Still here.

Well, I am still at Perry and busy as a bee.

I have not made the mistake of calling a Marine First Sergeant 'Top' yet which is good.

Ya gotta love some of the things I have heard here. There is a slick Sp/4 that smokes and when he wants a cigarette, he pulls a 'designated smoking area' sign out and posts it in a likely looking spot and lights up. He's not stupid because he's pretty careful about where he does this.

I have used that trick to get things done for years. When someone sees the sign they figure someone further the food chain posted it and they never seem to question it.

Give ONE cold beer to ONE Sp/4 and the entire Sp/4 mafia loves you.

I have been watching 3 senior NCOs getting ready to retire soon and I see three different sets of eyes.

One just wants to get the hell out as he seems tired of the service and I guess has a new career he will enter.

The other simply regards retirement as the end of one adventure and the beginning of another.

The third one sort of scares me. He is one hell of a damned fine serviceman and is facing mandatory retirement and sees to be scared witless as my guess is that he thinks all he knows is soldiering. He is one hell of an NCO and the kind of hard charger that would lead a platoon into cannons with fixed bayonets and a smile but the prospect of civilian life seems to scare him.

I see this a lot in some of the best servicemen and it is something that is not funny to watch. A guy can run a company of 150 guys as First Sergeant and the next day he is out on the street as a nobody. The odd thing is that anyone that can run 150 guys in a military outfit can do a lot more than he thinks.

Guys like that have a background where they are trained in personel, logistics, leadership and a lot of other things. The problem is they have a block and can't seem to figure out how to apply the knowledge they have into a civvie world.

A perfect Garand Match score here is "all rounds landed safely in Lake Erie". WHen you say that near a group of the service team mambers they shake their head unless they have fired the match. If they HAVE fired the match, they answer with "Yeah, really" and a grin.

I took a couple pictures yesterday and a few are of the hutments. For those that do not know, the hutments are 14x14 and were built for prisonors of war during WW2.

I suppose that when people ask me where I went on vacation I will tell them I spent it in a Prisonor of war camp, which is somewhat true.

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