Content note: brief mention of sexual assault and stalking, but no SA details

When I was a young (female) soldier, I was assaulted by another female soldier who then stalked me for a long time. This was before the days of smartphones that could block numbers, and I was in the middle of preparing for deployment and had a key role and felt I couldn’t change my number (which in hindsight I totally...

OIF 06/07. We are raiding (redacted)’s house, not because we thought anything bad about them, but because they fed us info and we didn’t want to signal AQI that they were important by leaving them alone. Me and my buddy are on the roof pulling security wearing our night vision devices, PVS-14s to be exact.

Now the thing to know about these is that they only cover one eye, so your depth perception...

Winter. Field training in the woodland.

It was an exhausting day with lots of running and marching. Weather was quite cold and felt like it gave some energy to push forward.

Trekking through hilly area, with snow up to your knees was a challenge. It burns energy very well, I bet crossfiters would love it. Walking through deep snow is hard enough, but doing “fire and movement” maneuvers felt like...

So, where were we last time? Oh yeah, the first night.

Between the cacophony of snoring from my squadmates, the soreness of my legs, the general anxiety about what was going to happen tomorrow, and the fact that this far up north, the sun never really goes away in the summer and the barracks room had no curtains, I didn't have the easiest time falling asleep. Nonetheless, at some point the...

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Part 2

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Sorry for the VERY late finale, guys. I had a trip out of the country, then immediately had some pretty nasty health issues to resolve for the past six weeks.

PFC Nephew did, in fact, make it to the ball with his own Pinks and Greens (with the appropriate rank, even!). I do have photos, but

Let's start with the questions:

1. Is the sailor hot? - Wow. Yes she is. PFC Nephew seemed...

As i'm sure with all military personnel, being able to call oneself a Sailor, Soldier, Marine, Airmen, honestly Coasties what the hell do you call yourselves because I have no idea aside from the above? Me being the fresh 18 years old and with all the esprit de corps being pumped into us, I was no different. The time was November 2007 at Great Lakes, Illinois home of Recruit Training Command. My...

As usual I was reminded of this story by someone else’s tale of their gas chamber experience.

We had one guy I’ll call…R. Not his real name.

Coffee is one of the first things I remembered about him when I started writing this. As someone who joined the Army basically straight out of high school, I never drank coffee; still don’t. This dude, on the other hand, ate the coffee grounds from MREs...

We recently had the privilege of briefing HRH The Princess Royal today. Such an engaging person, knowledgeable, interested and definitely had read our bios intently!! I particularly enjoyed introducing her to some of the team, when she asked how long one of the sailors had been here (meaning the Island) and he replied “Oh since about ten past four Ma’am”…….

“I’m sorry?”

“Yeah about ten past four...

As always, lightly edited and probably too damn long. Enjoy.

The big day came and I reported to the MEPS station. The Army sprung for luxury accommodations for travel to Ft. Bliss in the form of a Greyhound bus. The trip from Illinois to Texas sucked. Much like the trip from AIT on “The Hill” to my permanent unit, it was filled with all kinds of adventure. It’s been a lot of years, but 99.9% of...

I‘ve been hesitant to post the stories that my father told me about his time in the military for a while now. He’s told me quite a few from his time as a conscript in the Bundeswehr of the mid to late 1980s, but he told these stories to me about ten years ago, usually when we were huddled infront of the barbecue on a snowy winter evening or at 1am in the kitchen after both of us had had way too...