/ hot.

40. Completely tape over your computer screen just leaving a 9" x 9" area for viewing.

41. Cut a hole in your vacuum bag and every morning run the vacuum through the house.

42. Hold a family briefing for everything you do (drive to the store, mowing the yard, washing clothes) with so many briefings, you won't have any time to do the work. As a matter of fact - give a brief on how you are going to do the brief! Make everyone in the family go to the brief - even if it doesn't pertain to them. Ensure everyone uses the proper terminology- "next slide. slide down. slide off. continue."

43. Throw away your coins. Make little cardboard chips to use as money. Oh - you can't pay with chips, it only comes in change.

44. I you are going on a flight, arrive at the airport 10 hours early and take a nap at the ticket counter.

45. Go to the local pet store and buy 20 mice. Let them free in the house. Do not try to catch them, that is what Cobras are for. The point here is to get used to them climbing on you at night. This will also teach you good techniques for storing food. Put a nail in your ceiling and hang your food from the nail. If you have a mouse that can get at that food - do not wait for the Cobra! Kill the mouse.

46. Make a 50 lb pulley system to keep your refrigerator door closed. Learn to hold the door open with your knee as you take things out.

47. Put a commercial grade fan by your trash can. See if any member of the family can get all of their trash in the can without it blowing off the plate first.

48. Only put out breakfast cereal that is good for you. Take all the "good" cereal (Fruit Loops, Sugar Frosted Flakes, CoaCoa Puffs) down to the city jail for the convicts to enjoy.

49. First thing in the morning, make everyone brief what they did yesterday. At the end of the day, make everyone brief what they did during the day. Do this everyday - 7 days a week.

50. Just when you think you're ready to resume a normal life, order yourself to repeat this process for another two months to simulate the next deployment you've been ordered to support.

==================================================
"Wash. . .we got some local color happening. A grand entrance would not go amiss."

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Saturday, February 14, 2004 6:08 PM

STEVE580

You know, even though I'm not planning on joining the army, I think I may try implementing some of these policies in my home. Particularly 5, 31, and 38.

-Steve

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Saturday, February 14, 2004 9:25 PM

GUNRUNNER

I see the the US Army is taking after the Navy:
http://www.geocities.com/Pentagon/3392/humor.html

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