Skippy, renewed

 

I'm sure all of my veteran readers know of Skippy's List:  "The 213 things Skippy is no longer allowed to do in the U.S. Army".  Some examples for those who haven't encountered it:

7. Not allowed to add “In accordance with the prophesy” to the end of answers I give to a question an officer asks me.

10. Not allowed to purchase anyone’s soul on government time.

18. May no longer perform my now (in)famous “Barbie Girl Dance” while on duty.

29. The Irish MPs are not after “Me frosted lucky charms”.

33. Not allowed to chew gum at formation, unless I brought enough for everybody.

34. (Next day) Not allowed to chew gum at formation even if I *did* bring enough for everybody.

Go read all the rest at the link.

Friend in cyberspace and meatspace, fellow author and blogger, Tom Rogneby, has now added his own extensions to Skippy's List.  Examples:

3. Tom is not allowed to tell the Bundeswehr liaison officer that he has moral issues with doing gas chamber training at a German base in Bavaria.

8. Tom is not allowed to whistle the James Bond theme while walking across Red Square.

15. Tom is not allowed to sign a flag-rank officer’s government BMW sportscar out of the motor pool for a nighttime run across Stuttgart and back.

I giggled all the way through, remembering some of the "war stories" Tom has exchanged with the other vets of the North Texas Troublemakers (and honorary members from elsewhere) during LibertyCon.  Go read them all for yourself.

Those veterans' story-telling sessions at LibertyCon have gone on for years at each annual gathering.  You could see in the faces of some listeners that they thought we were making up most of them;  but then, one of us would say something to totally jar them out of their disbelief, and make them realize that "Holy s***, these guys are for real!"  It's a lot of fun to see that reaction.  For example, I served in the South African armed forces way back when.  I once told the tale of tracking a Soviet submarine across the South Atlantic.  This produced visible skepticism from my audience . . . until a former US Naval Flight Officer among our number took up the tale.  He described getting orders from Norfolk, VA to take off at once if not sooner, fly to point X, and drop a sonobuoy pattern.  He landed it right on top of the same submarine we'd earlier advised Norfolk was on its way there.  Neither the US officer nor I even knew the other existed until a couple of decades ago, when I began telling the story and he exploded, "So it was you who dragged us off our scheduled assignment that day!"  We both still laugh about it.  Small world, small transatlantic war skirmish unpleasantness . . .

Peter