Speaking of "deployments".....

my buddy muffin reports that he just started a blog as well. he's currently "somewhere in the pacific" on a humanitarian mission that's taken him to hawaii and will go to southeast asia including vietnam and thailand, amongst other cool places, all to provide medical care and support to locals. i've told him before, but i'm extremely jealous. if my military career consisted of humanitarian missions around the world, i'd prolly consider being a lifer. alas, here i am in the desert...not unexpected, and not all that bad, but not quite what i was hoping for either. some ppl have all the luck. perhaps i will just have to marry rich so that i can make my civilian career one medical mission after the next (i have to marry rich though, because i'm way too materialistic to be able to do it on my own).

i went to the rifle range today as the doc and had a chance to play with the m16 rifle as well as a couple of machine guns. usu, it's my corpsman that goes, but i wanted to give him a break...heheheh. yeah, it was pretty much a blast! we had hundreds of rounds to shoot and i had nevered fired any of those weapons prior (i've been relegated to my pistol so far) so it was pretty frickin' cool. pics to come soon, i promise.

there was one annoying thing in that the guys from training, the same ones who wanted to have the weapons course and who set up everything, didn't even show up! we had formation and 0530 and they weren't there. apparently, the marines from that shop didn't get the message even from within. i've had problems with them before in terms of scheduling my shot fairs and getting medical training to them just because they're frickin' lazy! these are the same guys who are the "flyers" in our squadron. bunch of prima donnas! i can't imagine what working with real pilots must be like, but ugh!