Someone sent this to me and I laugh hard at some of the following suggestions to simulate being deployed to Iraq. Hard to believe that I was there this time last year. Hope you enjoy all of these.
Semper Fi,
Taco
P.S. the folks are doing well and getting better as each day passes, thanks for all the support.
How to Prepare for a Deployment to Iraq
1. Sleep on a cot in the garage.
2. Replace the garage door with a curtain.
3. Six hours after you go to sleep, have your wife or girlfriend whip open the curtain, shine a flashlight in your eyes and mumble, “Sorry, wrong cot.”
4. Renovate your bathroom. Hang a green plastic sheet down from the middle of your bathtub and move the showerhead down to chest level. Keep four inches of soapy cold water on the floor. Stop cleaning the toilet and pee everywhere but in the toilet itself. Leave two to three sheets of toilet paper. Or for best effect, remove it altogether. For a more realistic deployed bathroom experience, stop using your bathroom and use a neighbor’s.
Choose a neighbor who lives at least a quarter mile away.
5. When you take showers, wear flip-flops and keep the lights off.
6. Every time there is a thunderstorm, go sit in a wobbly rocking chair and dump dirt on your head.
7. Put lube oil in your humidifier instead of water and set it on “HIGH” for
that tactical generator smell.
8. Don’t watch TV except for movies in the middle of the night. Have your family vote on which movie to watch and then show a different one.
9. Leave a lawnmower running in your living room 24 hours a day for proper noise level.
10. Have the paperboy give you a haircut.
11. Once a week, blow compressed air up through your chimney making sure the
wind carries the soot across and on to your neighbor’s house. Laugh at him when he curses you.
12. Buy a trash compactor and only use it once a week. Store up garbage in the other side of your bathtub.
13. Wake up every night at midnight and have a peanut butter and jelly sandwich on a saltine cracker.
14. Make up your family menu a week ahead of time without looking in your food cabinets or refrigerator. Then serve some kind of meat in an unidentifiable sauce poured over noodles. Do this for every meal.
15. Set your alarm clock to go off at random times during the night. When it
goes off, jump out of bed and get to the shower as fast as you can. Simulate
there is no hot water by running out into your yard and breaking out the garden hose.
16. Once a month, take every major appliance completely apart and put it back together again.
17. Use 18 scoops of coffee per pot and allow it to sit for five or six hours before drinking.
18. Invite at least 185 people you don’t really like because of their strange hygiene habits to come and visit for a couple of months. Exchange clothes with them.
19. Have a fluorescent lamp installed on the bottom of your coffee table and
lay under it to read books.
20. Raise the thresholds and lower the top sills of your front and back doors so that you either trip over the threshold or hit your head on the sill every time you pass through one of them.
21. Keep a roll of toilet paper on your night stand and bring it to the bathroom with you. And bring your gun and a flashlight.
22. Go to the bathroom when you just have to pass gas, “just in case.” Everytime.
23. Announce to your family that they have mail, have them report to you as you stand outside your open garage door after supper and then say, “Sorry, it’s for the other Smith.”
24. Wash only 15 items of laundry per week. Roll up the semi-wet clean clothes in a ball. Place them in a cloth sack in the corner of the garage where the cat pees. After a week, unroll them and without ironing or removing the mildew, proudly wear them to professional meetings and family gatherings. Pretend you don’t know what you look or smell like. Enthusiastically repeat the process for another week.
25. Go to the worst crime-infested place you can find, go heavily armed, wearing a flak jacket and a Kevlar helmet. Set up shop in a tent in a vacant
lot. Announce to the residents that you are there to help them.
26. Eat a single M&M every Sunday and convince yourself it’s for Malaria.
27. Demand each family member be limited to 10 minutes per week for a morale
phone call. Enforce this with your teenage daughter.
28. Shoot a few bullet holes in the walls of your home for proper ambiance.
29. Sandbag the floor of your car to protect from mine blasts and fragmentation.
30. While traveling down roads in your car, stop at each overpass and culvert and inspect them for remotely detonated explosives before proceeding.
31. Fire off 50 cherry bombs simultaneously in your driveway at 3:00 a.m. When startled neighbors appear, tell them all is well, you are just registering mortars. Tell them plastic will make an acceptable substitute for their shattered windows.
32. Drink your milk and sodas warm.
33. Spread gravel throughout your house and yard.
34. Make your children clear their Super Soakers in a clearing barrel you placed outside the front door before they come in.
35. Make your family dig a survivability position with overhead cover in the
backyard. Complain that the 4x4s are not 8 inches on center and make them rebuild it.
36. Continuously ask your spouse to allow you to go buy an M-Gator.
37. When your 5-year-old asks for a stick of gum, have him find the exact stick and flavor he wants on the Internet and print out the web page. Type up a Form 9 and staple the web page to the back. Submit the paperwork to your spouse for processing. After two weeks, give your son the gum.
38. Announce to your family that the dog is a vector for disease and shoot it. Throw the dog in a burn pit you dug in your neighbor’s back yard.
39. Wait for the coldest/ hottest day of the year and announce to your family that there will be no heat/air conditioning that day so you can perform much needed maintenance on the heater/ air conditioner. Tell them you are doing this so they won’t get cold/ hot.
40. Just when you think you’re ready to resume a normal life, order yourself
to repeat this process for another six months to simulate the next deployment you’ve been ordered to support.
The SandGram 
October 29, 2006 at 9:12 pm
GOOD ONE SIMILAR TO HOW TO SURVIVE IN A SUBMARINE.
BIG BRO JIM I.
October 29, 2006 at 9:22 pm
I certainly can’t say that I’m with you on this since I only stay in Kosovo 2-3 weeks at a time when working with the Soldiers over there but I CAN relate to many of these – especially the hygience/latrine ones and the extreme heat/cold. Nothing like “relieving yourself” in a hole in the floor regardless of the temps! Toilet paper? FORGET IT!
Don’t know how you guys do it for so long. Oh, yes I do – cuz you are SOLDIERS, MARINES, SAILORS, AIRMEN and it’s part of your jobs that you do so damn well!
Glad to hear that your mom and dad are improving. We’re still here for you guys!!!! Use us if/when you need us!
October 29, 2006 at 10:03 pm
Hilarious, pretty sums up the experience of living in Iraq for a year.
I added your blog to MilblogSearch.com
Search Inside Milblogs and Only Milblogs
http://www.milblogsearch.com
October 29, 2006 at 10:43 pm
WHEN I WENT INTO RECON WE HAD TWO WEEKS OF RUBBER RAFT TRAINING OUT OF A SUBMARINE.KINDA LIKE LIVING OUT A DUMSTER AFTER A WEEK OR TWO,YOU ARE MORE THAN HAPPY TO BE ON DRY LAND JUST TO GET WET AGAIN. I HAVE THE HIGHEST RESPECT FOR OUR MARINE PILOTS,MAN THEY GOT BALLS,SAVED OUR ASS A FEW TIMES IN NAM. PHANTOMS,HUEYS,YOU NAME THEY WERE THERE FOR US.
GOD BLESS OUR U.S.M.C PILOTS.
BIG BRO JIM I SAID THAT.
October 30, 2006 at 1:54 am
Gee, How do you stand it HERE?
October 30, 2006 at 1:55 am
That anonomous was Wang the Second.
October 30, 2006 at 2:45 pm
Funny stuff!
October 30, 2006 at 5:44 pm
Taco – you forgot practicing stuffing 100’s of off-color jokes and photos of strangers and contents of supporter junk drawers and Maxim magazines and cigar wrappers beneath your cot till you can ship ’em home for posterity. I’m absolutely positive you held onto every “treasure” anyone ever sent you… well except for the items that Leghound used for toilet paper.
October 30, 2006 at 7:30 pm
Just saw your “How to Deploy” story & it is a scream & even more so since I know it is 99.9% true! I showed it to an Army Intel officer I know who was over there 2004-5 & he confirmed your “facts.”
Seriously, very glad to hear your folks are progressing every day. Keeping them & all our brave Marines & military “Over There” in my thoughts & prayers.
October 31, 2006 at 3:40 am
Brada!
Lets throw a bone to Valour IT and join the “Marine Team” and kick some ass! Go here:
http://soldiersangels.org/valour/listteams.php
What, you havent donated? Your mother would be so disapointed!!!
October 31, 2006 at 12:30 pm
Don’t forget: Hire random guys from supermarket parking lots to come to your neighborhood and shoot at you. Ensure that they are well armed.
Or: Ask the men in your neighborhood to come into your home and “rub one out” all over your toilet seat.
And: Modify your car radio to play the voices of panicked men that are on the verge of being overrun.
Let’s not forget: Take the doors off of your car and sit sideways in your seat with a rifle.
Or: Put a wooden crate with no bottom out at the curb; use that as a toilet at rush hour; wave at passer by’s.
And: Find and Army base, and steal anything you possibly can from there (particularly socks and grenades).
Of course, this is only from the point of view of OIF one.
November 1, 2006 at 3:38 am
JJ,
BBBWWWWAAAAAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHA!
November 1, 2006 at 3:47 am
Jarhead John,
I ditto what GunnNutt said! Exellent additions. Unfortunately I’ve heard those from other OIF1 vets. Scary! Very Scary!
November 1, 2006 at 4:01 am
This was too funny!!!
But I did get a little kink in my neck trying to look at the picture! 😉
November 2, 2006 at 4:51 am
I received a picture from a MSGT at Eglin AFB that shows eight soldiers holding a large banner that says.
“HALP US JON CARRY-WE R STUCK HEAR N IRAK.”
God bless America and God bless military humor. Don’t you love it? Don’t you just by God love it!!
ABC covered the story and flashed the picture on national television. However it wasn’t on the screen long enough for most people to grasp what they were reading.
Edith
November 3, 2006 at 8:45 pm
(from Iraq this AM..)… like the list, and it’s really accurate. The only thing I would add is that people should go to a junkyard and sit in the backseat of an old car for 5 hours everyday in July, wearing the winter clothes. That will give them a good taste of what it’s like for us on a daily basis in the humvees.