Category: War Stories

Everyone who sent me this article in their email subject line reading “Marine takes sniper shot to the head and lights up a cigarette 15 minutes later”, so I just assume that the cigarette is the most important part of the story;

Early March 4 in Helmand province, Boothroyd, attached to the 26th Marine Expeditionary Unit, was on a rooftop providing over-watch for a local security patrol. It was his first deployment. Insurgents opened fire, “and I got hit by the first bullet,” he said.

The bullet pierced his helmet. The Kevlar caught and turned the round, he said, “so instead of going in and thrashing my skull,” it entered through the neck and lodged itself above and behind his right ear

So, I’m guessing that smoking a cigarette after getting shot in the head will save your life, judging by the importance of the cigarette in the story. I’m also assuming that smoking more cigarettes will prevent head shots, too. Maybe I’m wrong, but I’m not taking a chance.

The Rumor Doctor sends us a link to his latest investigation;

From World War II to the first Gulf War, you could find Bob Hope wherever U.S. troops were fighting. But was the entertainer so omnipresent that Marines landing at the east coast of North Korea in 1950 waded ashore, ready for battle, only to find that Hope and a USO show were already there?

Read the rest at Stars & Stripes.

Last night I got two packages in the mail, one addressed to me, one addressed to my wife. My first thought, of course was that they were bombs since I didn’t recognize the return address and wasn’t expecting anything. But I shook them (the first thing you should do with a suspected bomb, right?) and it sounded like pills in bottles. So I opened one.

It was medication that I no longer take and a bill for $12. I opened my wife’s and the same things – two medications she no longer takes and a bill for $12. The packages were from Express Scripts. So I called them and after navigating through the frustratingly complicated telephone menu (so I can push ‘0’ for a rep) I get this dunce on the phone and I ask “who are you people” and it turns out they’re the mail order prescription contract activity for Tricare – civilians.

I explain the problem in my usual booming, terse voice without cussing and she hangs up on me. So I call back and get a supervisor who tells me I still owe money for prescriptions I don’t need and if I want to get it adjusted, I have to have the doctor (Walter Reed Army Medical Center) write them a letter (a note from my parent). So I call Walter Reed this morning and they tell me (after diddling around with some Jamaican-accented boob, whom I imagine has five-inch long finger nails and $400 hairdo) that the prescription service can only be requested by me, myself or I from a lady sitting in the hall. Well, of course, I didn’t.

So I call Express Scripts again and after explaining the problem for twelfth time, they tell me that I still owe them $24. When I said I’d just send them back the pills, they said I’d still owe them $24. They have a “policy” which is kept, I imagine, surrounded by candles on an altar in the center of a garden, in the center of their building.

He actually asked me if Walter Reed was the name of my doctor (hand to God).

So I’ve come to the conclusion that Express Scripts is a criminal enterprise which uses their access to the medical records of military members to blackmail us with the health of our credit records. And it is now my mission to sever Express Scripts from their contract with the military health services.

If nothing else I’m going to cost them much more than $24 using their toll-free number and giving their employees heart burn.

Is it any wonder I hate civilians?