Thursday… oh, Thursday was funny. You can’t make shit like this up.

We’ve got one particular IET soldier who’s… how shall I put this… a flippin’ idiot. Kid’s got a habit of allowing his mouth to hang open if he’s not paying attention to it… yup, literally he’s a slack-jawed fool.
Anyways, he’s had more-than-one incident of leaving his weapon unattended, so recently they’ve taken to attatching his rifle to him with a dummy-cord. This has helped with the rifle, but I think they may need to go a step further.

Thursday, we were running a simulation exercise, where we’re doing triage & treatment on dummies; the dummies are attatched to computer controllers and pumps, so they have pulses, their chests move like they’re breathing, and there’s stage-blood leaking out of their wounds. High-speed stuff; you’ve got a team of 5 medics, and there are 10-15 “casualties” to be treated.

So, on my run through lane #2, I get put into the group containing this idiot. All of us made certain to check the guy to see if he had his rifle, but none of us bothered to see if he’d remembered to bring his Aid-bag.
Yup, that’s right, we were 30 seconds into the exercise when he realized he didn’t have any first-aid supplies to work with, other than the single tourniquet in his right cargo pocket.
How in the blue blazes do you forget your Aid-bag?!?!

The instructor gave him a lot of grief, all of us in his team gave him a good razzing for it, and when the others in the platoon started giving him flak about it, he finally snapped and started screaming… and started to lunge for one soldier in particular… and then stumbled and nearly fell because his rifle got tangled in his gear, and it was still dummy-corded to his LBE.

I really hope they recycle this clown, or even better, reclass him to some other MOS where he’s less likely to get somebody killed.

BTW, I return to STL from 28 AUG – 10 SEP, including my birthday, 05 SEP. Hope to see many of you during that time.

Ciao!