Originally Posted by
Schmedlap
I considered writing a book about my FOB experiences. I even have drafts and a very good outline for how it would be structured. My only reservation about contacting a publisher is that it would be difficult to pull it off without the book reflecting poorly on the military. Therefore, it will probably never leave my hard drive and will only serve as a source of entertainment among my friends and I.
I never lived on a FOB, but I visited them about every 3 or 4 weeks (thankfully only for hours at a time) during OIF III and passed through them several times in OIF V. EVERY time that I visited a FOB, I discovered some new rule that made absolutely no sense. I am not just talking about a rule that one would regard as a little dumb. I mean rules that you could not make up. By OIF III, I had been in the Army for 6 years, so there were some weird rules that I could anticipate (ground guides, wearing a helmet to drive a HMMWV 50 meters, etc). But the rules at places like LSA Anaconda and FOB Speicher were just out-of-this-world, scratch-your-head, stand-up-and-scream stupid.
The reflective belt thing was, indeed, a safety measure to prevent people from being run over. It has since become one of those things that is so prevalent on FOBs that all FOB dwellers can relate to it and it is something that they can all laugh about - a shared garrison quirk that they were all subjected. A shared "hardship" I suppose. To some extent, the rule makes some sense. But, then there are other rules...
My personal favorite was the requirement for an "O-6 memo" in order to drive a HMMWV without a "TC." What O-6 has the time to write someone a memo to drive a HMMWV without a TC? The MP with the flashing blue lights who was doing the traffic stop couldn't answer that question either. And, of course, for those of us who do not live on FOBs, how are we supposed to know about such an obscure rule? He couldn't answer that one either. And whose idea was it to send the "traffic ticket" to my company commander at our patrol base? (It arrived 4 days later, via LOGPAC, with a pallet of track, roadwheels, and two pallets of water. I'm not kidding.)
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