Let’s Talk Safety

Every Friday in the world, billions of people leave work and head off to enjoy their free time.  No one asks them what their plans are.  No one reminds them to not do stupid things.  It is just an unspoken rule that you not act like a fucking moron.  Your boss assumes you are grown up enough to make logical decisions and be back at work on Monday.  However….these people are not apart of the US military institution.  For those of you not familiar with this, there may be some unfamiliar terms or acronyms you may not know but I will try to limit it or explain.  Let’s walk through the infamous “Safety Briefing” and Army safety as a whole.

Imagine this.  It’s Friday.  1600ish (4PM for those unknowing souls).  An entire platoon/company/battalion is itching to go home and unwind from the asinine crap you endure daily in the Army.  The average soldier assumes they will get out a little early because to be honest, nobody does shit Friday afternoon in the Army.  That’s just how it is.  Now, most of the soldiers here are roughly of drinking age and for the most part, let me repeat that, FOR THE MOST PART, capable of making logical decisions.  However, there are those few that fuck it up for the rest of us.  So, at 1600 we gather for a “Close Out Formation”.  That is, we gather like lemmings so our leaders can lay eyes on us one more time before they release that hell upon society.  Then it begins.  Like it did the week before.  Like it does 52 weeks a year.  And I mean EVERY fucking week of the year.  “Drinking and driving is bad”, or “Don’t beat your spouse”, or my personal favorite “Don’t fuck your buddies wife or dog”.  I can’t make this shit up people.  In the military, we tend to cater to the LOWEST common denominator.  This means that any time we do anything, ranging from picking up trash on a military installation to going out to the field and training for a month, we must suffer because of stupid people.  We can’t fucking conduct physical fitness training (PT) without doing risk assessments.  We have entire days dedicated to the stupid motherfuckers that can’t hack it in real life.  We have to talk about the guy that uses 93 octane unleaded to light his grill.  Yes, that happened just today.  Or one of the ones I personally did the incident report on, a guy that loaded a 30 pound turkey into an aluminum pan, shoved it in the oven, then 4 hours later tried to pull it, and all 3000 fucking gallons of turkey juice, out of the oven.  Those of us good with physics understand that aluminum is not meant to hold that, thus it buckled and spilled all over his legs thereby causing third degree burns needing skin grafts.  We also have people that drink, have good ideas like going swimming, then realize after the fact….THAT THEY CAN”T FUCKING SWIM!!  Seriously?  I suffer on a daily basis because I have to tell grown ass people that they should drink water because we will be doing PT the next day.  Just like the day before.  And the day before that.  I am required to tell soldiers not to do things like shove hot hair straighteners in their partners ass because of the damage it will cause.  THIS is the pride of the US military.  And it is by no means restricted to the Army.  I sat through the same mindless banter with a Marine platoon where the man in charge reminded them not to sleep with 12 year olds they meet in the club.  In Augusta, GA.  We have to read about people who look down the barrels of cannons, attempt to jump from planes minus parachutes, and bring cocaine back from Columbia.  This is the shit we deal with that no one ever tells you about.  I’m not saying not to promote safety…..however, I am saying that we need to take the warning labels off shit and let nature work itself out.  The shear stupidity that is somehow hidden in normal society is magnified in the military.  I’m pretty sure they go to high schools, look for some of the dumbest fuckers they can find and say, “Hey kid, you wanna kill people and not go to jail?” and they’re all, “Fuck Yeah!”  See the video to understand.

In closing, I don’t support blindly killing stupid people.  However, I do support letting them do it to themselves.  If they want to suck start a shotgun, go for it.  Here’s the gun.  Let’s lose the stupid people in life that “forget” their kids in the car and keep our species moving along the upward slope of evolution.