Boy, this deployment is getting tedious. The
car bomber was a nice break, but it has been dead boring around here for some time.
For a while I had hope that my grenade baiting patrols through the most dangerous intersection in our part of town were going to pay off, but our idiot engineers who inspired me with their incompetence the last time they ate an
RKG there actually managed to identify and shoot at the most predictable and dumb terrorists in Mosul on their last outing...without hitting anyone. I got to clean up their mess and wait for EOD to blow up the harmlessly dropped grenade, and they got to waste three rifle rounds and the most perfect opportunity to safely and predictably hose down those surprisingly effective fools with .50 cal machine gun fire. My chance at glory for bagging those guys on my own initiative (...or further infamy if one my gunners missed by 30m and drilled several holes clear through an innocent's house) is almost certainly blown.
On the domestic front, I did have a good 48 hour run where I pissed off our most dangerous platoon sergeant, received a really amusing attempt at an ass chewing from our semi-autistic infantry-brainwashed company executive officer, and then inadvertently revealed the laziness and/or incompetence of two captains (plus two innocent bystanders who also got blamed) to our battalion commander, but I seem to have stalled on the enemy development front since then. And while one of the innocent bystanders did threaten to eat my unborn children in the future, the rest have been disappointingly passive in their enmity.
I did come awesomely close to the greatest Army social fuckup of all time, but as usual disaster will flirt with me, but the bitch never puts out.
Me: So, why did Sergeant X [creepy, psychologically questionable guy] get his weapon confiscated this time?
[incoherent mumbling from the crowd that presumes I already know or doesn't hear my question]
1SG: And you know what? He says the doctor is going to sign off on him going home, but that's not what the doc told me.
Me: If he goes home, what about his wife? [He got married 6 months ago on leave to a 19 year old soldier a decade his junior who is deployed with the rest of our brigade elsewhere in Iraq.]
1SG: [somewhat condescendingly] The Army will always send her home in that situation, sir.
Me: What, if her husband goes crazy [-er] and gets sent back for treatment she's exempt from the rest of the deployment? That seems odd.
SSG T: No, you can't be in a combat zone if you're pregnant.
Me: [still not getting it, and deploying my standard joke] That's great! Does he know who the father is?
SSG T: Well, not him.
Me: Uh, what? Didn't it happen on leave?
1SG: He went on leave in January. She's six weeks pregnant. [It is clear all five people in the room think I'm an idiot and that I'd known this all along.]
Me: Oooooooh. [Later:] You know, there's a really funny alternate reality where I didn't ask enough questions to get through your collective assumption that I wasn't the last person to find out about this. In that world I'm going up to the most unstable soldier in the company and saying, "congratulations, I hear you're having a baby!" And then having no idea why my teeth are on the floor.
Them: [Stunned expressions, followed by laughter. Disappointed laughter, the bastards.]