Something a friend sent me

How to Prepare for a Deployment to Iraq/Afghanistan
1. Sleep on a cot in the garage.
2. Replace the garage door with a curtain.
3. Six hours after you go to sleep, have your wife or girlfriend whip open the curtain, shine a flashlight in your eyes and mumble, "Sorry, wrong cot."
4. Renovate your bathroom. Hang a green plastic sheet down from the middle of your bathtub and move the showerhead down to chest level. Keep four inches of soapy cold water on the floor. Stop cleaning the toilet and pee everywhere but in the toilet itself. Leave two to three sheets of toilet paper. Or for best effect, remove it altogether. For a more realistic deployed bathroom experience, stop using your bathroom and use a neighbor's. Choose a neighbor who lives at least a quarter mile away.
5. When you take showers, wear flip-flops and keep the lights off.
6. Every time there is a thunderstorm, go sit in a wobbly rocking chair and dump dirt on your head.
7. Put lube oil in your humidifier instead of water and set it on "HIGH" for that tactical generator smell.
8. Don't watch TV except for movies in the middle of the night. Have your family vote on which movie to watch and then show a different one.
9. Leave a lawnmower running in your living room 24 hours a day for proper noise level.
10. Have the paperboy give you a haircut.
11. Once a week, blow compressed air up through your chimney making sure the wind carries the soot across and on to your neighbor's house. Laugh at him when he curses you.
12. Buy a trash compactor and only use it once a week. Store up garbage in the other side of your bathtub.
13. Wake up every night at midnight and have a peanut butter and jelly sandwich on a saltine cracker.
14. Make up your family menu a week ahead of time without looking in your food cabinets or refrigerator. Then serve some kind of meat in an unidentifiable sauce poured over noodles. Do this for every meal.
15. Set your alarm clock to go off at random times during the night. When it goes off, jump out of bed and get to the shower as fast as you can. Simulate there is no hot water by running out into your yard and breaking out the garden hose.
16. Once a month, take every major appliance completely apart and put it back together again.
17. Use 18 scoops of coffee per pot and allow it to sit for five or six hours before drinking.
18. Invite at least 185 people you don't really like because of their strange hygiene habits to come and visit for a couple of months. Exchange clothes with them.
19. Have a fluorescent lamp installed on the bottom of your coffee table and lie under it to read books.
20. Raise the thresholds and lower the top sills of your front and back doors so that you either trip over the threshold or hit your head on the sill every time you pass through one of them.
21. Keep a roll of toilet paper on your night stand and bring it to the bathroom with you. And bring your gun and a flashlight.
22. Go to the bathroom when you just have to pass gas, "just in case." Every time.
23. Announce to your family that they have mail, have them report to you as you stand outside your open garage door after supper and then say, "Sorry, it's for the other Smith."
24. Wash only 15 items of laundry per week. Roll up the semi-wet clean clothes in a ball. Place them in a cloth sack in the corner of the garage where the cat pees. After a week, unroll them and without ironing or removing the mildew, proudly wear them to professional meetings and family gatherings. Pretend you don't know what you look or smell like. Enthusiastically repeat the process for another week.
25. Go to the worst crime-infested place you can find, go heavily armed, wearing a flak jacket and a Kevlar helmet. Set up shop in a tent in a vacant lot. Announce to the residents that you are there to help them.
26. Eat a single M&M every Sunday and convince yourself it's for Malaria.
27. Demand each family member be limited to 10 minutes per week for a morale phone call. Enforce this with your teenage daughter.
28. Shoot a few bullet holes in the walls of your home for proper ambiance.
29. Sandbag the floor of your car to protect from mine blasts and fragmentation.
30. While traveling down roads in your car, stop at each overpass and culvert and inspect them for remotely detonated explosives before proceeding.
31. Fire off 50 cherry bombs simultaneously in your driveway at 3:00 a.m. When startled neighbors appear, tell them all is well, you are just registering mortars. Tell them plastic will make an acceptable substitute for their shattered windows.
32. Drink your milk and sodas warm.
33. Spread gravel throughout your house and yard.
34. Make your children clear their Super Soakers in a clearing barrel you placed outside the front door before they come in.
35. Make your family dig a survivability position with overhead cover in the backyard. Complain that the 4x4s are not 8 inches on center and make them rebuild it.
36. Continuously ask your spouse to allow you to go buy an M-Gator.
37. When your 5-year-old asks for a stick of gum, have him find the exact stick and flavor he wants on the Internet and print out the web page. Type up a Form 9 and staple the web page to the back. Submit the paperwork to your spouse for processing. After two weeks, give your son the gum.
38. Announce to your family that the dog is a vector for disease and shoot it. Throw the dog in a burn pit you dug in your neighbor's back yard.
39. Wait for the coldest/ hottest day of the year and announce to your family that there will be no heat/air conditioning that day so you can perform much needed maintenance on the heater/ air conditioner. Tell them you are doing this so they won't get cold/ hot.
40. Just when you think you're ready to resume a normal life, order yourself to repeat this process for another six months to simulate the next deployment you've been ordered to support.

Merry Christmas From Florida!

 

PUBLIC SPEAKING

I have spoken at a couple High Schools one in Orlando, Florida and one in Portland, Oregon and have been by two different colleges to speak about my experiences with war. If anyone else is interested in having me speak about what I have seen and done (just as all of you read about it on my blog) I would love to know and hear about it. If things work out I will attend...

My email can be found on the Right hand side of my blog, or simply by emailing me at misoldierthoughts@gmail.com for those interested.

Take care,

Zachary Scott-Singley

Stress

I monitor my personal stress by my reaction to people and events. As my stress level increases so do my responses to that stress. Things which especially set me off stem from my experience with combat in Iraq. When I am in a crowd I find myself stressed out and begin the almost automatic scanning procedures, locating avenues of possible attack (in the military these are called avenues of approach), escape routes, and looking for danger constantly by using a pattern of eye movements so as not to miss a possible avenue of approach.

Within a minute or so (depending on my stress level) I will have realized what I am doing and will begin to ramp down my stress level and response by thinking logically about the situation. I am not in Iraq, these people are not potential attackers and I am ok. I usually find a reason to leave when that technique doesn't work, and at those times when leaving is not an option (like at a busy restaurant after you order food but you haven't' paid yet) I usually get very irritable with my wife and kids which isn't fair to them.

These techniques are not the best methods but I live with them, what can I say, I am a product of this war now and must live with the lasting effects...

My Movie Idea

Let’s go into the future ok? I’ll go and get my time lazor and shoot you into 2035, it’ll be awesome!

Ok, stand there by that tree while I arm the time lazor with time bullets. Here we go!!!

BLAMO!

Ok, now I’ll shoot myself into the future with my time lazor, I use my last time bullet and Kapow! I am in the future as well.

Wow this is awesome. Everyone here has hypercolor shirts and wears slap bracelets just like when I was growing up in the 80’s. Cool, 2035 is like 1985 but radder!

Look over there! They cloned unicorns with wings and use them as transportation instead of cars.

Let’s go ride ours over that rainbow off into the universe!

The end.

This would be my movie if I were a director…

Personality Test

Personality Test

Zachary Scott-Singley

In my time I have taken many personality tests, but none affected me as much as the one I took when trying to become a police officer in 2006. I passed of course and was asked to interview, but by that time (it took almost 4 months to respond to my test) I had already taken another job which was my first choice to begin with) where I currently work. I also took a personality test for this paper and was not surprised by my results. Through my constant writings I have become fairly aware of how I operate and so my results from the Personality Test were not incredible or surprising to me. In the test I was rated as:

Openness to Experience/Intellect- You are relatively open to new experiences. (Your percentile: 76) Conscientiousness- You are well organized, and are reliable. (Your percentile: 69) Extraversion- You are extremely outgoing, social, and energetic. (Your percentile: 96) Agreeableness- You find it easy to express irritation with others. (Your percentile: 38) Neuroticism- You probably remain calm, even in tense situations. (Your percentile: 9)

That was mostly for your sake, but for mine I would like to discuss my police personality test I took for the Portland Oregon police force. It was both an intelligence test as well as a personality test and for me the questions (which were often re-stated in different ways) were much more interesting than the hundredth intelligence test I had taken… I found it interesting (and often wondered what it said about me) when they would ask on the form what you like (colors for instance) or questions like, “Do rainy days make you feel sad? Yes or no?” These questions which probably were placed in to measure your emotional stability were very interesting to me and I found myself thinking as I took the test that I would very much like to have been able to see the police’s assessment of my personality. They called me back for an interview, so I must have been fairly stable (or perhaps just the right amount of unstable for the job) and were very disappointed when I told them that I had taken a job with someone else.

The one question which I found alarming though was the one asking if I had killed anyone. It was probably in the test to see if they could weed out potential felons from the police but I was probably the only one out of the one hundred or so of us who had to answer yes that day. I had killed someone, many someones in fact. We were not to get up for any reason during this test, but I raised my hand and when an attractive young police woman came to ask me if I needed help I asked her if I would be disqualified for answering yes to that question. I explained that my platoon and I had been responsible for over 190 confirmed kills based on our intelligence and that I had shot people as well while deployed in Iraq. She had grown pale as I told her this, but she answered that she was not quite sure; according to what she knew as long as it stated I was a combat veteran (which I did) on my test that it would simply be covered if and when they decided to interview me.

It has always been hard for me to answer that question. Many times (especially when I tell teenagers, who seem to be the only ones uncouth enough to ask) when I explain that I have been to Iraq (twice) people ask me if I had to kill anyone. They ask with the morbid fascination of one who hates the idea of it but who still wants to know every sick and twisted detail. I have gotten good at answering this question. I look them dead in the eyes and tell them, “Yes, I have killed. I killed over 190 people.” I continue to look at them almost daring them to judge my stone cold face as I state the large number. They are always the first to look away. After that the questions are focused elsewhere and life goes on…

PUBLISHED AGAIN

So, I am pretty pleased to let all of you know that I was recently published again (along with some other amazing military writers) in a BOOK by the people who make the Doonesbury comics.

Chevelle Experience

Snaking out of the shadows we swerved into the lane intended for the final destination. The House of Blues. We were here to see the rock concert Chevelle. It was amazing. I had not been to a rock concert since high school and I was floored. The crowd developed into a single entity as we screamed, danced, and pressed into one another along with the rhythm of the music. Behind me people were ripping off their shirts and slamming into each other in collisions which exploded with sweat. Nobody was angry however, and when I looked at those slamming into one another, they were smiling. The minute someone fell on the ground two or three people were there picking the person up so they could continue rocking out.

As the evening continued I found myself drawn into the frenzy of excitement as the band everyone had been waiting for began their first set. It was amazing just how close everyone was and how I no longer had my individually, but rather, I was a part of the entity that was the crowd. We were like the ocean, swaying and rocking against one another with huge smiles and sharing sweat as we pumped our hands in the air to the beat of the music.

It became hard to think for one’s self as the energy of the crowd intensified with the next couple of songs, and as the crowd’s crescendo of rocking continued you became one with the show. The beat of the music and the thrashing guitar became your heartbeat for a couple of hours as you began to push and touch those around you for balance with the crashing of bodies in the pit right behind you knocking off your center of gravity.

I was enamored and enthralled by the music and those around me enjoying the music. For my first true, hard rock concert I was instantly hooked. I need more of this… I was amazed to find that we as a society need this level of intimacy, even with strangers like those at the show. It created for me an experience which will be hard to duplicate and one which I long for even now at 2 am as I write this mere hours after the music ended.

Like so much sand a Best Friendsip is gone

One occasion does comes to mind with regards to devastating my ego. It is my best friend. I had given him my address for when I was to be at war in Iraq. He promised to write. He was one of the few I confided in regarding just how scared I was to be going. You see, I was going to Kuwait during this first deployment of mine to Iraq mere weeks before what was to begin what we call “The War in Iraq.” I didn’t have and fancy ideas about us not invading Iraq; I knew it was inevitable in our political climate. So when I told him I was going to Kuwait I knew that I was really going to be one of the first ground troops to invade Iraq since Operation Desert Storm.

I was scared, nervous, and excited for combat. He knew all these things because I had said as much to him. He was my very best friend, why wouldn’t I. One other thing I told him was that I wouldn’t be able to make any phone calls, but letters would help me get through it all. He made a solemn promise to write me every few weeks, just so that I would get mail. My wife and kids of course would write as well (and did) but he was one of the few males I would call friends, and of those he was my best friend. Months of combat went by with no letters from him. Through the combat and death I almost forgot him.

It wasn’t until I returned that it hit me, just how devastated my ego was that I had not received a single correspondence from my very best friend. Even old acquaintances I had thought forgotten had found a way to write me while I was in Iraq and yet, he had not. It hurt me very much and for a long time I refused to call him. When we finally talked he told me he just didn’t think about it and that it wasn’t a big deal. This again was a huge ego buster, that my best friend didn’t think it was a big deal? Maybe for him it wasn’t but for me it was huge, and it made me realize something I had known for quite a while but had never admitted. He was selfish and one of the main reasons he had needed me as a friend during high school, was that he was so introverted and self conscious while I was not. He relied on me for social interaction as much as I relied on him for camaraderie. Lost was that connection we once had as best friends. In its place was more of a common acceptance of each other on good will that, like the miles which kept us apart, created fleeting memories of better times. We were best friends once, yet now we are more friendly acquaintances who happen to remember a phone call every now and again.

My Dog Benny and my Daughter's Cat Sydney