WTI, Birthdays and other nonsense...

WTI (Weapons and Tactics Instruction)
A whole month in the beautiful Yuma Arizona Desert, Camping, shooting, cooking, running, sitting, sleeping, hiking, reading and watching Sopranoes.

For those of you confused about my job I do all the work when I am back at home. Maintenance, repairs, troubleshooting is all done in the rear.

This means when we go into the field we do NOTHING!!!

We have a good day of work at the beginning setting up my Baby and then a good day of work tearing her down at the end. The rest is just time to kill.

Luckily I had a few things other than Lazer to take up my time.

A week of Mess duty(which was aweful but did pass the time) several days of the "Thunder Dome" a few days at the range and of course MRE bombs!

I am trying to shut mess duty out of my memory so I will skip that one.

The Thunder Dome: this consists of one of two things. Either two bored Marines rolling around in the sand trying to inflict as much pain on each other untill the weaker of the two taps out and sumbits to the constant embaressment and ridicule that comes from losing. I, by the way was undefeated. The other method is finding local wildlife, such as spiders, scorpians, camel spiders, dung beattles, stink bugs, and yes, one poor little lady bug and force them to fight to the death. It was during one of the gladiator matchs that we discovered something very interesting. Now one would assume that a scorpian could kill all of the other bugs. It has all the cool hardware. The well positioned eyes, the giant chompers, the big ol' crab hands and of course the ever deadly stinger of doom. Well we have a saying in the Marine Corps. Assuming makes an ASS out of U and ME. And it did. Now picture a stink beattle. One of the least intelligent of all Gods creatures. While most bugs will run as fast as it can to get away from a predator, a stink bug sticks its behind in the air. However, Comma, pause for effect there is nowhere on a stink bug that a scorpian can sting. Scorpians are dumb cause they don't know when they are done for. Long story short, Scorpians 0 , stink bugs 1.

Then we had the range which was me shooting stuff which is ALWAYS awesome. Radar got the shaft and was picked to do range cleanup. This was chosen the way all important decisions are made in the Corps. Best out of three... Rock, Paper, Scissors. We did luck out because a large amount of extra 203 grenades, more than 100, were discovered. this meant that it was not just our right, but our duty to blow stuff up with these extra exploding projectiles. An hour later we are fully satisfied with the damage we have done to several cars that, well, don't look like cars anymore.

MRE bombs. The commandants gift to every Marine is a self heating pack in every MRE. Now this can be used to heat your food but as this does little to improve the taste of the "food" in question, it can be used for something much more entertaining. Now normally this is where you would see a don't do this at home type thing but wheres the fun in that.
1 Remove the individual packets of Chemicals for self heating pack
2 Cut open packets.
3 Pour the sand like chemicals into some sort of bottle. Plastic is recommeded as glass is usually to hard to blow up and when it does glass cut things up.
4 repeat steps 1-3 with a bare min of 4 self heating packets.
5 Pour some sort of shrapnel such as plastic bb's and duct tape balls into plastic bottle.
6 Add luke warm water to plastic bottle
7 Very quickly screw on the lid to the bottle
8 Run like crazy, find some sort of cover.
9 wait untill the pressure builds up and starts expanding the bottle in ways in was never meant to expand
10 giggle like school boys
11 shoot in glee and glory when the bottle finally explodes and sends hot water and shrapnel in all directions

And there is the living proof that Marines are just little boys at heart who are pleased with the simplest of pleasures.

All in all a great trip, a great tan, and a record of 12 - 0 in the thunder dome.

Oh yeah and it was my birthday yesterday. Thanks for those of you that called and tried to call. My phone is dead and my charger is somewhere between Yuma and Denver right now so no calls for me.

And hopefully I will be in Virginia by this time next week!!!