Entry tags:
Power corrupts, and PowerPoint corrupts absolutely.
Chris Bray is a PhD student in history at UCLA and a sergeant in the U.S. Army currently stationed in Kuwait. He blogs at both Cliopatria and Histori-blogography about history and also about the weird limbo of his tour of duty. All of Chris' posts are worth reading, but this is the story that I currently can't get out of my head:
Training for war, I spent an afternoon in an army classroom listening to presentations on improvised explosive devices and the insurgents who plant them. Droning through one of the inevitable PowerPoint presentations, a sergeant first class read directly from the slide in front of us: The insurgency, he read, will probably die down after we capture Saddam Hussein. Except that the class was taught this October, a couple of years after that former dictator had been dragged out of his spider hole. The sergeant stopped for the briefest moment, mumbled that the slides were a little out of date, and went right on reading.
Here's the rest of that post if you're interested. Here's hoping Chris' war remains uneventful and banal.
Training for war, I spent an afternoon in an army classroom listening to presentations on improvised explosive devices and the insurgents who plant them. Droning through one of the inevitable PowerPoint presentations, a sergeant first class read directly from the slide in front of us: The insurgency, he read, will probably die down after we capture Saddam Hussein. Except that the class was taught this October, a couple of years after that former dictator had been dragged out of his spider hole. The sergeant stopped for the briefest moment, mumbled that the slides were a little out of date, and went right on reading.
Here's the rest of that post if you're interested. Here's hoping Chris' war remains uneventful and banal.