{"id":22655,"date":"2011-03-21T13:51:58","date_gmt":"2011-03-21T17:51:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/valorguardians.com\/blog\/?p=22655"},"modified":"2011-03-21T18:14:38","modified_gmt":"2011-03-21T22:14:38","slug":"things-i-wouldnt-write","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/?p=22655","title":{"rendered":"Things I wouldn’t write"},"content":{"rendered":"

There’s an opinion column in the Washington Post written by Michael Cummings entitled “I didn’t deserve my combat pay<\/a>“. Basically, Cummings compares his two tours to the Middle East. Of his first tour he wrote;<\/p>\n

We slept on cots. I roomed with eight other people. In the winter, snowmelt leaked through our roof. In the summer, temperatures routinely passed 100 degrees and our AC units would crash. It took several minutes to get hot water in the shower, if it came. Food consisted of two warm trays of heated .?.?. stuff, if we didn\u2019t eat MREs. A snowstorm could knock out the satellite television feed and the Internet, as one did on Super Bowl Sunday.<\/p>\n

In short, conditions were spartan.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Now, I may get some shit for this, seein’s how my war was two decades ago and fairly abbreviated, but; WTF, dude? That’s not Spartan in the least – I mean look at some of the nouns in that statement “AC”, “cots”, “hot water”, “satellite television”, “internet”, “food…warm”. So what if the stuff hardly ever worked. <\/p>\n

I’m not saying he didn’t deserve those things, nor that he didn’t deserve to have the stuff work, but I’m pretty sure no who has spent any time in most of the Army would call that spartan.<\/p>\n

He compares that tour to his second tour;<\/p>\n

On our compound, the water was always warm (sometimes too warm). The chow hall had a Caesar salad bar, a sandwich bar, an ice cream freezer, and shrimp and steak Fridays. My (personal) room had a working AC unit and Internet connection. VBC hosted multiple PXs, coffee shops and nightly dance parties. I could buy pillows, microwaves, televisions or any video game.<\/p>\n

Conditions were plush.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Actually, i thought the description of the first tour was about plush conditions. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There’s an opinion column in the Washington Post written by Michael Cummings entitled “I didn’t deserve … Things I wouldn’t write<\/span>Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[84],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-22655","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-military-issues"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22655","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=22655"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22655\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=22655"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=22655"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=22655"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}