Living the dream

It turns out those Army boys in Iraq have it made, assuming they can get their boss to leave them alone.

US soldiers shy from battle in Iraq

WATERTOWN, New York – Iraq war veterans now stationed at a base here in upstate New York say that morale among US soldiers in the country is so poor, many are simply parking their Humvees and pretending to be on patrol, a practice dubbed “search and avoid” missions.

See, I do this kind of thing all the time, only I call it “avoiding work”. I’m glad “heroes” can be just as lazy as the rest of us.

Aliff [an active duty soldier with the 10th Mountain Division] said he participated in roughly 300 patrols. “We were hit by so many roadside bombs we became incredibly demoralized, so we decided the only way we wouldn’t be blown up was to avoid driving around all the time.”

“So we would go find an open field and park, and call our base every hour to tell them we were searching for weapons caches in the fields and doing weapons patrols and everything was going fine,” he said, adding, “All our enlisted people became very disenchanted with our chain of command.”

I guess I was suffering with a lack of morale whenever I goofed off at work. If I was more motivated I probably would have been working more enthusiastically. The only problem (for my boss, that is) is that I saw no reason to work harder. It’s not like it would have changed anything – there still would have been more work to do and I’d still get paid the same. Maybe being the guy everybody else dumps their work on is its own reward. For now, I’ll follow the lead of the brave boys in the US Army:

“[S]earch and avoid” missions continue today across Iraq. “One of my buddies is in Baghdad right now and we email all the time,” he explained, “He just told me that nearly each day they pull into a parking lot, drink soda and shoot at the cans. They pay Iraqi kids to bring them things and spread the word that they are not doing anything and to please just leave them alone.”

That’s pretty much the dream of any wage slave: Get left alone to drink Shasta Cola, listen to music and shoot at cans. Really, who can blame them? It’s a crappy situation to be in a country where everyone hates you, you don’t know the language, and your bosses are idiots. It’s nice to know that the American work ethic is alive and well. To quote Homer Simpson, “If you hate your job, you don’t quit. You just go in everyday and do your work real half-assed. That’s the American Way.”